100 Cups of Chai
By Nia Howard
He tells me I make the chai too spicy. He kisses me on the nape of my neck before taking his cup to the small table by the balcony. He lights a cigarette, and the smoke stretches and curls over a sleepy city we still don’t know yet. I stand in an ancient kitchen, small as my thumb. I’m not ready to join him, yet, so I stir the bubbling milk over the gas stove for a minute longer. I notice a chip in the teacup as I pour the tea, a stream of brown silk and steam.
The dirty tile is warm underneath my bare feet—no doubt from the hot air stagnating both from inside the musty flat and from outside the open balcony window, the dead air making everything else feel just as dead.
I bring my cup over to join him, and tuck my knees up against my chest. His shirt swallows me, and the fabric dangles gingerly against my legs.
The robin’s egg paint is peeling from the walls, already discolored from decades of cigarette smoke and sweat or passionately drawn air. This is a romantic city. This is an old city.
I study his profile as he looks out into the early morning: a small cobblestone avenue below, a closed tailors across the street, and above it, neighboring flats where, should whoever live there not still be sleeping, we might see them closely through the windows, going about their day.
He can feel me studying him, but he doesn’t move. I can tell he’s no longer thinking candidly; he’s thinking about looking picturesque, helping me admire the scene—posing, as though I’m taking a mental polaroid. Really, I’m only waiting to see if maybe this time, after all this time, I’ll finally feel it.
I search my innards, rove all the way back inside me towards the quietest corners in my bones, behind my blood, and listen closely to whatever lurks “back there,” where intuition or an unsurfaced fear might live. I don’t feel anything. And I think maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m remembering incorrectly what it’d felt like before. Maybe it’s always felt like nothing.
But then in this moment, my mind—as it often does in moments like these—wanders to Thomas. And I wonder where he might be these days, and whether he might be married, now, too, and if his thoughts ever drift my way when he’s supposed to be making memories with her.
“Remember the real thing?” Joel lifts his chai and brings me back to now. “What I wouldn’t give.”
I lean over and steal the cigarette from his mouth with the pinch of my fingers. I can smell his salty skin mingling with his cologne from the night before, and I remember that it’s not impossible to be happy with him. I take a drag.
I nod and think back to our honeymoon in Mumbai and that first morning’s stroll when we stumbled upon a Chaiwala who sold us our first transformative cup —one that we’ve since tried to recreate (poorly) every year, no matter where we are in the world.
“Five years.” I smile the way people do when they wonder where all the time has gone.
“Five years.” He shakes his head.
I fight the urge to stare at him again. I worry that one day, he’ll see that when my eyes trace his jawline, I see someone else sitting in his place. So instead I say, “Happy anniversary,” and I lift my teacup to his.
“Happy anniversary, babe.”
I wash down the kiss with a sip of the lukewarm chai.
It’s good, but it’s just not the same as the first.
THE END