Lakshman’s Madras
Anusha Hariharan
DEGREE COFFEE BY THE YARD: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF MADRAS by Nirmala Lakshman Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2014, 156 pp., 295
March 2014, volume 38, No 3

There is a reason why this book is called Degree Coffee by the Yard. With an interesting word play on ‘yard’, it automatically evokes one of the many sensibilities that create and sustain Chennai: the action of cooling a ‘tumbler’ of coffee by pouring it from a height into another tumbler, seamlessly measuring out a yard of distance with the hot, flowing liquid between the two containers.

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