I was staring at an empty Google Doc on my laptop screen, wondering what to write about. My mom passed by, and I casually asked her what I should write. She didn’t think twice. “Tea,” she said. Alright then, tea it is.

There has never been a day in my life without tea in some form, especially not when I’m home. In my house, black tea is a daily ritual, an unspoken rule. Milk was never part of our everyday life, at least not in the form of milk tea. The rhythm of our mornings and evenings has always been marked by the making of black tea. We even have special vessels for brewing it and special glasses for each person. For me, milk tea has always been difficult. It makes me nauseous, and I could never acquire a taste for it.

My mother often reminisces about the gatherings that used to take place at home when my siblings were children. Friends and comrades would come over, and the living room would fill with chatter. And, my mother would send one of my sisters to quietly count the number of sandals outside the door. That was her quick arithmetic to decide how many cups of tea to make. It is a small memory, but it captures the centrality of tea in our household: not just a beverage but a measure of hospitality and community.

As a child in school, however, I encountered a very different politics of tea. During refreshment breaks, we had three options to choose from: black tea, milk tea, or plain milk. One day, someone - I have no memory of who - told me that drinking black tea would make me lose my skin color. I was fairly light-skinned for Indian standards, and the warning worked its way into my head. From then on, I stuck to milk. I rejected black tea, not because I disliked it, but because I didn’t want to lose something society had taught me to treasure unfairly: my complexion. Looking back now, I can’t help but see how racism creeps into the most mundane details of childhood. A beverage became a site of discrimination. My choice of milk over black tea was not about taste at all, but about fear, shame, and the politics of color.

Years later, when I came to Hyderabad for law school, tea returned to me in a new form. At the university mess, during breakfast and evenings, we have three options again: tea, coffee, and milk. But here, “tea” always means milk tea. There is no black tea. When I first arrived, I was shocked. My roommate, who was from Bangalore, didn’t know what black tea was either. I was aghast. How could something so common and ordinary in my home be completely absent in another part of the country? That too in the same southern part. To make matters stranger, people here do know lemon tea. And I thought to myself: just don’t squeeze the lime and you have black tea! But no, that wasn’t how it worked. Cultural differences in something as simple as tea reminded me again of how identity and belonging are shaped by the smallest of practices.

At the mess, I usually go for milk, sometimes coffee. On particularly exhausting days, I fill my tumbler with coffee and sneak in extra spoonfuls of powder. Many of my classes have been saved from the fog of sleep because of that tumbler of over-caffeinated coffee. It is a small rebellion against the monotony of institutional routine, a way of claiming some control over how awake or alert I can force myself to be.

Of course, there are days when nothing but a good lemon tea will do. After a heavy lunch, a glass of hot lemon tea feels like pure heaven. It cleanses, resets, and prepares you to go about the rest of the day. There isn’t much more to say about it except that sometimes simple pleasures matter more than grand declarations.

But tea isn’t just about the liquid. It’s also about the powder. I have a strong dislike for most commercial tea powders because they are meant for milk tea. They don’t taste right when brewed as black tea, and the flavor is often dull or diluted. To find a good brand, one strong enough to satisfy me, has been a long journey. Over the years, I’ve discovered a few reliable ones, but they are rare treasures. A good cup of black tea is never just about boiling leaves in water - it’s about the precise strength, the aroma, and the kind of bitterness that feels comforting rather than harsh.

Ironically, while tea has been the unquestioned staple of my home, I’ve also managed to introduce a coffee culture into the household. Now I make customized coffee for everyone. My father likes his light, with less sugar, because of his diabetes. My mother prefers hers strong and unsweetened, because she simply enjoys the raw bitterness. And me? Extra song. And sugar? I oscillate depending on my mood - sometimes unsweetened and otherwise with more sugar than is probably good for me. Coffee, in this sense, has become another kind of intimacy, a way of expressing love and attention through small acts of care.

There are, of course, days when I don’t want any hot beverage at all. The body is unpredictable like that. But then again, if someone places a perfectly brewed black tea in front of me, I won’t refuse. That’s the paradox of tea - it isn’t just about thirst or habit, it’s about context, memory, and even politics.

When I think about tea now, I no longer see it as just a drink. I see it as a stage where culture, class, race, and intimacy are performed. From my childhood refusal to drink black tea because of a racist remark, to my shock at the absence of black tea in Hyderabad, to my experiments with coffee in my family home, tea has been more than a beverage. It has been a mirror reflecting the values, prejudices, and desires of the society I live in.

Maybe that is why my mother was right to casually suggest “tea” when I asked her what to write about. Tea, after all, is never just tea.

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