Chai Tea for Two, Else Coffee Will Do
A puzzling, pandemic rise in consumption of tea and the lies behind it
Coffee is for lonely spells: sit and sulk. The ritual of boiling our milky, masala chai is a communal one — think chai tapris, ‘arranged marriage’ negotiations, and sharing it with loved one(s) in late-night wakeful lazing. Humans are drinking too much tea since the coronavirus pandemic struck in March 2020.
In India, at least, I’m certain it’s our WhatsApp ‘fake forwards’ marketing tea as a vaccine against the virus that have fueled the risen consumption. No other reason that Indians can afford to have more tea when its dearest, most frugal partner of Parle-G biscuits became unaffordable for a major chunk of this billion plus country.
I have had spurts of over-consumption — up to five daily cups of various forms of caffeine but mostly versions of tea — and near-abstinence to prove to i-don’t-know-who that I’m more than the chemicals I gulp. Yet, it’s the carefully rationed weekend peg or pint that’s been my most sturdy way of lockdown time-keeping.
I’d first gotten hooked to tea as a 6-year-old, spending too much time at my neighbour’s upstairs. Vinni didi would seat me on the kitchen counter while preparing tea before her mother returned from office, haggling a network of public transport in mid-1990s New Delhi, still to get its flyovers and the metro train.
I’d insist on operating the gas-stove knob for the final boil in didi’s style — let the tea hit the saucepan’s lip, then turn the knob around to sink the bubbling liquid; repeat at least thrice for a strong batch.
A bout of jaundice that year took my near-addiction for tea and I’d recover my taste for it 16 years later, at 22, in my auditor-to-journalist transition in a magazine internship. An office sweetheart tricked me. I blame 22! So, I became an accomplice for cigarette breaks at the chai-stall.
As a budding filmmaker in my master’s next year, my first group project was relating the journey of an Indian Prime Minister using the metaphor of tea (there was much crimson, boiling, and gas-lighting in their story as in any chai-making). I make gorgeous chai and it’s the only cooking my mother craves out of my hands.
So, you see, I’ve never known tea in isolation. And that’s why, I can barely make it in pandemic.
On the half-way mark of the pandemic-length we’re at now, I moved to further isolation in my first-ever solo-occupancy apartment. Thankfully, my budget ensured I live in a New Delhi block so dense that my neighbour’s playlist accompanies my morning cuppa. But here, the cuppa’s contents have increasingly been less of chai, more coffee, and that too a Syrian instant coffee that only asks for boiling water.
I distrust people who live alone and have claimed drinking 5 or 11 cups chai in lockdowns. They’re just crying in their coffee; watery, that too.
Sometimes, I’ve cried tearless in bone-deep fatigue when I was too broken by COVID-19’s ill news or plain loneliness from scrolling pictures of friends and familiars who’ve adopted pandemic partners in the hope to not face this apocalypse alone.
“At this point, I’ll take in a husband if that just means I’ll be lovingly fed tea,” I’ve said more than once to many friends, circa 2021. But I love coffee in equal measure at other times. I’m both, a tea and a coffee person. I wonder if I’m lying to myself like all those love-birds writing their pandemic love-stories.
Who’ll call whose bluff?
