Milk Tea on a Winter Evening
by Paromita Patranobish
The blue lotus of the burner blazes softly. There is a deep hiss of gas, and a slight flicker. The flame hesitates, then settles into perfectly shaped petal-tongues. My mother places a black-bottomed saucepan over it. I notice the multiple bangles she wears hanging from her gaunt wrist like oversized clothes. She has been sick for a year. Now I am drifting away. The shared pain of illness fills with silent recognition the space of our disappearing flesh. The water takes forever to boil.
The winter of 2002 is the coldest in India in five years, says the met department. A cold wave sweeps over the northern states. In the east my body is shivering beneath three sweaters and a blanket. I cannot remember the last time my feet were warm. My hypothermic body is like a broken radiator. I rest my eyes on my mother’s smallish hand, the manicured nails, the filigree of tired veins like a net floating underwater, the unmoisturized skin and accessorised wrist bone. It looks like winter. The edges of my vision blur. I’m worried that I might pass out. This would be the second time this week. I use my gaze as a hook, digging into my mother’s hands as they scoop herbal tea out of a jar. I fix the rising numbness in my limbs on the fragrant choreography of browned tea leaves as they swirl and float on the water’s surface like sun-kissed ballerinas. If I stare hard enough at this little piece of reality, if I break it off like the dry cracker I ate for lunch, I’ll be alright, I think.
Caroline Knapp once wrote that cottage cheese was created by God to torture women. Diet foods are emblems of society’s restrictive-punitive demands upon women’s desires. In the same memoir, Knapp describes her descent into disordered eating as a growing obsession with measuring, portioning, and planning of food. Cheese-and-cracker lunches. Surviving the day on coffee and rounding it off with a pot of yogurt at night. The superior feeling of being morally and physically invulnerable to the weakness of the flesh. Exactitude and curtailment, suggests Knapp, are two sides of an anorexic’s relationship with food. The refusal of food and the amplifying of refusal into an existential praxis, what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls a style of being, while tied to the idealization of thinness in post-industrialist, neoliberal and consumerist image and media cultures, is also an attempt at overturning through internalization these very norms of feminine desirability.
In Susan Bordo’s paradigmatic analysis, anorexia isn’t merely a woman’s unintelligent capitulation to gendered societal demands. Starvation is a complex form of covert protest, misdirected but not without agency. The mastery of hunger by transcending it, the resistance to social objectification of women’s bodies by turning the body into an object of deliberate control and policing from within, are equally modes of self-expression. Anorexia’s specific graph of austerity uses an elaborately coded, meticulously maintained physical and gastronomic regimen as a means to reinstate individual autonomy. The anorexic wishes to restore the singularity of a pristine self, a prepubescent body before it has been cast into cultural moulds. Gilles Deleuze calls this process “making oneself an anorganic body” (1987, 110): a specific use of embodiment which challenges the mechanistic conception of the body as a passive, inert, and cohesive organism underlying the construction of ideal body types. Anorexia’s paradox according to Bordo is the fact that the starving body is instrumentalized as a text, an expressive medium to reflect back to society at the level of lived reality its problematic stereotypes of gender, beauty, health, and ability, now pushed to a limit at which these become the very opposite. (Bordo, 2002) It is a desire to inhabit the flesh by sublimating it, to reclaim the body by erasing it. Knapp calls anorexics “masters of exaggeration” taking “a certain satisfaction in going the average woman one better, internalizing her worst fears and then inflating them, flaunting them, throwing them back in her face.” (2003, 17)
The hot tea in my white cup is the face of a flushed child beaded with sweat, glowing with energy that is still unconscious of gaze and shame. My mother is trying to coax milk and sugar into it, to turn it into the beverage of my childhood. I let her. I know I will regret the added calories. The milk spiral and sugar crystals will float up from the dried tea bed like unexorcised ghosts and haunt me till I’ve burnt the extra nutrition with frenzied jogging. But I’m also amused by the make-believe quality of it. My mother has strange attachments to rituals like these, even after every imaginable catastrophe has wiped out the old life that we knew just a year ago and replaced it with emptiness and foreboding. She has her little superstitions, comforts she can hold on to in the middle of the night, a steadfast belief in magical thinking for instance. But to me the tea ceremony has the quality of child’s play. Our empty, grieving house might as well be a child’s toy set. All this effort to create a semblance of normalcy as if milk tea on a winter evening might push the clock back to a different time, overwhelms me. I crave to prolong the physical emptiness around me, to cave into it, become emptied of the burdens of visibility. My skin crawls with the eyes of others and their undisguised discomfort.
The disinfectant smell of my last hospital stay sticks to it. I would rather skip tea, skip dinner and the exhausting need to resist, measure, calculate every bite and forkful, skip the mirror and its confused, anxious, unhappy stare. In fact, I would rather skip living altogether and check out for good. My mother has her tiny rituals. Mine are grand fantasies of vanishing without a trace.
