Originally published on lavkesh.com
The Tea Association of the USA reports that nearly 80% of American households make tea regularly, often from a bag steeped quickly in hot water.
My mother, however, does not make tea from a bag. Her chai is a ritual, a slow alchemy of water, milk, fresh ginger, cardamom, and sometimes a whisper of cloves. It is boiled not once, but three times, each boil coaxing more flavor from the spices, deepening the color, thickening the consistency.
Growing up in Orai, this was simply how chai was made. It was not a choice but a given. Twice a day, morning and evening, the clatter of the mortar and pestle grinding ginger would signal a shift in the household rhythm. Time slowed down; conversations started, or sometimes, just comfortable silence settled in.
Later, in Hyderabad for my MCA, the city moved faster than Orai, but the chai still kept its pace. Small stalls on every corner served it in glass tumblers, piping hot, demanding a brief pause from the rush of auto-rickshaws and bustling markets. It was a shared moment, a silent acknowledgment of the need to step away for a few minutes.
When I first came to Dallas-Fort Worth, the pace here felt like a constant sprint. Everyone seemed to be running against the clock, even for simple things. The idea of taking twenty minutes, twice a day, just for a drink felt almost indulgent, a luxury I could not afford in this new, demanding environment.
But some habits are anchors, and the chai ritual is one of them. In our home, the sounds of morning are not just the kids waking up or the dogs stirring; they are the gentle scrape of my mother peeling ginger, the thud of the pestle, the hiss of milk coming to a boil. She insists on this process, and I am grateful for her insistence.
That twenty-minute window, from the first crack of ginger to the final strain into the cups, is a forced halt. It is time when email waits, Slack notifications are ignored, and the urgent demands of the day recede. The aroma fills the kitchen, a warm, spicy invitation to simply be present.
It is a pocket of silence, a space for my wife and me to talk about the day ahead, or for the boys to share a dream they had. Often, it is just quiet, the clinking of spoons against ceramic, the slow sips, the warmth spreading through us. The world outside can rush, but inside those twenty minutes, it does not touch us.
This pause is a small act of resistance, a deliberate choice to slow down and connect, not just with each other, but with a sense of time that is unhurried. It is a reminder that efficiency is not the only metric for a well-lived day.
Perhaps the real brew is not just the leaves, but the quiet moment it carves out, twice a day, in a world that never stops moving.
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