Turkish Coffee

In the Russian novels that I read, samovar was a word that often popped up.  The primitive and rudimentary dictionary that we had at home helped me out with an understanding that it was an urn-like metal container to boil water for tea.

It was news to me that they drank tea in Russia.

A novel is not merely about a hero or a heroine and the villains.  To me, a novel also gave me a wonderful window into the lives of peoples somewhere far away from the southern tip of the Subcontinent that was home to me.

It fascinated me to no end that they drank tea in Russia.  We drank a lot of chai, and I knew that tea was a thing in China.  Of course, the British with their "high tea."  And the famous Boston Tea Party that we read about in the chapter on American Revolution in the history book.  But, tea in Russia?

When people talk about globalization as a new thing, I always point out that we have been global for a long time.  It is just that the pace of globalization picked up a lot in recent times so much so that there is now practically no inhabited place on the planet that is exclusively local.

Tea drinking in Russia fits into that narrative of globalization in history.

Orhan Pamuk describes in Silent House the changes that globalization brought to modern Turkey.  From Coca Cola to the culture of tanning at the beach like Europeans, the result of global interactions are in plenty in the fictional work.  A character dreaming of moving to America and making for himself a good life there is relatable to many of us.

None of the characters drank the Turkish coffee that I am familiar with because of my interest in coffee.  I assumed that there would be at least one scene that was set in a coffee shop where they drank (ate?) the brown sludge (ha!)  But, not even one.

There is also the food and drink that is truly local.  Like the drink raki.  Unlike the bad old days when I had to rely on a primitive and rudimentary dictionary, I now have the all-knowing Google at hand, which gives me detailed answers when I go looking for what raki means.  It even confirmed my suspicion that the word is related to arrack that I remember being a part of the dark and seedy looking liquor stores in India back when I was growing up.

With only a third of the novel remaining, the names of the characters are familiar.  Ceylan and Metin and Nilgun are now part of the world that I too inhabit.  

It is like how the name Nazife Emel was once alien to me.  A Turkish name that I knew only because a fellow Indian, Sukumar Ganapati--a Tamil--who was a couple of years junior to me in the doctoral program wrote to me once that he had married another doctoral student named Emel, whom I had not known. 

What we cannot learn from the real world with its physical limitations we can certainly learn from the fictional world that brings us all closer than we can imagine.