Tea with Pema

Fingers numb with the chill, Tsering lifted the bowl of bödja to his lips and let the silky broth wash through.

The next moments were lost in warm ecstasy.

It was his first cup of the day. Not every first cup was this satisfying, but when it was, it was an inebriation.

He filled the cup once more from the dented metal thermos with its flaked green enamel and battered plastic stopper, then stood from his seat on the flat wooden sofa with one worn cushion and stepped to the open window.

The house was set high on a cliffside, far from the village in the low valley. What met Tsering’s gaze was not the dwellings of man but the sheer escarpments and rugged walls of himalaya, the indigo sky, the birds swooping in corkscrews— this was as close to where the gods lived as anyone dared go.

If I were a bird, he thought, I might get tired of flapping so much.

He took another drink of butter tea. It was still hot, but the joy of the first drink was not there. It never was.

He slipped red beads through his wrinkled fingers as his lips muttered the prayer. He had been told by a teacher that it was a request for compassion. He did not understand the language of the prayer. He did not understand compassion. But he said the words, and hoped he might receive mercy somehow.

 After a few minutes of looking out at the pale sky and harsh frozen cliffsides, Tsering sat back down on the seat, and set his cup down next to him. Time for a refill.

The tea was one of the only things he ate besides tsampa and yak jerky, and he didn’t mind. It was delicious, and he felt it eased his stomach. He had heard that in some countries, like America, people had tables full of meat and fish and vegetables every day, and that they ate mostly bread. The closest he had ever been to that sort of lifestyle was when he had traveled to Lhasa five years before. There had been so much food everywhere and such a variety. Bakhor merchants would hardly let you pass without calling to you to gaze over their array of spices, and there were restaurants serving noodle dishes like laphing and thukpa.

Tsering’s mouth always watered when he thought of thukpa.

He took another sip of tea. It was lukewarm. How did it always cool so quickly?

There was a loud knock on the door, and Tsering started as he was torn from his thoughts.

A woman’s voice came from the other side. “Akhu-la, tashi delek! It’s Pema.”

Tsering muttered to himself as he heaved himself forward off of the couch and tottered past the stove to lurch open the door.

Pema was his niece by way of marriage. She shared neither his blood nor his looks. Her jaw was broad, and her kind eyes rested by a wide nose. Her braided onyx hair hung lank around her head like the counterweight of an unused prayer wheel, and her naive smile angered Tsering.

“Tashi delek,” Tsering grunted. 

“I braided some more wicks for your butter lamps and brought you some yak jerky…” Pema was panting from the long walk up the thin, dusty trail to her uncle’s flat-roofed stone house. “Oh, and I don’t think you are running low on tea, but I saw a brick in the shop that the owner said was high quality, so I split it in half and brought you one side. He gave me a sample; it’s better than the usual kind.”

“Mm...” Tsering took the bag with a jerk.

“Do you want anything while I’m here? I can help you clean up or…?”

“No,” Tsering muttered, “You can leave now.”

Pema had hardly had a moment to catch her breath, but her head drifted to the side in a nod. “Alright, I’ll be back tomorrow. Be sure to eat lots of the yak, in your condition you need to eat lots of mea—” The door was already shut on her.

Tsering walked back into the living space and glanced in the bag. A handful of cotton strings, a large bundle of uneven strips of leathery meat, and a small yellow paper bundle. That had to be the tea.

He pulled the half-circle package from the bag and tossed the bag of items into the corner of the floor. Opening the yellow paper, he pried a dried leaf out of the frayed side of the puck and stuck it in his mouth, wetting it with his tongue and tasting the flavor of the unadulterated tea. His tongue was met with a divers array of notes— apricots, goji berries, and the sun-baked grasses of the plateau.

It was good.

He didn’t plan on telling Pema that, however. Every time she came to his house he had to endure the reminder of her father and… her.

Tsering guessed that Pema didn’t even want to visit him anyway. It was likely her father telling her, We need to take care of him, he is family, after all.

He could do without their pity.

The prayer beads slipped through his fingers mindlessly as he set water to boil and started the process of preparing more tea. The edge of the knife slid into the side of the tea puck and wedged out a husk of a layer, dry needles of tea scattering across the paper. He placed the portion in a malformed tin bowl, and saturated the hunk of leaves with the hot water, stirring them to soak them through. Some people boiled the tea with the water, but that made it bitter; he could not do it to his tea. When the liquid was a malty gold, he strained the sweet-smelling tea back into the pot, and dropped in a few crystals of salt, then spooned out a heaping of fermented yak butter and plopped it into the long wooden churn. 

