O Heavenly Brew!!!

Simon (Simon's story is for later) gets me a mug of brown fluid. I see specks of black/grey floating around in it. "Chai, saab!" Really? I raise an eyebrow. Flecks of cigarette ash, presumably, the alien floating objects... "Thanks, yaar". Say I, ever the stickler to social equality.
The Barracks serve pathetic tea. Anything to accompany the cigg, so I shrug my shoulders and resigned to fate, take a sip from the mug. He's managed to flavour it well, indeed. Shabash to the cook or whoever brewed this.
Tea as I remember it, came carefully picked and lovingly packaged from my uncle's estate in Munnar....The very act of Mom cooking tea would be advertised by the aroma floating around the kitchen..That, and the smell of freshly frying banana chips...Aaah, for those good old days...My Dad had a penchant for pointing out shortcomings in even the best tea Mom brewed... I'll get him across one day and give him a sample of Simon's tea...He'll probably castigate the poor chap for sacrilege!!
And then there is the tea Cadet's Mess gave us. The tea we fought for, until 'angle of maximum tilt' to the decanter was established and even the most stubborn Mallu couldn't extract a drop more...Not for its aromatic value or exquisite flavour, no siree...It gave us an excuse to hang around for a li'l more time. For a cadet beleaguered with PT, drill, acads, hikes, punishments and lot more, 'coursemates' are the only solace (Jat and my cabin-for-all-seasons is a fallout of this), and teatime was some time to cherish.
And of course, the Mallu's fixation with tea. The staple beverage in any Mallu home, we'd been brought up on copious amounts of tea...Bye bye, Kerala and hello Barracks...lo! no more quality tea. Thus resigned to an unsavoury fate, I sip at Simon's 'chai' and make a face....
A few years back, I'd made a sojourn into the interiors of Kashmir(yep, yet another story) and I'd come across an interesting concoction called 'kah-vah', the Kashmiri equivalent of Tea. Imagine my amazement when I discovered that this 'tea' was actually SALTY!! Didn't want to offend the kind lady who was serving us, and held on, but soon I grew to like the taste...
And then again in Porbandar, the city where the Mahatma was born, I tasted spicy 'kah-vah' on the waterfront. Was it a smart salesman trying to pass it of as the real Kashmiri kah-vah, I wonder?
A true mallu, they say, would accept a mug of the vilest poison, if somebody were to tell him that its tea. I agree, it is for me, a part of my ethnicity. So I call Simon, and say....Mug bhar ke laana (get me more tea).....