Screw worms, the early bird gets a cup of chai.

You could say I’m not a morning person.  The day my summer vacation finally started, I slept through the night until 4pm the next day. That wasn’t the first time I’ve done that. Apparently, my body’s clock and the clock of the working, waking world are not always in sync.

But once, when I was around 8 years old, I happened to roll out of bed before my mom and brother, right after my dad went to work. I essentially had the house to myself, but it was weird. Weak, morning light and chilly, still air are sensations that have always made me feel a little out of place, kind of like the world is not yet ready for little children like me (in my head, I’m still 8 I guess). It was an adult time of day, so I decided to do something the adults I knew did. I made my first cup of chai.

I used to watch my dad make it every night. I don’t know why, but I methodically committed every detail of the process to memory. Children sense things that are never explicitly said and I think I knew how integral chai was to sustaining my community. It’s how you woke up in the morning and how you unwound at the end of the day. It’s how you got visitors to stay an extra half hour and it’s how you filled the awkward silences when you ran out of things to say. It was language you consumed, so if you could make chai you could communicate in a way that literally warmed people up inside. I felt the calling to be one of those people, so that morning was the moment that pajama-clad, Dora-the-Explorer-hair-repping, eyes-level-with-the-stove Banicia inducted herself into the privileged ranks of the chai-makers. The torch I endeavored to carry was this knowledge: Without us, family functions would cease to exist. While the responsibility is great, the honor is greater.

14 years later and I still make chai regularly. It’s become a sort of meditative experience, an exercise of intuition, because I do it without thinking. But I don’t really let my mind wander either. I just watch the cardamom float in the water, stir the sugar until it dissolves, pour milk until it feels right and then watch it all foam and boil up precariously close to the edge of the pot before I turn the gas flame down and let the concoction calm into stillness again. I don’t know how many times I repeat that process, but at some point the color speaks up and the chai demands to be poured through a half-melted, plastic chalni. Half a cup for Mom and Nani, 3/4 of a cup for Bob. Leftovers for Shari if he’s in the mood. Sometimes cookies, sometimes not. Then I clean up the drops I almost always spill and my family takes their first sips. The final part of the ritual is their verdict. Always gentle but always honest, I’ll know how they like it. Whether I’m 8 or 22, there is nothing quite like hearing a sigh of satisfaction and “chai bahut swaad hai, beta.”

Maybe early mornings aren't so bad. 

On Death and Defecation

I went to San Francisco a couple of months ago, looking forward to some time alone in a big city. I didn’t do much, but I found a Blue Bottle Coffee shop by the Port of San Francisco, so I knew it was going to be a good day. The weather was beautiful, with just enough clouds to be interesting and the sun shining its approval on the new Bay Bridge. I sat outside with my compostable cup of coffee branding me as a responsible, Bay-Area consumer and watched a crow poop after being chased by little kids. And I thought about death. I don’t really know why the two were associated in my head, but there was a sense of finality to the way the crow defecated and flew away, leaving his mark behind. I thought it was pretty analogous to the way so many of us want to digest life, getting the most we can out of it so that we can crap out a glorious legacy before dying and leaving this earth.

I mean, it seems so simplistic. We go on learning, building, destroying, and loving and then we die. That should be depressing, but honestly, when I think of myself and the people I love as non-invincible, I feel on the periphery of some kind of wonder. It’s kind of humbling and simultaneously empowering to realize that no matter what we do or don’t do, what we achieve or don’t achieve, death is the one thing everyone gets to do. It makes me feel honored, because people like Gandhi and MLK died too. And then my ashes will become soil and the carbon from my body will be a part of new life, just like I got that carbon from stars that died their own, brilliant deaths. In the grand scheme of things, I mean both nothing and everything. Sigh, existentialism.

I should clarify, the prospect of dying also scares the crap out of me the way those children scared it out of that crow. It’s not like I’m looking forward to death or claiming to know what it’s like, and when I think about a world in which the ones I love the most no longer exist, I sense the deep holes death can carve. My family and I’ve talked about this a lot, as we tend to do with the things that make us most uncomfortable (you can either call us growth-oriented or masochistic). My parents have said they wish to be cremated after they die, and have their ashes scattered in various places. My Mom has said that she wants part of her ashes scattered in the Ganges and part of them used in my garden for planting. When I heard that, I oddly enough felt so alive I wanted to cry (big surprise). I think that’s because I realize that the love inside living beings is as warm as death is cold, and that can transfer to new life, just like carbon. I know that death is just another fact in the path of life, for every specie, and that it will be me giving those ashes meaning. I will draw from the flowers born of it a life beyond their photosynthetic functions. I don’t know if that’s crazy, but if I can see symbolism in a crow’s process of digestion, I think I’m allowed to find my mother in a bed of flowers.