Tea

There’s three things about tea. I’ll try to keep it concise.

One, tea is not always caffeine. You have all the flower drinks – dried up flowers steeped in hot water. They’re all usually pretty good. Very soothing. Kind of old people-y but comforting. 

But see the thing is, sometimes it’s not even a drink. You pour it all the same and a lot of people prefer it hot. Myself, I pour my tea online because I don’t live close enough to my best friends to pour them actual tea. And in any case, if we do get together, we probably would not be drinking tea. Maybe coffee. Wink.

Two, I used to be one of those people who drank ten cups of tea a day. And this was chai. I loved tea the way North Indians make it – unhealthily. I boil tea leaves with milk, sugar, ginger, elaichi and bay leaves. People who knew me even as recently as two years ago would know me as a Tea Addict. I was always drinking tea. I could drink a pot of it myself. Sweet, milk tea. 

And then something happened in the recent past and I no longer really consume a lot of flour and potatoes. It was really difficult at first because most of the tucks I ate was maida and alu! But three months into cutting off those items brought out a really weird unintended consequence that I stopped consuming sugar and dairy as well! This in turn meant that I no longer really make or drink chai a lot anymore. I do drink a lot of red tea in office and strong, bitter black coffee at home. But no sugar, no milk. 

So my point is, don’t make assumptions about people. They change without you being a part of the process.

Third and last, no one knows what tea costs in Mizoram. And I say this fondly because I am always bemused by euphemisms. Mizo are not straight-talkers. We say one thing to mean something else entirely. This is very difficult terrain for someone who usually shoots straight because she was raised by people who didn’t know how to lie very well. In my life, I have learned to navigate through these cloudy waters where people give other people ten bucks or five hundred or seven lakhs as tea money. Oh, I’ll treat you your next tea! but what the tea actually is, is unclear. Because clearly no cup of tea costs seven lakhs INR. I find this euphemism particularly fascinating. The price of tea in Mizoram, if they don't tell you outright, has its own rules and economy.

Maybe we can discuss this over tea. Wink wink.

On Kindness

Esau and Jacob were twins and yet one was loved and the other, meh. When not even twins in a biblical patriarch’s household can attest to having the same parents and upbringing growing up, I believe it is safe to assert that people live different lives than us. They have different experiences and we can’t possibly claim to fully understand all that they think or do. It is not an understatement to say you never know what someone is going through. So we should maybe ease up on the judging.

Easier said than done, though.

One time my cousin asked me to help him solve a Maths problem. This was lower level Maths so I helped him. I explained the steps and he kept understanding it, so I exclaimed: You already know it, why did you ask me?! My sister smacked me on the metaphorical head and snapped: You explained it to him and that’s how he understood it; he didn’t come to you having already understood it! I laughed because I felt stupid; once she said it out loud, it made sense.

It was basically a case of having all the numbers but not knowing how to add them up. A lesson I am still learning today, by the way. Sometimes you know all the variants to a situation and yet you just never put them together until it is too late. Or until God intervenes and pulls you out in a lowkey dramatic cowboy swerve. That’s when you think: hey, prayer works!

Another story for another time.

I understand how much my position of privilege has defined me, but I do not want to be limited by it. I want to be more, never less. I want to be kinder, nicer, more empathetic and wiser – a list of challenges that always feel Sisyphean because I seem to be very bad at it.

Sometimes I don’t know if I even try.

I think what I want as my default is to remember that people are different from me. They did not have parents, for example, who did not seem to think that learning to be independent was gendered as many parents seem to think. Yes, I missed out on many things many young ladies learnt from their homes but they also missed out on what I had. Who is to say who got it better or worse? Not me, for sure.

I want to remember that I cannot judge people from my own life experience. Of course, I shall judge them mercilessly and sometimes callously with my best friends but that should not bleed into Life Outside Of Idle Gossip. Very hard to remember to do, but this much I am trying.

I sign off this time with these words from Doctor Who: without hope, without witness, without reward, be kind.