The perfect cup of tea

We have three stainless steel jugs at home. The smallest holds a cup of tea, the medium two, and the largest, three. I always use the biggest. Three tablespoons of tea leaves, boiling water up to an inch below the rim. Cover and let it sit for ten minutes. Add six spoons of sugar. Milk until it’s the right shade of brown.

This isn’t how you make the perfect cup of tea. The tea is too strong (“Kahata wadi,” Amma would way, wincing at the bitter taste.) When Athamma was alive, she would add more sugar to it. It doesn’t taste good and I know it. But it’s the cup of tea I make.

A cup of tea means a few things in life. In the morning, it helps me wake up. It makes me feel relaxed and helps me to shrug off the usual feelings of dread that accompany the act of waking up. In the evening, it’s a nice way to take a break from work or life in general. Sometimes, it would mean going back to my childhood by dipping Marie biscuits in hot tea.

A few years ago, tea meant a break during work. At my very first job, a temporary stint at the school library, they would serve tea for us in clean white cups every morning. At my first actual job, they served tea at 10 a.m. I used to let it sit in my cup for hours, sometimes. It would be cold by the time I drank it.

Tea also means family and togetherness to me. Visiting someone for just a short while, staying for a cup of tea and ending up chatting for hours is a Sri Lankan thing to do. A ginger tea while travelling is something I will never say no to.

I never had plain tea until a few years ago. I had my first cup during an assignment and a few years later, a friend taught me how to make plain tea that doesn’t taste awful.

Two friends from my first real job work for the same company as I do now. We met up for tea one day and stood outside, watching kittens snooze and people walk past.

There are many more happy tea moments in my life, but lately I’ve been thinking about how women are always expected to make tea at home. It’s usually the woman who wakes up before others and makes tea for the entire family. It’s the woman who rushes to the kitchen to make a cup of tea for visitors.

And I’ve been hearing more and more comments along the lines of, “Wonder what kind of wife she’ll be. She can’t even make a cup of tea.”

Comments like this always shake me a little. As a woman, it is strange knowing your worth is reduced to something like a cup of tea. It’s strange knowing that people talk about marriage like a cup of tea and the ability to make it can make or break it.

And so the cup of tea that has always brought me such joy is now starting to represent a life I don’t want for myself. I don’t want to get married, settle down, wake up at the crack of dawn every day to make tea and then breakfast and then lunch and then dinner. I don’t want someone to ever reduce my worth to my ability to make a cup of tea. Or cook. Or have children. I don’t want my value to be simmered down to nothing.

I want to be able to enjoy a cup of tea without thinking about any of the roles carved out for me; whether it’s the dutiful housewife or the bossy working woman. I want to be able to make a cup of tea without people being surprised that I can manage a thing or two in the kitchen or add it to the list of things that will make me A Good Wife.

But until we stop expecting so much from women, until we tell people, regardless of gender, to learn how to make a cup of tea, for their own good, even the perfect cup of tea will taste bitter to me.

 

(This post is not a man-hating post. It’s not about men not being able to make a cup of tea because so many of them do. Quite a few men in my life cook and they cook well. So this post is actually about women. Women who put other women down because they don’t fit the traditional moulds created for women. Because they reject gender roles. Because they can’t make a cup of tea.)