Vishal Sharma
I am an early morning tea addict. I have been so for as long as I can remember. And it’s not green tea or any other local variant that I am hooked on to. It’s the classic lipton variant that a vast majority of Indians drink with much relish. In that sense I feel proud to be a part of the massive tea sipping tribe in this tea crazy nation of ours. Although I know that it’s harmful on an empty stomach and that it is advisable to follow it with some victuals, it’s the first thing that I smell and let slide down my throat at the dawn break or soon after.
In winters, I have the highest craving for it in the early hours of the morning. On a grey wintry morning, first thing I do after leaving the warmth of the bed is to open the front door to the house a little bit to let in the cold draft to extenuate the mustiness that hangs heavy in a space that is fully closed up to shut out the cold air. When the icy cold breeze hits me in the face; it nearly chills me to the bone; forcing me to take a step or two back. But I don’t stop there; and make for the back door to open it as well, but only just enough to allow the air to blow into the house. This allows the draught to pass through the house; imparting the much needed dewiness to it.
The next thing I now do is to proceed to the kitchen and get going. I can’t go without doing dirty dishes in the sink left over from the previous night, if there are any. It’s not just me. I can’t frankly work around in the kitchen with filth screaming out at me from the sink or any other place. As far tea, well, I do it the in the manner I have been used to doing it all these years. First water goes into the pot as it settles in nicely on the full flame of the gas stove followed by tea powder in the proportion that is touch more than the normal. For I like my tea to be strong and heady. Then the contents are left to simmer for some time till the mixture of water and tea turns dark amber in colour. It’s time to now pour milk- not less; not more. But just enough to let it turn temptingly deeper and stronger brown and not so much as to overpower the natural aroma of tea. Finally, a little bit of sugar is thrown into the mix. After all what’s tea if it does not taste just a little bit sweet? Tea without sugar, to me, is like indulging in ‘karezza’. Is it really worth it? Really?
In summers, I follow more or less the same ritual except that I get up earlier than I do in winters. My sleep is timed to a clock that moves on a different plane. First instinctive reactions are the same as those in winters. Doors are opened so that the morning breeze stirs into the house to freshen it up; and, yes, they are opened fully for there is no fear of the numbing chill. But summer mornings are dull and drab and fusty and airless. They don’t enthuse you; liven you up in any which way. No wonder, there isn’t much appetite for tea during summers not even at the day break- the time of the day when you are otherwise less likely not to feel inclined to having it. But when you are slave to a habit; there’s not much you can do either except to endure it. So, I step into the kitchen and start doing the thing that I often do at this hour of the day all the year round. In some weird sense, it gives me a feeling of being on the loop.
In springs and autumns, the appetite returns for morning tea as air is still damp and there’s still a tittle of sense of chill in the spring breeze even as air has begun to become laden with wetness of the impending winter in autumns. Spring mornings are light, fragrant and vivifying. On spring mornings, I am tempted to walk in the small house lawn that is fringed by zinnias, petunias, marigolds and pansies in colours as varied as white, red, amber, yellow and violet. As I get down to caress them, I feel a sense of oneness with them; life at its glorious best and in harmony with all things living, nearby and far away. After soaking up the invigorating colours and early morning chirping of birds, I return to make tea in the kitchen.
Autumns come pregnant with a sense of foreboding, as trees strip themselves of leaves and stand denuded and forlorn. Green turns brown; everything rich and strong wastes away into poor and witherings. An air of deep despair and gloom seems to engulf everything. It’s nature’s way of telling us that everything can’t stay same all the year round. What comes into being will grow young and then mature and finally leave us. While vegetative life seems to be trapped in a time loop in a sense, humans sadly don’t have that luxury. Like on spring mornings, I often spend some time in my lawn looking around and making sense of things around me before returning to the kitchen to boil the billy to use the Australian expression.
Lately, I have begun making detox water too- using some fruits or vegetables or carom seeds, which are dipped in water and kept overnight to be consumed in the morning before tea. I usually gulp down two-three glasses of detox water before taking tea. After tea is made, it is strained and poured into two cups. A tray is then readied on which are placed a glass container containing a few cookies and two cups filled with tea. A tumbler filled with detox water is also placed on it. I then walk into our bedroom and call to my wife, who is usually asleep as she often stays up watching TV. Her reason for hitting the bed late in the night and not waking up in the morning early enough is that I don’t let her watch her stuff on TV up until it is very late in the night.
In winters, we have our morning tea on the bed while during the other three seasons, we prefer to have it in the lawn or in the porch.Tea in the morning acts like a magic potion that gets me going. On rare occasions when my early morning tryst does not happen with tea, guess what, I feel low and not my usual self. And if you are wondering what that another tumbler filled with detox water on tray is for, well, it is for her.
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