{postcards from India--chai beginnings}

I am sipping a cup of chai here in my home in Bedfordshire called Chota House. It's tea time. Although I live alone, I continue the tradition of tea time. Tea makes me think of life in India and it offers me a little escape everyday at around four o’clock in the afternoon. 

{my Dad's family in India in the 1950s}

Ever since I can remember, chai and chatter mixed in our family.  It was a necessity of everyday life. Chai nourished our souls and the chatter created unbreakable bonds. Through a hot liquid, generations have been nourished and continue to grow. They carry on traditions that have been long forgotten; they start new ones. Chai and chatter—the foundations of a family. 

It was not the blinding white intricate marble inlay of the Taj Mahal built by the proud Shah Jahan for his Mumtaz Mahal that so often appears in picture-perfect postcards and replicated in styrofoam models. Nor was it the ancient and crumbling powerful tower of the Qutb Minar built by Aybek to signal his authority over destroyed Hindu temples and to demonstrate his might to his newly conquered people in Delhi. Nor was it the obscure and quaint water ways of Cochin, where inhabitants eat, sleep, wash, dine, and die within the confines of the winding water banks. It is not a particular monument or a particular era that has drawn me to India, but a discovery of a way of life and a way of a country--an interest that is in my blood as there has always been a long love for India in my family.

My great-grandfather left England to join the army in India, which resulted in three generations in India. My granny was born in Simla, the summer capital of the Raj, and after marrying my Bristol-born grandfather, together they raised my Dad and his brothers and sister across the subcontinent (my father was born in Peshawar, what was then India until Partition). 

{my granny as a child with her ayah}

{my Dad and his pet monkey, Archie as a school child in New Delhi}

{my grandparents in Simla, newly married}

On my first trip to India, I was 10, and yet it felt like I had somehow returned to a place I knew well. We had visited the country in our sleep and in our imagination, through numerous stories told to us over chai. Our childhood was filled with tales, recounting the horrors and delights of a place called India. Every morning we were reminded of the spices of India as the smell of fresh chai permeated the air. I would hear the click-clack of my mum’s slippers on the staircase, the creak of the door, and a soft song of ‘chai chai gurham chai.’ A fresh, hot, sweet and delicious cup of tea would be placed beside my bed, and I would awake to a day of normal life in Victoria, Canada. Then I would look forward to another cup of chai at four o’clock, when me and all of my four sisters would gather around eating home-baked cookies and sipping copious cups of chai. Chai and chatter mixed. 

It was on our first trip to India that we gained the nickname the 'gurrham chai sisters'--given to me and my four sisters by our faithful taxi driver Jaya Kumar. Whenever we get the chance, we still enjoy our cups of tea together! On this most recent trip, my sister Julia & I (the other 3 sisters not being able to come)enjoyed copious quantities of masala chai. Unfortunately, the tradition of serving tea in silver tea pots seems to be no longer the fashion, and even tea bags seem to be the favourite over loose leaf (my granny would be absolutely shocked if she were still alive)!

{me & our friends, relatives of Jaya Kumar, in Ooty in the mid 1990s}

{At the Taj Mahal on our first trip to India}

{returning as a family for the first time to India, visiting my Dad's old boarding school in Ooty}

India felt familiar on that first trip and my Dad rapidly regained his fluency in Hindi. Hindi words were (and are still) used in our everyday vocabulary from the delicious tea we call chai, the quenching lemonade we call nimbupani, to billi for cat.  My Granny flooded our early childhood with English Raj vocabulary.  Words like godown, rickshaw, the dak; all of these were English to me, although I often learned they were not understood when I tried to use them at school or in ordinary conversation with people outside my family. My own house here in England is called Chota House, meaning 'small'; my nickname in my family being Tiny (or the derivative Tinza) and my abode is rather a tiny little Victorian worker's cottage...

{my grandfather (right) in Pakistan}

{my sister and me in 2005 on the Khyber Pass}

After our first visit to India, we continued to go back--always for a couple of months. It's a place that keeps drawing me back. So it was with utter excitement that on 2 January 2018, I flew back with my parents from Heathrow, landing in Mumbai. Immediately upon arrival, all the memories came flooding back, and all the reasons why I love it so much...all the splendours that India has to offer: the intense smell of bodies, spices, squalor and riches, that are blended together so intricately as if concocted in a similar fashion to a well slaved-over curry, simmering in the heat for just the right length of time. This “curry-in-a-hurry” encompasses the unseasoned traveller as they first step out of the airport and watch the flurry of Mumbai wallahs: some rich, some poor, some beggars, some beggar-masters, some all too seasoned by the Indian spices of life that they go unnoticed, as if part of the urban landscape. These are all the attributes that contribute to the appeal and wonder of a country so rich in history: from cave paintings and temples dating back to the second century BC, to the great epic poetry and mythical texts such as the Gitagovinda, to the exquisite miniature paintings and the lavish ceremonial of the Mughal Court, to the East India Company & Colonial rule, the First War of Independence (or the Uprising) to the Swadeshi Movement and the familiar face of the Bapu figure, Gandhi, and finally to the fame and fortune of Bollywood, hips shaking, light bulbs twisting,& brightly coloured bodies girating, exhibited on the telly that is modern day India.

{Mendhi on my hands as a teenager}

{in the jharoka at the Lal Qila (Red Fort) Delhi in 2005}

  

{Rajasthan on one of our many trips to India}

& so, over the coming weeks, maybe even months, I'll recount my latest adventures in India. Stories that are dear to my heart, that will stay with me for a lifetime...

{Char minar Hyderabad, Jan 2018}

Stay tuned!

xo

L