Everyone loves Tea

Osian’s 4 th floor office overlooking the Qutub Minar and a jungle of laburnums was the one place where they valued tea drinking. Everyday at 10:15 and 5pm the smiling office helps would bring you tea in spotless white crockery cups. Actually you could have the tea with milk or the lemon tea which danced in its blushing orange color inside those white cups. Even the last nip of that tea sparkled henna orange inside the mug in the light that fell from my window. I think I lived for those cups of tea when I was there. There wasn’t much else to life then. I learned to bow to my tea there!

But If you had grown up in UP you would grow up thinking that every man’ duty is to offer you a cup of tea if you offer them your presence. It has a Buddhist philosophy to it. No enemy, no rascal, no poor man is poor enough to not have tea to offer. It is indeed serious tragedy when the inanities like tea have to be disposed in conversations and customs! Tea is nice, Tea is Cheap, Tea is infinite, Tea is invigorating, and Tea is awakening. Let’s have Tea! No matter how full you are, No matter how acidic your intestines are…There should never be a time to say No! to Tea.

In Lucknow Tea was the bridge that connected us to the landlords (Pandey’s), their daughter’s (who liked bathing naked in the common courtyard to thus expressed horror of my Dad!) board flunking history as told by her sobbing mother while passing on the plate of Namkeen. The recipe of the pickles that Pandey grandmother made in Benares and the rogue stories of the Uncle's Bank of Baroda customers (he was the manager there!) Tea was also the time where all the gifts received on Diwali would be layed out in front of us on the taj mahal like carved wooden table. We (the sandhu family) would keep muttering rishwat rishwat rishwat under our breath and wipe out the lovely sweets. How could anybody refuse anything that was offered with chai!

When I grew older I started evaluating my friends based on the Tea experiences they gave me. You have to understand that it in not just the tea in the cup that makes the tea experience! But everything else outside that cup that does.

At Saumya’s house in Vishnupuri(Lucknow) the tea was always a little weak for my senses. The stress was always on the accompanying snacks (biscuits, mathri, shakarpara, whatever we could squeeze out of the kitchen). But what I loved was the lemon grass flavoring in the tea for which we had to jump a 4 foot wall. It was lovely when it rained. We would go on the roof and look at our old school) (St Fidelis College, Vishnupuri, Lucknow) and sip and slurp (sip less and slurp more!)

At Safura’s house in Okhla (Delhi). It was the tea that straightened the kinks out of ones head. It was hard crisp yellow label brought in big cups of different makes with no sugar and very little milk! You want tea? Or you want sweets? Have tea now and buy sweets later from outside!
In one my previous basement office the tea was mostly made by Ram a househelp from Nepal (a Tony Leung of Chunking express lookalike). He put some strange concoctions of Nepali masala along with touch of cinnamon and basil. In the office people either loved it or hated it. One ones who hated it had conspiracy theories about how it tasted like the Office dog’s pee. And to be fair to them I think they could have been right! But they never had tasted office dog's pee so they should have expessed it in some more beleivable way! Anyway the point being I liked that tea! It was the only reassuring energy boosting ritual in that office where people often forgot that humans needed food! I liked it for its frequency. If you were working more you could demand more rounds of tea (the same rule did not apply to holidays or money alas!). So my best days were days of 7 rounds( 11am, 6pm, 11pm, 3am 7pm 11am 6pm) It meant that you had worked more than 24 hours at a stretch and that being considered and noted you had been awarded with more teas!