“Dev's father had died four years ago. Heart attack at sixty-one, in the sorting shed, surrounded by Grade A parchment coffee that would sell for two hundred and seventy rupees per kilo. The irony was not lost on anyone: a man who had spent his life producing something the world valued enormously had died unable to afford the cardiac stent that might have saved him because the world's valuation of his coffee did not reach him. It reached the traders in Bangalore. It reached the exporters in Mangalore. It reached the roasters in Mumbai who sold single-origin Coorg arabica for twelve hundred rupees per two-fifty grams in matte-black packaging with a watercolour illustration of a hillside that looked nothing like the actual hillside where his father had died.”
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