Tea Tales
Best articles on Tea
My friends talk over it. Colleagues gossips over it. Siblings fight over it.
A cup of tea it is – a simple, soothing brew which exudes a fragrance of familiarity – the fragrance of home.
It is Monday morning when I am sitting with my friend at office canteen. Taking a sip of ‘masala chai’, I feel relief in the intense flavor of ginger and cinnamon until the crushed pieces of clove which were floating over the brew enter my mouth and wreck a wild havoc with my delicate taste buds. Jeez!
Nonetheless, the delicious aroma has soothed my tense nerves that the worries of workplace have subsided.
This is the small repartee from work that I and my friend, who sits two floors below mine, share at a common table. It is only reserved for a friendly banter, which makes it something to be excited about in the middle of the horrendous work. If I ever leave this job, I wonder, what I would miss the most. Not the pile of endless tasks, which can make anyone’s head pound my merely thinking about it but this ten minute ‘chai chat’ which I have with her.
Suddenly, I find myself wondering about similar memories in my life which sends me back to good olden school days.
When I would return home, since mom and dad were at work, it was grandma’s daily chore to make afternoon tea. She would pour it in the steel glass that had a signature boundary an inch below the rim. Because I was small, or it was her style, she would toss the tea several times between the glasses until a thick creamy foam formed upto the brim.
I would then sip slowly while watching daily sops on TV in her room and the foam would cling to my lips.
On weekends, when my mom would be home, the sounds of placing the steel glasses on the shelf would let me know it was time for family tea. The smell of it would float around in the kitchen and travel towards my room. And before I could get up in the middle of the studies, mom would come in my room with a glass of tea. Despite being free of foam, it had a flavor of either cardamom or ginger depending on the season.
I miss those study breaks.
The college canteen mostly kept the stuff that suited the young generation so there was nothing much in beverages more than cold drinks or packed artificial juices. Besides, they only kept ready-made things. Perhaps, they wanted to avoid an extra work of customizing the eatables. The food was most of the times stale or mishandled. But nearby, there was a stall which became famous for instant spicy maggie. You would not mind walking a few meters to a place which is open to customize as per your taste and need. Would you, when they can also make you an instant tea?
In the winters, the place used to be very crowded. It was the maggie, or the hot tea, or both – I can’t say. But when I would disembark from the bus and have a sip of tea at the improvised stall near the bus stop, I would feel a sense of warmth in the freezing fog.
There is a cosmetic shop on the way to my place, where I stopped by one evening to shop for earrings. I started looking for lipstick and eye shadows. The owner and his sweet wife were delightfully showing me their stock. Perhaps it was the feeling of familiarity, that they offered me tea.
Offering tea to a customer – in a non-jewelry shop? Well, I was spell bound. I refused several times, but my futile formality ethic was easily snubbed. So, there I sat, until three glasses arrived in sometime. With the rich fragrance of Tulsi, the talks smoothened from mechanical to personal between me and the couple.
I would not call myself an avid tea drinker. But to check something new, I thought of visiting ‘Chaayos’ in Gurgaon. It offers a rich variety of tea by mixing the ingredients in all possible combinations. They give you everything ranging from common ones like Adrak Tulsi, Honey Ginger, Elaichi Tulsi, Lemon tea, etc to unique ones, like Ajwain chai, Hari Mitch chai, Pahadi chai, God’s Tea. Following the demand of my adventurous taste buds, I ordered Aam Papad chai only to realise that it was a wrong combination that did nothing else than making their menu card attractive.
Being alone with a distasteful tea is what I am narrating to my friend. She laughs out loud as she puts her empty cup on the table. I get up to pay the bill since it was my turn today. But the counter boy tells me, “Someone from the corner table has already made the payment.” I turn around, following the direction of his finger and recognize a boy sitting out there. I have seen him before. Perhaps, we often cross ways during lunch. My friend gives me a wry smile and says, “another tea tale?”
Interesting Facts about Tea
- Tea was earlier used as a medicine which took 3000 years to become an everyday drink
- Tea is the most famous beverage of India and also world’s most consumed beverage.Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization suggests that the world drinks about six billion cups of tea a day.
- Tea beats coffee in a lot of ways. It predates coffee by about 3,000 years, and is thought to have first been harvested in 2700 B.C. by the emperor Shen Nung who was known as “the divine healer.” Coffee didn’t come until the tenth century at the earliest, first discovered in what is now Yemen. These days most coffee is produced in Brazil and Central America; it wasn’t brought to the western hemisphere until around 1720, first in the Caribbean and then eventually south into Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil. The bean wouldn’t grow in the more volatile climate of North America (except in Hawaii), so South America dominated.
