Excerpt: You come back to your room from seemingly endless lectures and meetings to your piled-up assignments and essays waiting to be completed. It is not all bad though. Because after those lectures and before those assignments, you get to sit and do nothing but drink a cup of tea.
Keywords: Home, Nostalgia, NarrativeÂ
Edited by: Mythili Kamath
What is it about having a hot cup of tea after a long tiring day?Â
Now, the Wagh Bakri tea packets may only be described as a shell of the thing itself. With its overpowering sickening sweetness and unrelenting monotony, the tea leaves leave something to be desired, to say the least. With the glass (that was most definitely my own and not stolen from the dhaba) in one hand and the wretched little tea packet in the other, I make my way to the pantry, dragging my feet and muttering to myself about how far the pantry was.Â
Just as I overcome the arduous journey from my room to the pantry, I find the old kettle– yellow around the edges. Someone made Maggie in it again. Great.Â
But I stay there regardless, washing the kettle in disgust. I pull apart the tea packet, which lets out a puff of a dreary scent – something that can only be described as artificial. I empty it, scent and all, into the cup and watch the powder dissipate. The water takes on a dull shade of ochre. I sigh as I make my way back to the room.
My Grandmum often scolded me for my impatience. The colour is not right she would say when I insisted she give me my cup of tea already.Â
“I do not care,” I would retort. All tea tastes the same, anyway.Â
But she would refuse, closely examining the kadhai, switching the gas knob up and down as the tea rose and fell. It was an amusing ritual for me. I would laugh at her obsession with the colour of the tea and the precision of the proportion of masala, milk, and tea powder she maintained.Â
Now,as I stare at the lukewarm and watery prepackaged concoction, I long for her obsessive tea-making patterns.
I pull out the packet of Khakra I had bought from the tuck shop. Jeera flavor it reads. It is as boring as it gets, but I make do with what I have.Â
I shut my eyes as I take the first sip and I’m hit with the sickening sweetness and dulled hint of chai masala. I let out a semi-satisfied sigh and take another sip. And then another. Not a thought in my brain now. The to-do lists, timetables, and calendars in front of me blur into nothingness. I sit there sipping tea and nothing else . My phone rings and I let out an exasperated sulk. I shut it off. None of that. Not now.Â
Safe to say, Wagh Bakri chai still needs to redeem itself when it comes to taste. I fail to place what it is about this time that I enjoy so much. Perhaps it is the excuse to do nothing. A moment where all your assignments, exams, and papers become secondary. Perhaps Wagh Bakri is winning me over. Or perhaps, tea itself becomes a reminder of home.Â
My mum would often call me asking me if she should send more packets of tea.Â
“No ma, you just sent me two boxes.”Â
“Okay,” she would say, “But tell me when you need more. Do not skip out on tea.”
I would laugh incredulously and tell her I would let her know.
Drinking those tea packets, painful as they are, becomes less about the tea itself and more about the feeling of home. It is the feeling of sitting at the dining table with those delicious chorafali khakhras and sweet biscuits. It is the feeling of finally leaving your room and seeing your family gathered around the dining table. And maybe this is wishful thinking. And maybe those moments of coming together and drinking tea were fruitless. Maybe those moments would never come back.Â
But as I sit on my desk, sipping the now cold brew, I am reminded of those moments. And, for now at least, maybe it is the memory that is enough.