When the steaming bath was poured over the butter, his nose lingered over the churn before he plunged the tea into emulsification. He stood sliding the plunger in a steady rhythm for one or two minutes, then walked back to the stove to collect the pot. He set up the pot on a small wooden table in his kitchen, then lifted the churn from the bottom to pour the hot liquid back into the pot.

A sharp pain erupted in the side of his gut. His hand jerked back as he doubled over, and scalding tea rushed over his hand and his legs. He screamed, crumpled into his stomach, and his legs trembled in rigid spasms, dropping the churn to the floor where it ricocheted and rolled around itself in a spiral.

It was the cancer.

He lay shaking, curled like a worn line of prayer flags on the valley floor.

When he managed to lift himself off the ground, his stomach felt no better. He staggered to his bed, released his dusty, tea-soaked chuba robe, and shivered into the thick yak-wool covers. His stomach screamed at him, and he winced back.

Laying in the darkening evening room, his eyes drifted to the picture of his late wife, Dawa. He lifted the feather-thin photograph and brought it close to him. It was of when they were young and energetic, laughing at anything, looking into each other’s eyes like they were the whole world.

Where are your eyes now?

A lump formed in his throat, looking at her face— the face that looked so much like Pema’s.

Pema had been born prematurely to Dawa’s brother, Tashi, and his wife. Because she was a premature birth, there had been complications. They had needed to bring her to a hospital in a neighboring town, a few hour's journey, and in the dead of night. Tashi had convinced Dawa to accompany them so that she could watch over the mother and the baby. But, as Dawa helped them make the journey, they were set upon by bandits. That was where her life ended, and Pema’s was saved.

Perhaps it was karma… karma for who knows what.

Tsering nodded off with tears rolling from his eyes, wreathed in a woolen blanket, and smelling of sour butter.

He awoke to a knocking at the door.

“Akhu-la, tashi delek! It’s Pema!”

Tsering lifted himself from the bed, shuffled into his chuba, and hobbled to the door clutching his stomach. He stepped around the churn, still lying in the middle of the floor.

When he opened the door, Pema’s eyes flashed wide and her jaw dropped. “Akhu-la! Are you alright? Is it the cancer, akhu-la?” She dropped the bag of supplies she was holding and rushed over the threshold and under his arm, propping him onto her shoulder. “Come, let us get you to a seat.” She swung her long braids around her free shoulder, then pulled Tsering’s hand over as a counterbalance, and they shuffled to the table near the stove, where she lowered him onto a chair.

“Aren’t you tired from the climb?” asked Tsering, “Why don’t you just leave me be? You come here every day. Aren’t you tired of my bad attitude? Aren’t you tired, Pema?”

“I’m not tired,” she said. “I’ll clean up this mess and make you some tea.” She lifted the churn from the ground and got to work cleaning it and wiping the oily slick from the floor.

Tsering watched her from his seat, holding his stomach. He tried to make sense of Pema.

When Pema had made the house clean again, she picked up the brick of tea from where Tsering had left it on the table and started prying leaves from it with the knife.

“Akhu-la, I know why you are mad at me.”

Tsering looked at her through the sides of his eyes.

“I know why you are mad. You are mad because you see Dawa in me, and because you believe I killed her.”

Tsering grimaced and looked away.

“I do not blame you. I have had this on my mind every day since I can remember hearing how I was born. I have had to think about this.” Pema set the water to boil and put butter in the churn. “I have thought about it so much, uncle, and I have not had any courage to say it, until now. You are still holding onto her picture; this is how I know it is time.”

Tsering could not look at Pema. His eyelids were quivering. His fingers had been clenched onto the photograph since the previous night; he had not released his grasp on it once.

“But that is why I come here every day.” Pema dropped the tea into the boiling water and let it revolve with the motion of the bubbles. “I come here because I owe my life to Dawa and to you. Her sacrifice lives in me. I can only give some of it back to you.”

Pema dropped a handful of salt rocks into the tea, then poured it through the strainer into the churn. She sloshed the dasher through the hot liquid, and Tsering heard the suction and squelch of tea and fat being forced together.

Pema poured the tea into the pot, filled two tea bowls with the steaming gold, and wiped her hands over her pure white chuba. When she slid Tsering’s bowl to him, he saw only Dawa.

Pema grabbed a bag of tsampa and put it on the table between them. She sat down, and they looked at each other. Tsering began to think about how long Pema had been bringing him supplies, about how much abuse she had endured from him, and how she had dealt with the weight of Dawa’s death all throughout her life.

He looked into the tea. It was the color of the clouds that hung over the mountains in the afternoon glow of the Tibetan sun. The aroma from the cup was pleasant, and his aging face reflected in the surface.

Perhaps, he thought, this is how I receive my compassion.

And in that moment, when they took the first drink of their butter tea, Tsering saw Pema for the first time.