Chai  

The one thing that I clearly remember about my trip to India when I was 8 years old is the silence in the car ride going home from the airport with my cousins. The only time that I had ever even talked to them was on our birthdays. I think even that was just because our parents were on either side of the line, forcing us to keep conversation with each other, so we had no choice but to ask the same questions back to each other, and then make some excuse to give the phone back. I moved to the US when I was really small, and I felt like I barely knew them, while they were all extremely close. 

We all sat squished together in silence, glancing at each other from time to time, trying to find something of common interest. It lasts as we reach my grandma’s house and walk up the stairs several times with all of our luggage, the atmosphere around us looming with awkward silence. 

My cousin broke the silence by asking us if we wanted to cook something, mentioning that her mom had taught her to make tea recently. She asked us if we wanted to help her make some, and since we didn’t have any other ideas to offer, we all agreed, some more reluctantly than others. We stood cramped together in the kitchen, side by side. Each of us did something different: one grated ginger, the other crushed cardamom, anso on. 

I watched as she poured the water into the pot, and then, she added the tea. We added the spices that we each had prepared separately. She turned on the stove and told us to wait until the water started bubbling up, and then she added the milk. I could see the light color swirling throughout the dark liquid, slowly transforming it into the familiar color that I was used to seeing. Then she put spoons of fine, white sugar into each cup: one spoon for the adults, “but two big ones for us,” she added. She asked us to taste it first, handing each of us a small clay cup.

My youngest cousin eagerly took a sip before the rest of us, and his reaction afterward is the reason I still remember this story so vividly. “What is in this?” he asked almost disgustedly. With curiosity on our faces after hearing this, we all quickly took a sip and discovered that the sugar had been misplaced with salt.  At the time we just found it funny and didn’t think too much of it after, but I realize now that this is the first memory I have of truly bonding with my cousins. It’s a memory we laughed about recently, as we loudly conversed on our way back to the airport at the end of our trip last summer.