Café-neited

Caffeine has always been my poison of choice. I can drink it while I decide on what I actually want to drink. Even if – and I do surprise myself with this at times – it is a second drink of caffeine.

Used to be it was chai. I loved chai. Hot, sweet, strong, fragrant milk tea. It just has that magic to ease your tension.

Much earlier, it was milk. My siblings and I all love milk; it is a shame our guts can’t tolerate it much anymore. I wonder if it is because when we were kids, we drank pure milk – unpasteurized milk – fresh from a cow. Police battalion cows. It was sweet and rich and creamy and we even often visited the cowsheds where they milked the cows. Just like that. We have always been curious kids.

Which is why when I went to Delhi and we drank the pasteurized milk, it tasted different to me, although I could not really put a finger on it. But Delhi had a lot of milk – toned milk, double toned, full cream. I never knew you could have so many selections of milk. Fancy!

Which, again, is why when I returned home and only had one option – Mulco – I didn’t like it again.

And then of course, even that stopped because I moved to Champhai in 2017 for work. There I had to make do with tetrapack milk. 

So I liked milk till I liked milk. Till tetrapack milk, I realise, as I type this. I never thought about this but apparently my Laxman Rekha with milk is tetrapack. Never knew!

I still drank chai regularly till quite a few years later. For some reason, I stopped drinking milk tea somewhere around Covid. It might be because of really bad milk tea I kept being offered, because of which I would lie and tell people I prefer red tea. Or maybe because of corn creamers that are a staple milk substitutes with coffee/tea drinks or “powder milk” we get from Burma. Again I noticed the difference in the milk but it was not until much later it clicked that I was consuming not milk, but corn. Even if it behaved like milk. I stopped drinking Burma “milk” products after that.

I have given up a lot of milk!!

I set out to write a piece on caffeine and ended up with a monologue on milk. Weird how that happens sometimes.

I guess it is understandable given that for the longest time in my life, I drank milk tea or milk coffee and loved it. White people are always saying you should not give coffee to children. But my mum fed us coffee from the time we were in primary school. Some of my favourite childhood memories are coffee froths from hot, sweet, rich milk coffee. Latte, I’d say. 

Small disclaimer: the memory of coffee might be a nice memory because when she gave us coffee, it was as a reward for having gotten up so early. I might also like milk because they were a reward for having studied. My parents ran with reward systems when we were kids. We were always having to “win” things. It might distort what we really feel or think about things. Ooh, another epiphany!

Anyhoo, somewhere around Covid, I chucked milk in the bin. I never really looked back. I gave up milk and as an accompaniment, unintentional as it was, sugar. At one point, I bought a kilo of sugar for the house and it went virtually untouched for a year. They went hand in hand for me.

I drank tea without milk – all sorts of tea. This is also a remnant of Delhi days for me. I first fell in love with non-milk tea with organic chamomile and rose pip tea that I got from Himachal Pradesh at some exhibition. I began trying other tea after that. Roselle tea, Earl Grey tea, matcha tea, Darjeeling tea, oolong tea… I was getting into that habit again of drinking tea without milk and sugar. 

After a year of choosing to drink tea without milk, my milk tolerance really plummeted. It never recovered. And I, who once drank five to ten cups of chai daily, stopped cold.

Today I drink coffee. It has been some years of strong black coffee for me. As bitter and as dark as my soul, I feel sometimes. I drink coffee so much my skin turned dull at some point. I don’t sweat very much anymore but I feel like if I did, I would just smell of coffee. 

People say they need coffee to perk up. Interestingly, for me, not so much. Coffee relaxes me. Sometimes I drink coffee to unwind just before bed. It does not mess with my sleep.

I try to drink less coffee now. I have started drinking warm water as my second cup. Used to be I’d drink two mugs of coffee back-to-back. Today I do one mug coffee, second mug warm water. My skin feels better for it.

I have started drinking milk tea and coffee sometimes again this year. But I think I’d call myself a social drinker, in this regard. I don’t do it out of choice, but rather to not inconvenience people, I would accept a cup. I might not even drink it down.

Now I sound like a recovering alcoholic.

Nearly a thousand word muse on what began as an intent to reflect on a move to restrict café culture in Mizoram. Too long now. Maybe next blog? 

Definitely maybe.