by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
1. Teacup from Russia
The first teacup I use as a child is not for tea but milk which is boiled and mixed with sugar. I blow on it to watch the steam disperse and the cream float. The teacup is Russian. This is just before the Soviet war begins in Afghanistan and America lionizes the Mujahideen, the future fathers of the would-be war orphans otherwise known as the Taliban.
By the time I begin college in America, the Soviet Union fades and the Mujahideen are already darlings of the past, but I hear the story of Stalin that will forever stay with me:
Stalin at the dinner table pets a live chicken whose feathers he plucks feather by feather, demonstrating how, as the chicken becomes colder and weaker, it hovers more desperately around his hand, the only source of warmth. Bloodied and in pain, it follows the trail of the few grains of feed tossed its way.
An image to relive in a time when I see nothing but a pile of feathers and humanity desperate for survival. It is June of 2025. The trail of blood will be obvious to the reader; it follows the trail of fuel, weapons, data, and global capitalism.
2. A Persian Rug in Churchill’s “War Room”
As I boil water for my morning tea, the gallery of emaciated humanity appears on my phone screen, a population of brutally starved people, robbed of homes and livelihood, survivors of bombings, amputations, displacements, lured to food only to be ruthlessly murdered. Gaza is the scene of the most cunningly orchestrated, graphically documented genocide of our times. But the method of Israel’s settler-colonialism is not new: the prototype is the British Raj.
Churchill’s “war rooms” in London must be filled with ghosts of the nearly 4 million South Asians killed by food shortage he manipulated during the second world war. Is it palpable in those rooms— the chilling legacy of mass starvation in Bengal, the terror of famine, disease, displacement, and a slow, painful death? Those skeletal bodies in Bengal, in video footage, humans deprived of the yield of their own land, whose fishing boats were confiscated from use in their own waters— continue to whisper to land, water and blood.
There is blood, bloodshed, and there is tea. “During the eighteenth century, tea paid for war, but war also paid for tea,” writes historian Erika Rappaport.
Churchill enjoyed Lapsang and Earl Grey. On my patio, with a view of night jasmines, I am taking tea, an Irish blend, my manuscript of tea poems awaiting edits. Tea hinges between a sense of familiar comfort and a symbol of oppression with widespread global repercussions in the manner the East India Company blended geopolitical power play with policy, the economy, and the environment, with elite culture and class structure, laying the foundation for a language of euphemisms concealing the hubris that has come to define what capitalism looks like today, typified by the adage all is fair in love and war.
War, its machinations beyond the military, its clever multi-dexterous arms— is plainly in sight in 2025. Define love.
Love is anything but the narcissism implicit in the love and war adage; the Victorians consuming Persian mystic poetry ought to have known better, but Persian poetry was no more than an imperial vogue for the Victorian bourgeoise. Not unlike Persian rugs.
Spread on the floor of Churchill’s war rooms are the Persian carpets similar to what I remember from my childhood home in Pakistan. When visiting London, I negotiate nostalgia, inter-generational trauma, signs of colonial abuse of power, cultural curiosity, a love for literature. My grandparents were the subjects of the Raj that was founded on stolen wealth, carpets included, and language twisted to skewer commerce with empire, self-interest with law, love with narcissism. The pattern is impossible to ignore in 2025.
Besides the Persian carpet, there is China in the cabinets, massive teapots, and crisp linen napkins, objects carrying cruel reminders of colonial exploitation.
3. “Dhobie Pie” or “Washerman’s Pie”
The demand for crisp linen kept the washerman in demand in British India. “Dhobie Pie” was a Raj dish for the little Sahibs lording over India. “Perhaps the sheet of mashed potato which covers this pie is reminiscent of the pristine white linen the dhobi-wallah managed to produce despite the bad soap and cold water he was forced to work with,” writes David Burton. If the dhobi or washerman damages the Memsahib’s dress from negligence, The Englishwoman in India recommends fining him: “There is no other remedy, unless the delinquent is sent up to the police and flogged.” Equally disturbing is the account of a Memsahib’s advice on training her native cook to reduce the amount of sugar by pouring a ladleful of hot pudding into his outstretched palms.
There are bakery items popular as Desi tea snacks— cakes, pastries, and biscuits, that the Raj passed on to South Asian cuisine, just as curry, chutney and samosa have entered the British culinary culture. British chefs and Memsahibs explored native ingredients with some interesting results, but their relationship with food remained centered on feeding the empire and its progeny exclusively, not on building a culinary tradition honoring the bounties of the land that belonged to their subjects, as is apparent from the ease with which the Raj allowed itself to profit from the Bengal famine.