The milk tea my mother makes is an old family recipe. At the centre of it is a concoction of crushed spices boiled in milk. An aromatic basil tea preserved in saffron is then added to the simmering infusion. To bring the rich concoction to a befitting close, a pinch of salt is released and stirred, a garnish that elevates a mundane beverage to Biblical gravitas. As a child, beginnings and endings were perfumed with spice. This was the olfactory alarm that beat the clock at waking me up every day, the smell that fed the house at daybreak filling every room with its appetizing appeal. I knew the workings of hunger through the energizing effect of milk tea on my senses: how the draught of its familiar fragrance became a craving for its taste, the heat radiating from the sides of my large mug into my palms became ineffable signs of nourishment and belonging. Before my father became too ill to stay at home, or my mother’s autoimmune disorder hadn’t consumed her, and I could still bask in the pleasure and plenitude of my body and its marvellous strength, chai was the ritual that glued us. The layers of earthy cardamom and sweet cinnamon held together with the subtle freshness of a dried bay leaf and subtly transmogrified by salt, were as tantalizingly variegated as the subjects of my parents’ conversation as we lounged in the garden in wicker chairs. The chill air of dawn was warmed by the pungency of ginger and the sharpness of clove. The smoke made wispy spider webs in the air as I dunked a Britannia Marie biscuit into the mug. Left unattended for slightly longer, a thin wrinkled film would form on top.
An anorexic Indian is a supposed rarity. Eating disorders are considered to be Western diseases, affecting privileged Western women with enough food to pick from. A developing country harbours a contradictory relationship with food. Here histories of exploitative colonial economics, artificially engineered famines, local caste and class-based hierarchies, contemporary postcolonial extractive capitalism in the form of disinvestment and privatization of agriculture, natural resources and ecological commons, inclement weather, lack of infrastructure and a collapsing agrarian sector coupled with corrupt bureaucratic practices— combine to create massive food shortages, large scale scarcity, malnutrition, and declining quality of both natural produce and consumables. The socio-economic topography of food in India is predominantly marked by disordered eating at a structural level. Vandana Shiva’s brilliant expose of the closely entwined social, economic, and ethical implications of seed patenting and genetic modification of crops by agribusinesses like Monsanto has shown the links between gendered labour, endangered indigenous knowledge, belief systems and cultivation practices, and the right to autonomy over lands and their produce, each of which interlinked facet the agrocapitalist food market tries to colonize, appropriate, and erode.
It is no longer surprising to think that the years during which I struggled with an early puberty and a developing female body with its psychosomatic, emotional and endocrinal complexities, that the culture around me was neither capable of addressing nor hospitable towards, were also the years of rapid liberalization and privatization of the economy. The globalisation of local food cultures that began in Indian cities during the time my generation was coming of age bringing with it the novel phenomena of fast food joints, an expanded advertising sector, and the gradual erasure of the local palate, and the glossy magazine pictures of size-zero models who looked like life-sized Barbies were two sides of the same spectrum. In this new neoliberal Green Revolution era of the late 90s and early 2000s where scarcity, economic divide, and erosion of the local and the singular were the targeted costs of the corporate aspiration for plenty, capitalist expansionism and the existing bedrock of femicidal misogyny and caste and class-based patriarchy reinforced each other. The cultural taboos around the female body on the one hand that made its functions, desires, and autonomy extremely suspect, and the seeming permissiveness of new media prototypes of a liberated femininity on the other, that were circulated in magazines and cable television as a certain body image ideal left a generation of early millennial girls confused and alienated.
I grew up in a toxic milieu of institutionalised ableism where mental health was a deeply stigmatised, heavily policed topic. The silence and namelessness that surrounded psychic suffering meant that in the early 2000s an eating disorder was very likely to be undiagnosed, misdiagnosed and left untreated. It meant that without an appropriate vocabulary, medical policy, or an empathetic public culture of recognition and redress, the relationship of young girls to food, and the embedding of food itself in a wider landscape of consumerist greed that extends the same ideological lens to commodify both food and femininity, were things barely understood or brought to popular parlance. My healing came fortuitously from the rare medical attention and a few supportive individuals I was lucky to encounter. My mother in insisting upon the old, generationally transmitted tea ritual, even though it was just the two of us struggling to make ends meet, to get from one exhausting day to the next, seemed to understand the restorative power of gustatory familiarity and sensory security. In concocting the flavours and aromas that represented the crescendo of familial fullness, in an entropic space of loss, desertion and decline, she was changing the meaning of food, allowing new resilient, persevering possibilities to emerge out of the lived experience of consumption: a cup of milk tea on a winter evening.
Notes
Bordo, Susan (2003). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Translated by Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Knapp, Caroline (2003). Appetites: Why Women Want. Berkeley: Counterpoint
Dr. Paromita Patranobish is Assistant Professor of English, Mount Carmel College, Bangalore, India. She writes and researches on topics at the intersection of gender, embodiment, environmental humanities, disability and neurodivergence, and nonhuman ecologies. Her creative nonfiction, and book and art reviews have been published in Hakara Bilingual, The Hooghly Review, The Bombay Review, Gulmohar Quarterly, Scroll, Poems India, Cafe Dissensus, Stir World, The Chakkar: An Indian Arts Review, and The Assam Tribune, among other publications.
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