I was a daydream-prone child. My mental excursions often tended towards the romantic and macabre: on the countless journeys to and from school, whether on foot or by bus, I would grant my stifled young mind free reign to find in the mundane suburban-scape, which my parents had cruelly forced upon me, visual passages to more preferable—and/or intriguing—, imagined realms. An oft passed tree, for example, would for an instant become a distant view into a Baroque Dutch landscape. Or, the brown and orange interior of my neighborhood library—the afternoon rains beating the building into a martial cry—would become a lonely, alien theater inhabited by self-conscious actors and blank-page-filled prop books. As artists and writers (neither of which I purport to be!) know, such fantasies are difficult to sustain, the script too written to rewrite, the visual cortex too hardwired to rewire. Yet, these hopeless dreamers continue to seek out precisely what is out of their grasp: those moments when the physical world actually exceeds the restless desires of the untransformed self. These moments lie beyond some neuropsychological ‘twilight zone’, beyond the journal’d storyboard you sketched as an angry adolescent, and most certainly beyond the oneiric tale you once narrated to a bored lover whilst you both languished in a dirty, unmade bed. They’re different because they’re really fucking real.

I’ve left the suburbs; I’ve journeyed to the once-great cities of crumbled empires and the still-great capitals of economic imperialism. I’ve even hitched a ride with a meth-crazy truck driver and fallen off a mountain and broken a bone. Still searching, I then one day stumble into a concrete phantasm, climb two flights, and discover ‘Indian Coffee House’. Indian fucking coffee house. Yes.

The frothy milk coffee shite pictured above was not sampled by this tableauist. While I am hopeful I will be able to give Indian Coffee House the full attention it deserves—that is, by trying its milk-less, plain coffee brew—I must confess part of me is also hopeful that the next visit I make I will be greeted instead by a storehouse filled with bags of shredded papers. When I enquire about the fate of Indian Coffee House, a man sipping ‘Thums Up’ cola will meet my question with a quizzical expression and say, “Je n’ai pas d’idée que vous avez dite.”

‘Angels in my Kitchen’ is your typical Delhi café. It boasts an extensive menu that neither inspires one to wonder at the skill of the chefs, nor to speculate upon the amount of preparation given to the multitude of dishes on tap. Rather, when confronted with such gastronomic tomes—a common feature of ‘Western’-style establishments in India—I am left to ponder at the quality that slips through the cracks when café-a-teurs insist upon being such dilettantes. Need any one eatery offer breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and electrolyte sachets? Certainly, this is not a feature restricted exclusively to South Asian establishments—see thos. more’s kaffa crossing tableau, for an example of a similarly confused ‘café’ in our own West Philadelphia, PA—but being a resident currently in Delhi, I am forced to face this particular situation squarely, in the face, on a daily basis. I can only imagine that ‘Angels in my Kitchen’ would improve infinitely if it were to transform itself into a nice little coffee house. I say this not out of some misguided self-interest (ok, yes, it would lend legitimacy to this at-the-moment questionable ‘café’ tableau), but rather because I believe Delhi’s brand-conscious, rising middle class could really use a kick in the pants, and I am positive a home-grown, independent, fair-trade-conscious coffee house is just the venue for the job.

I also propose that ‘Angels in my Kitchen’ nix the Journey and the Billy Joel, both of which were heard during this morning’s visit to said establishment. I can appreciate some mid-thirties lawyer from Minneapolis digging on such bad 80’s tunes, but the notion that this music carries an audience here only conjures notions of some bizarrely misplaced, schizophrenic nostalgia for the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan years. In India, mind you.

There are some things we are unable to transcend, but by recognizing our own agency—the potency of subjective experience—we may be able to locate some breach in the strictures of habitus that bind and structure us. I would like to think I succeeded in doing just that, whilst sipping an adequately pulled cup of espresso today at ‘Angels in my Kitchen’. I had allowed my mind to wander, to meditate upon the view onto the multi-storey Pizza Hut across the way, when I spotted a cat plying his way from rooftop to rooftop. As this is in fact the first cat I have seen in Delhi—and I have been here for two months—I am positive this sign augurs well for our little market. Perhaps next year, when I return to Delhi, I will find that things have changed for the better. In ‘Angels’ place, I will find a new establishment—a coffeehouse, perhaps, called ‘Cats in my Kitchen’. Or, better yet, ‘Angels’ will have become entirely overrun by cats, its large market-facing windows filled with lounging calicos, harlequins, and tabbies.