A Cup of Hot Coffee

The title attracted me to it, as i was reminded of the short story by Katherine Mansfield with the title 'A Cup of Tea'. This short story with the title 'A Cup of Hot Coffee' is by a Konkani writer Edwin J F D'Souza, that runs only to three pages. It is narrated by an elderly woman who is frail and spends her time alone in a palatial house that her son constructed for her. She needs hot coffee to give warmth to her physique. As she goes into the modern kitchen to prepare coffee, she goes into a reverie. She had three sons; the first one died in an accident and the second one succumbed to some illness. She was left alone in this world by her husband with three of her sons. She was not rich and could not afford money for the treatment of her second son. With much pain and difficulty, she brought up her third son who did study well to become an engineer. He found a fantastic job in Dubai and kept sending money to her mother.

He had a dream of putting his mother in a comfortable home. His mother had seen only a mud-walled house with thatched roof, where she had lived most of her life with memories of her days with her husband and the dear departed children. In all her life, the mother, an illiterate had had not a single dream of moving into a comfy and cozy structure. The boy wanted to make the mother's efforts in bringing him up requitable with his gesture of building a fully furnished concrete home. The Dubai money made them rich and the mother received a lot of money from her son and she communicated with him with the local vicar whose home received a lot of charity from him. He married a working woman and brought her home and convinced his mother of the destruction their ancestral mud house and the construction of a brick house in its place. The rubble of the old house took away with it the past memories. In the new house she is trying to make coffee, as instructed by her son, as he would say that she would get everything in the new house with the turn of a switch. She has turned the knob of the gas stove and is looking for the box of matches. As it is not found in the kitchen, she goes to the bed room of her grandchild and finds one near an ash-tray. She is assailed by an obnoxious smell in the kitchen. However she is ignorant of its source and cursing the modern living and its consequences, she ignites the stove and self immolates herself unknowingly.