The only exception to this apathy was the food the Raj household gave to the wet nurses employed for their infants. According to David Burton, “In The Englishwoman in India, the instructions given for feeding the wet nurse read like those for a prized pedigree cow: ‘Should her milk diminish slightly after several months’ nursing, a basin of sago congee, given between her supper and dinner, will almost always produce a sufficient supply.’”
Love and War: Against a culture that threatens to exploit or reduce humanity to the mere transactional, the wet nurse is symbolic of land as mother, offering compassion as milk— a generosity made possible by love that is far removed from the avarice of war.
4. A Prisoner of War Sips Tea
The air as sharp, the trees as majestic this side of the border, the pilot
of the downed plane asks hysterically which country he is in. Which way
should he run? As a prisoner of war, he is recorded saying, between sips
of tea, the officers of the Pakistani Army are thorough gentlemen.
He is nervous. The cup he holds is Raj-white, with a pale green bough,
vaguely Mughal in its vegetal flourish. The temperature in Islamabad is 11 degrees
Celsius, in Delhi it is 16. Yellow trumpet daffodils are blooming. It is early spring.
May, 2025, India launches missile attacks on Pakistan in the dead of night. Lines from my poem “After a Deadly Aerial Engagement, a Cup of Tea” return to me from 2019 when the last such attack happened and when the aircraft pilot was intercepted as he entered Pakistani territory. I recall the news clips from six years ago: the Indian wing commander swallowing papers, a quarter of the secret documents, tossing the rest in the pond near which his plane was shot down. Equally well known is the cup of tea he is served before the Pakistan army officers escort him to return at the border. While the conflict between the two people as well as teacup is “Raj-white,” the tea is likely the style of tea preferred on both sides of the border: “desi karrak chai,” “brisk,” cardamom-scented tea, boiled in milk.
5. Goddess of Tea
Tea begins in the East. Like the Sun. It is the sublime muse of poets and scholars. It sets in the West.
We know all too well how poets in England imagine the East: “A savage place! as holy and enchanted/ As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman wailing for her demon lover!” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” which comes from a fantasy of his own opium -addicted mind, sets the scene of a crazed and violent people needing to be civilized, a trope formalized by Kipling, the veritable poet laureate of the Raj, in his poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written a hundred years later as an exhortation to the United States to continue the project of colonization in the Philippines, a trope that extends to the entire planet, and is in active use to this day.
Around the same time that Kipling is writing— “We had a kettle, we let it leak:/Our not repairing made it worse/We haven’t had tea for a week…/The bottom is out of the Universe”— Urdu poets of British India are asked to write poems in praise of Queen Victoria, the “Rani.” The poet Hali presents a qasida on the occasion of her golden jubilee. (https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/05/transmutations-of-the-qasida-form-and-ghalibs-qasida-for-queen-victoria.html)
Tea originated in China five thousand years ago. As tea traveled along the Silk Road, its tastes shifted. The Mongolians were the first to add milk, the Persians, sugar. For centuries drinkers of tea across Asia enjoyed it as a soothing, stimulating elixir. It was not until a Portuguese royal Catherine of Braganza created the social ritual of afternoon tea in England, that tea became a consumerist addiction of global magnitude, the capitalist frenzy that ignited war after the kind of war we are witnessing now.
In Beijing, I see a performance that is emblematic: a woman dancing with cups and saucers on her head; a dance from the Mongol-Chinese heritage that reminds me of Kubla Khan, the Persianate parts of the Silk Road, and the splendor of the Mughal dynasty, the descendants of Mongols from whose decadent final years, the Raj was wrested.
If the mythos of inspiration is embodied in the Chinese goddess of tea, I imagine her to be stately, alert, sensitive, playful and eloquent, the kind of friend who can undo the damage of divide and conquer, who can not only bring all people together, but help us to discern, among other things, excess, putting us in touch with our own best selves:
“When the water is boiling, it must look like fishes’ eyes and give off but the hint of a sound. When at the edge it chatters like a bubbling spring and looks like pearls innumerable strung together, it has reached the second stage. When it leaps like breakers majestic and resounds like a swelling wave, it is at its peak. Any more and the water will be boiled out and should not be used…” Lu Yu (733-804), in his masterpiece Ch’a Ching (The Classic of Tea).