The Chai Process

Five months at home proved to be enough time to master the art of making chai. Or have I really mastered it? Only a novice would say so. I have mastered the art of making chai that my mom likes, and consistently making it that way. It is essential now to mention the criteria for judging the goodness of a cup of chai. How else can I make the judgment that I have mastered this art?

Chai is not merely a drink to enjoy the taste of. Many elements together decide its perfection. Its colour, its taste, its smell, and its texture are only some of them. While making a cup of chai for my mother, I make sure to keep all of these in mind. 

To keep the perfect texture, just the right amount of milk is needed. Too much and it can get too creamy, too less and the cup of chai approaches a glass of water. Of course, this factor is heavily influenced by your personal preference of ideal creaminess. This is the one point where coffee drinkers may relate. Personally, I prefer triple the amount of water than milk. For my mom, the ideal ratio is closer to seven to one.

The rest of the variables change depending on the amount of milk that went into making the chai. That would determine how many tea leaves you add, so that the chai comes out at a perfect level of colour and bitterness and aroma. The approach I follow is to add a small of amount of tea leaves at first, and check what colour of chai results. Slowly add more and boil until the perfect colour has been reached. A surge of excitement leading to adding too much tea leaves can result in dark, bitter chai and overwhelming regret. On the other hand, boiling it too much can lead to the same results.

If you grew up in a chai-drinking household, you just know the perfect colour of chai. It is a colour imprinted on your mind. Slight perturbations from that colour are detectable. My mind feels a certain kind of satisfaction when chai reaches this perfect colour - like a ball perfectly balanced on the top of a hill. The colour is the mark of perfection, a mark of perfect alignment. 

The colour is why intuition is the most important ingredient while you make chai. Can you tell how bitter the chai would get as a function of how much you boil it? Can you tell whether the chai would reach its ideal colour after five minutes of resting it, in case it is not the ideal colour at this point in time? Can you estimate the infinitesimal amount of tea leaves that are needed to get the chai to its perfect balanced state? If so, I guarantee that you will make good chai.

When do things seem magical?

Things seem magical when they are sort of separate from the background and stand out, seem more three-dimensional. For example, the tree visible from my window seems to stand out whenever the cloud cover is heavy. The tree finds more life running through it. Each leaf and each branch that moves reminds me of people living and swinging in the tree, living in a giant and magical tree kingdom. This entire effect increases when the tree is in particular contrast with the sky.

The Water Tank

7:30 AM each morning and 6:30 PM each evening in our old apartment were tied by a special occurrence—an alarm blaring with the voice of a woman saying, in a funnily formal way, “Hello, your water tank is full, please switch off your motor”. She would say this twice, once in English and then in Hindi, unless you cut her off in the middle by switching off the alarm. A loud, catchy tune would also play in the background, so that everyone in a five kilometre radius would know that the water tank of 95, Nagin Lake Apartments was filled up to the brim. 

While I haven’t experienced much of the morning drama associated with the water tank filling up, since I was either at school or asleep, I have fairly vivid memories of 6:30 PM in the evenings. If it wasn’t a weekend, my mom would be teaching middle schoolers on our dining table, right beside where the alarm was housed. New students would often get scared or chuckle when the alarm sounded, but slowly got used to it. Initially, my mother had to tell the kid sitting right next to the alarm to turn it off, but slowly, the students didn’t need to be told to do so. 

The alarm had been turned off, but now the motor needed to be turned off. The motor being on is what fills the tank up, and my parents would turn the motor on each morning at 7 AM and each evening at 6:00 PM. I would sit in the bedroom while my mom would teach, and from outside, my mother would call out to me and say, “Gauriiiii, motor band karde”, that is, to turn off the motor. For some reason, she would say that each time even though she knew I could hear the loud blaring of the alarm. A sense of emergency would overwhelm me, and I would run to the bathroom. The motor switch sat on the wall, and I would flip it off.

I apologise for the amount of switches and machines such as alarms and motors in this anecdote, I hope it doesn’t get confusing. My family, on the other hand, worked like a well-oiled machine whenever the water tank would have to be filled up. 

Such water-tank-filling periods would also be accompanied by other activities, such as filling up all the buckets in our bathroom with the fresh water that would be supplied through a special tap (which would have water flow through it only from 7 to 8 AM and 6 to 7 PM, when the apartments would turn their overall apartments motor on). We would do this to be cautious, just in case the water tank ran low on water early. I became an expert at estimating the amount of time a bucket would take to fill based on its size, or what the sound of more water hitting the water already in the bucket would tell you about the amount of water already in the bucket. 

In the summer, we would also have to fill our water cooler (a giant machine with a fan and a pump that cools the whole house) with water. My family devised a clever way to do so, with a pipe attached to the kitchen tap and snaking through the house all the way to the cooler in our balcony. I would handle this too, since my mother would be teaching, and sometimes with the buckets and the cooler one of them would overflow with water. I lived for the days when each of them would attain the perfect level of water, with no water wasted. Otherwise, I would comfort myself by thinking about the pigeons, who would bathe in the standing water on our balcony in case the water overflowed. 

And this is it, a bit of the story of the water that would greet my family and the pigeons twice a day.