A warm cup of tea

When I fell down the stairs of my grandmother's house, shattering my fat and first toenail neatly in half, ammamma sat me down and cleaned my wounds with quiet but firm assurances. She then left me crying and made tea. My little hands curled around the tumbler, holding the warmth to my chest. The hot milk poured into brown powder with a hint of ginger and cardamom washed away my pain. I was five.

When my O/Level results came, words of everyone I knew turned into blades. About how much my widowed mother suffered for me, how they expected better of me, how I would always be a burden to her. My mother brought me a cup of tea, plain and black with a pinch of sugar because we could no longer afford milk powder. She didn’t speak, but she added ginger to it. I huddled into my tea, making a shield out of the bitterness.

The day I first kissed a girl, we went on a date by the lake. We ate salted mangos and spiced veralu and threw popcorn to the fishes and ducks. We held hands, her shyness and my anxiety underpinning each other, the butterflies and worms threatening to burst out of our stomachs. We got tea from a brand truck that sells the same mediocre shit always, paper cups tiny and capricious between our fingers before I leaned into her.

When they found a boy in my bed, I was coming back with masala tea. Kamala akka made the best masala tea in the neighbourhood and I wanted to treat him. Then they took him away and the full cask, Kamala akka’s special recipe, sat unopened for weeks before someone threw it out.

At my mother’s funeral, I served Nestea to our guests. I couldn't bear to be the chief mourner, to look at her crumpled body day and night, so instead I gathered the children and set up a tea squad. Every person who came to give me condolences got served tea straight from the machine we rented from Piyumi akki’s cafe. Sometimes, when the powder ran out, it only served hot water and I drank it, one sip at a time. It tasted like tears.

I was drinking the hospital cafe’s (terrible) tea and munching on their (divine) muffins when my test results came. Yes, I was positive. No, there was nothing more they could do. They could make me comfortable, though. I sipped the tea as my partner told me this, his voice wobbling like it was on a precipice. I drank until it fogged up my glasses, the liquid heating my chest, then crushed it within my hands before dropping it. I put my arms around him, my hands now accustomed to holding anyone regardless of gender, and he broke down, howling for the whole hospital to hear.

When my body hurt everywhere, I became cruel. I was not graciously dying, and he was not kindly caring, a combination that led to many powder keg days. But I was dying, and he was caring, so he always made me tea after our spat and then let me cry into his shirt as he rocked me to sleep.

One day, when we were both tucked in bed, he curled around me like I was something he could protect. I told him he felt like a blanket, warm and lovely, and hard to let go of. He replied, “You, my love, are a warm cup of tea, something whose taste I’ll chase for the rest of my life.”