The Cutting

When Ramesh would pour it from the kettle, into the glass cup… He would hold the kettle high and bring it closer to the cup and again take it aback… The mist that would cover the top walls of the cup… And the white, thin, steamy strands flying free into air, rising from the brown tea in that cup… sweet like the jaggery that they used to bring to my dad’s factory… The fragrance it would bring early in the morning, or in the dull afternoon or even thoughtless evening…

The glass cup, is the one I used to be amazed at… it had those straight dents made on it, never counted, but same on every glass. Those would get curvy just before the thick top wall… Guys from Engineering College in front of our tea stall would hold the cup, like some scientific instrument. I had once been to a chemistry lab, when I used to go to school… They had those test-tubes held tightly in rusty metal claws… these engineers would hold the cup by making a clamp using the thumb and the index finger… then there was Nari Chacha… He would hold the hot cup, his bare palm embracing it all around… he used to work Municipal Corporation… a sweeper.

Nari Chacha used to come to my Dad’s factory… Dad used to make the finest… hooch… And the butterflies… I would play with them… In the green fields… I would steal a little from the dad’s kerosene can like containers for hooch… then lying down in our hut, I would be running… in those green fields… it was so lovely…

But now everything seems so bland… The fragrance of tea is so unfulfilling… the jaggery is so tasteless… I don’t see those butterflies anymore… the night before, I don’t know where I slept… gotta make it to the tea stall… to beg Ramesh to let me wash some cups… to serve some tea… I just need 40 rs… to buy me the white powder…

I hate sunlight in my eyes… reminds me of the torch’s heat I had used for my dad’s funeral rites…