The kopi that waits for a man who is always late

There is a corner kopitiam near the old market where, most mornings, an order goes in for a man who is not there yet.

I noticed it because the uncle who places it does so without looking up from his paper. Two kopi, he says, when there is plainly one of him. The boy who takes the orders does not query it. He brings two, sets the second across the table at the empty stool, and goes. The second cup sits there steaming and nobody touches it. Then, some time later, maybe five minutes, maybe twenty, the other one arrives, always a little out of breath, always with a reason that nobody asks for, and sits down in front of a coffee that is now exactly the right temperature to drink.

I watched this for a week before I understood it. The first man is not being generous, or not only. He is being tactical. His friend is incurably late, has been late, I would guess, for forty years, and will not be cured now. You can be angry about this every morning for the rest of your life, or you can order the coffee early so that lateness stops being a problem and becomes, instead, a sort of weather. By the time his friend arrives there is nothing to forgive. The coffee did the forgiving in advance.

I think about this more than I should. We spend so much effort trying to change the people we love out of their small, fixed habits, the lateness, the way they never close a cupboard door, the story they always tell at the same point in every meal. We treat these things as faults to be corrected, as if the person would be better with them sanded off. And sometimes we are right. But mostly the habit is not going anywhere, and the only real choice we have is whether to meet it with a grievance or with a cup of coffee ordered five minutes early.

The uncle, I am fairly sure, would be appalled to hear any of this said out loud. If you asked him why he orders two, he would tell you it is faster, or that the boy is slow, or that his friend cannot be trusted to order his own. He would not say that he has arranged his entire morning around someone else's weakness and dressed the arrangement up as impatience so that no one, least of all his friend, would mistake it for what it is.

On the last morning I was there, the second man arrived even later than usual, full of some complaint about a lorry blocking the lane. He sat, took the cup, drank, and said nothing about it being the right temperature, because of course he had no idea it was being kept that way for him, which is the whole point. You do not tell someone you have made their lateness painless. You just do it, every morning, and let them think the coffee is always warm when they get there.

I left my own cup unfinished and walked out into the heat, thinking that most of the kindness in the world is this kind, the kind that works hard to look like something else.

A cup kept warm for someone late is the kind of thing Kopitiam Stories, Vol. 1 is made of: nine stories overheard, half imagined, and pressed straight from coffee shop tables.