Coffee, friendship and a common syndrome

I call it the Koshy’s Syndrome after the popular restaurant on St Mark’s Road in Bengaluru. Koshy’s is an institution, and if you sit there long enough you will meet everyone you know in the city, perhaps the country even. 

You also meet, and engage in animated conversation with, people whose names you don’t know even at the fifth or sixth meeting. Often when you walk in and notice that these nameless (in your mind) friends aren’t there, you are disappointed. You feel cheated. What is the use of going to Koshy’s if you don’t get to meet, or at least wave at, the regulars? 

You remember earlier meetings full of intellectual and emotional talk; you open your heart out and so does he in response. You know this nameless person (at the sixth meeting it is too late to ask, “By the way, what’s your name, and what do you do when you are not here?”) better than you know close relatives.

But – and here’s the point – meet them anywhere else, at a movie theatre or a cricket match or even at a bookstore on Church Street across the road, and you have no idea who they are and why they are smiling at you. This is the Koshy’s Syndrome. You recognise and chat with people in their ‘natural’ habitat but once outside the confines of that protective shell, you struggle to place them. 

It is a bit like failing to recognise your electrician or bus driver when they are out of uniform. G.K. Chesterton has a Father Brown story where the murderer is a person everyone takes for granted, and so when they say they didn’t see anyone near the murdered man’s house they are being honest. Because they don’t think a postman counts. And of course the postman is the killer.

I met a Koshy’s friend (a special category) at a bookstore once, and although we smiled at each other, neither had a clue who the other was. Conversation was stilted, each hoping the other would drop a clue, both conscious of not giving too much away in case they were talking to a total stranger collecting material for a future con. 

Then one of us suggested a coffee at Koshy’s. The moment we entered the restaurant, everything came flooding back. We continued the conversation from our previous coffee there.