Chai anyone?

Alka put her tea water to boil on the gas stove. She absentmindedly put on another pan on the second burner for Lakshmi’s Chai. She measured one large teaspoon of the finely blended Darjeeling tea in the kettle and poured steaming hot water. Her own tea had to brewed for at least three minutes to release its true flavour. While her tea was brewing, she added a teaspoon of Brooke Bond Red Label, India’s oldest brand in Lakshmi’s boiling water. One third milk and three spoons of sugar as Lakshmi liked it and her tea was ready to be strained in the large coffee mug. She turned stir the leaves in her ceramic kettle and, satisfied with the rich color and aroma, began to stir in sugar and before adding  a spot of milk.  When she began to butter her toast, she realized that Lakshmi was not going to turn up today or ever. Lakshmi had quit work in a huff when Alka chided her for late coming and taken up a new job. As an efficient worker, she was snapped by someone or the other immediately. Alka missed her neat habits. But more than anything else, she missed having tea with her house help who would narrate a fresh tale of torture, as she dipped a slice of bread, before noisily slurping her tea. All house helps were doomed to live with alcoholic wife-battering husbands because a woman needed a man. Bonding over their addiction to tea, or nasha as Lakshmi named it, the mistress and maid sighed helplessly in unison.

It is always tea time in South Asia. Bed tea, tea with breakfast, mid-morning tea, afternoon tea, evening tea and even after dinner tea. Visitors are invariably greeted with “chai, coffee or thanda?”. When accosted with “Would you like a cup of tea?” in East or West India, a North Indian would be mighty offended and mutter, “Yeh bhi koi poochne ki baat hai (does one need to ask?). Tea is never served without platefuls of cookies, savories or hot snacks in the North. In the rest of India,  it is accompanied, if at all, with biscuits. Friends meet over endless cups  of tea. Neighbors drop in for their dose of daily gossip exchanged between sips.  Close friends share secrets and confide over tea cups. Students rush to college canteens between classes for tea breaks. Colleagues punctuate long discussions with Chai ho jaye (Get some tea?). Meetings begin or end with tea and biscuits and it is mandatory at all seminars and conferences. No gathering, be it a function, a festival or a wedding is complete without tea.  Tea is a perk the house help is entitled to even if it is poured in a separate cup and consumed seated on the floor.

It was the British who introduced tea who turned it into Chai. Some from the generation who were not weaned on it are still around to list its health hazards. “We were raised on milk and buttermilk and got to taste tea very late in life”, they claim and agree to join in the tea ceremony only if the formula of half water and half milk with only a half a teaspoon is used. Children are the other group who are not permitted to drink tea. Half milk and half water is the formula followed by dhabas boiled with many spoons of tea for several minutes on highways for truck drivers who have named it 100 kms tea, 200 kms tea, 500 kms tea depending on its strength. The generation that followed, however, swears by the countless benefits of tea. When one is sad, ginger tea is offered as a comforting beverage; when one is happy, it calls for a celebratory cup of tea. Tea is the panacea for all aches and pains -headache, stomach ache -and  ailments - cough, cold and fever. Ginger tea with green cardamom and cloves is considered the perfect remedy for cough and cold; black cardamom is believed to relieve stomach ache, herbs are added to the decoction to reduce fever. Such are the miracles of tea that it is considered an essential item in every desi pantry. Free rations distributed to the poor always include a packet of tea in addition to rice, wheat, oil, lentils, salt, turmeric and sugar.

Munching on the toast, Alka went into a reverie. When did she acquire a taste for tea as she, like all children of her generation, was banned from drinking tea? Her mind went back to the summer vacation when she got to taste tea as her grandma’s milk budget did not stretch to spare milk for half a dozen visiting grandchildren. Toddlers and infants had to be given milk but she, all of seven, was included in the older children several years her senior. Kicked at being treated as an older child, she welcomed the tumbler of half milk and half water tea handed to her with a sumptuous breakfast of hot parathas with dollops of white butter. She refused to return to her milk regimen even after they returned home and demanded tea with breakfast. She relented to gulp down her evening glass of milk before racing down to play and let her parents their evening tea. She recalled that her home was always filled with visitors, neighbors on weekdays and friends on weekends, and her mother going all out to entertain them with hot snacks and tea despite having to look after her infant and toddler and a seven-year-old. It was when they were allotted a huge bungalow with a large garden separated from rice fields by a high wall and set apart from the cluster of houses across a lonely path that the house turned silent. Deprived of human company, Alka’s mother turned to tea for companionship consuming several cups a day. Laughter and loud conversation returned with daily rounds of visitors on her father’s hill posting.

Tea was welcome at all hours of the day as it was always cold. Her mother, who brought out fried snacks in a jiffy, unlike her friends who made do with coffee and biscuits earned her the reputation of being the best cook and theirs the most visited house. Mother’s dishes were the first to disappear on all pot luck gatherings and she was invited to cook even on a floating boat known as donga, which was equipped with a kitchen. Mother got to enjoy the view of the river only after frying pakoras for the evening tea while the rest of the party chattered and joked. Notwithstanding all the hard work, Alka’s mother enjoyed having friends drop in unexpectedly. There were picnics and excursions every Sunday to the famed tourist spots surrounding the city. With only a luxury hotel housing film stars and an overpriced café on an island on the lake, local families carried stoves to the places they visited carrying lunch in hampers and wrapping up in the evening with tea. Alka could smell the potato fritters being fried in the Mughal gardens as she watched the sun setting on the lake. Locals were brewing their own variety of salted tea known as kehwa and even offered it to a Bollywood icon as he began shooting for his new film.  Alka never got to eat at the luxury hotel on the top of the hill but got to sip coffee in the rooftop café to get a better view of their favourite film star.

Decades later, she made a pilgrimage to the same spots and found the path dotted with cheap Vaishno dhabas selling tea and samosas. In the past, these dhabas could be found only on the highway halts where the bus stopped for breakfast, lunch and tea on the twelve-hour drive. Breakfast never tasted better than in the dhabas which catered to busloads of passengers with parathas, puris and tea during the half an hour halt. Egg parathas, in particular, were a specialty in the dhabas of Kashmiri Sikhs with flowing beards. As strict vegetarians, Alka’s family never got to gorge on them like their friends but were happy to savour the equally delectable puri aloo in the vegetarian dhabas. Sitting on charpoys in the open, surrounded by high mountains, added to the flavour. On an unscheduled halt on one of their trips, they got to taste the best paneer pakoras (cottage cheese fritters) and downed them with tumblers of sweet tea making it a compulsory halt on all subsequent trips. But to have dhabas leading up to the pristine tourist spots was an act of desecration. On this visit when they stopped on the drive back, she spotted a lone Kashmiri family cooking mutton on a beautiful spot by the river like in the good old days who invited her to share their meal that she politely declined but agreed to share the flask of tea.

The house turned silent once again when Alka’s father was posted to the South. Other than language, cultural differences prevented close encounters of the North Indian kind. South Indians do not believe in dropping in unexpectedly in neighbours’ homes as in the North nor welcome uninvited visitors. As coffee drinkers, tea drinking is restricted to the afternoon tiffin.  Invited visitors are asked if they would like a cup of coffee and if the reply is affirmative a steel tumbler of filter coffee is brought out without any snacks. North Indian colleagues or friends lived too far apart to visit on a daily basis. But when they appeared invited or uninvited, it was always a cause for celebration and impromptu snack making and tea. Craving for adult female company, Alka’s mother found a way of filling up the house with fun and frolic. She invited Alka’s friends (and their mothers if they were free) to her famous high teas  complete with chhole bhature, tikki chaat and cakes that they would remember for decades. This was also the years when the teenage Alka became her tea companion. She would eagerly wait for Alka to return from school to share the evening tea with snacks after feeding and sending the younger children to play. Mother and daughter would set off for their evening walk with Mother filling Alka on family gossip and get back in time before Alka’s father returned from office. Weekends were often movie times when the family left for the few theaters that screened Hindi films. A far cry from cinema halls in the North where movie going pleasure included sampling street food or tea in the sweet shops outside in addition to viewing.

The tea gossip that began at this stage bonded mother and daughter in a shared addiction. Whenever Alka was home from the university, they would wait for her father to leave to sit down to the mid-morning tea and breakfast that her mother enjoyed after scurrying around to serve breakfast to all members between 8.30-9.30 a.m. Their Punjabi  neighbour often joined them after packing her children to school and husband to work. Mrs Singh would knock on the semi open door exclaiming “Have you heard …?” and regale them neighborhood or family gossip for the next hour and a half before she returned home to cook lunch. At others she would update them on latest fashion trends in upmarket Delhi and catch up on Mother’s family events advising her on what to feed unexpected relatives showed up at odd hours.  Afternoon tea was a quiet session with Mother and daughter exchanging confidences unless the bell rang to announce a relative passing by and became a family stories gupshup. On other days, they would slip out after tea to a shopping spree, more window shopping really, before returning with a few small purchases before Father returned from work. These were faithfully displayed to Mrs Singh the next day  when she dropped in for mid-morning tea. Sometimes she would approve if their choice; at others educate them on what was needed to fit in with Delhi ‘gentry’.   Evening tea was a family affair with all members joining in for their fill of refreshments and exchanging titbits.

Alka’s mother wanted her to share the pleasures of with her daughter. On a vacation, she pulled Alka out of bed at 5 a.m. to invite her to watch the sun rise above the hill while sipping tea from the pot of tea brought by a liveried waiter on the balcony outside their room. Not sure whether the pleasure was the liveried waiter bringing tea to the memsahib who never had the luxury of being served or the breathtaking sunrise, Alka mumbled something and went back to sleep. Mother loved the tea and toast brought on a tray in trains much as the tea and breakfast on flights for the same reason. The only time she could enjoy her tea uninterrupted was when they were on the move or when they visited someone. For a change she was brought tea and breakfast by their house help only when she was ill. Soon she reverted to serving others by making parathas and tea for the house help before sitting down to listen to the helper’s tales of woes as her grown up children had switched to a no fat breakfast.    But would agree to accompany Alka to tearooms later in life where she could watch people pass by as she took sips of her tea. All of a sudden Mother kicked off her tea addiction as she wouldn’t wake up at tea time in the empty nest. Her husband who nudged her to make him his evening tea was no more. Visitors and friends had stopped dropping in. The children had long moved to other cities or countries but called to check on her morning  or evening. She woke up only when the phone on her bedside table began to ring.

Alka looked forward to their tea ritual on her annual visits and started a conversation. But mother had no interest in tea or chats.  She listlessly accepted the cup handed to her and drank it slowly. Alka returned home where occasional visitors declined her offer of tea. While she waited for them at tea time, house guests returned at dinner time after meeting friends over tea. She decided that sipping tea watching the sun rise or set in silence brought her more peace than mindless chatter and gossip.