At my old workplace tea was served in a tray. It was the last vestige of the brown saheb culture of the company so there wasn’t china or a tea service of any sorts, just a sweet brew served up in brown and much stained plebeian mugs. For the most part of my time with the company, the person who brought around the tea was a constant. But in his absence, we would have a succession of different people. One of them was a smiling young man from Tamil Nadu who managed to make the usual slop a very drinkable brew. He was one of very many “annachis” who did the menial jobs around the company. Many of them lived in Dharavi and would come around to chat on finding I spoke Tamil. Some of them over stepped the mark, some were entirely diffident but the tea man was pleasant and polite yet reserved. This with a certain sense of self-worth made him different from the others. He was also a good looking lad which perhaps set in motion a series of events that eventually came to a head. The first inkling of trouble was his absence one particular morning. Later in the day, the local police arrived and the news went around that the tea man had been arrested in a murder case. The company of course swung into resourceful panic mode. The tea man was a contract worker and this was just one of several jobs; he had no union representation and the company soon delinked itself from the man and his fate. For awhile it was a juicy scandal and a melange of fact, rumour and spite swept through the workplace and then it faded from people’s memories.
It turned out that the tea man had committed what appeared to be a crime passionel. Though we had a pleasant friendship I knew little of his romantic life so I was surprised to find that he had killed a man over a girl. What I knew pertained to his family in Tamil Nadu. He had two sisters and an old mother who depended on his income. He hoped to get the sisters married and then marry himself. It was the average Indian immigrant story bar a certain happiness about him which was perhaps due to the girl or just a seemingly even temperament. To him could be attributed that trite phrase “a nice person” which made the whole murder inexplicable. There were perhaps some clues here and there. Like many a young lad on his own in the metropolis he liked his drink. This he never mentioned to me, he had a certain air of gentlemanliness which forbade him from discussing the seamier aspects of his life. But I, brought up amongst people who drank, recognised the signs of excessive liquid refreshment. In the days leading up to the murder, he had been quieter, more bleary eyed, we put it down to his perpetual concerns about home and a bender. In the evenings I dimly recollect a small child waiting at the gate and they would go home together, it was the only time he looked like his old self. Then the murder.
The tea man it appeared had been in love with a bar girl. It’s likely it went well for a time. It's likely that she entirely reciprocated his passion and was faithful. Whatever the case, it appeared that at some point there had been a betrayal or an imminent betrayal. There were whispers of the unknown parentage of her child, I do not even know if the tea man had been led to believe the child was his. All of this had come to a head one day and led to steady drinking through the evening and the night culminating in heated words and then a stabbing. The man died and by the early morning the tea man was in jail and had confessed to his crime. I never saw him again.
I think I meant to visit him; I certainly felt I should. When I voiced this thought my friends were aghast. But of course other people’s opinions do not matter; I was not afraid of the tea man but a little afraid of what such an association might bring post the murder. Because of course I could not stop at one visit and my mind wavered when I thought of many visits to the jail, the degree of emotional commitment required. This of course was overheated imagination, all that the tea man required was simply a gesture of care. I had timidly raised the point of bail only for it to be shot down; no one wanted a murderer in our midst. In any case it was unlikely to be granted. For awhile the annachis tried to rally around him and provide some support but this too faded away. It was through them much later that I heard that he had been disappointed that I hadn’t visited, that he had felt that I at least would not refute the friendship we shared. In their eyes too was disappointment. The hardest moments of life are when we fall in our own estimation and at no time did I fall harder and faster than at that moment. It was by then already too late to make the gesture. The case had gone to trial, the tea man was sentenced for some inordinate number of years and dispatched to Yerawada. The man he murdered died quickly but the tea man’s life seemed set to ebb in agonising slowness. It’s hard to imagine what prison life must have done to him. In the meantime life moved on. The annachis left and so did I. The regular tea man died and the company marched into the future and got tea dispensing units.
In the murky depths of the thick, sweetened tea of Mumbai’s chaiwallahs lies the debris of overboiled tea leaves. When I drink cups of that tea, a rare occasion as the years go by, I try to decipher the fate of the tea man in its dregs. What I knew of him might have been a facade, maybe it hid darker impulses. You could think that the perverse end to the love affair undid anything that went before. But all things in life are based on instinct and trust and then and now I cannot judge the tea man. It could not be said that our friendship was anything like the intimate ones I enjoy with my own peers, yet it is true that the tea man considered me a friend and I him. It was also true that I had felt the murder to be an aberration; I didn’t know what the tea man felt but he had by all accounts been badly shaken and willingly confessed. An excess of feeling can take one to the brink, one reason why an impulsive murder is not seen to be the same as a premeditated one. It is difficult to condone murder; then again life is not anodyne.
My friendship with the tea man was slightly unique in that gender and class had been transcended. It may not have lasted. The tyranny of time and distance puts paid to most office friendships. But the circumstances and the abrupt break of ties make it a friendship that is hard to forget.
It turned out that the tea man had committed what appeared to be a crime passionel. Though we had a pleasant friendship I knew little of his romantic life so I was surprised to find that he had killed a man over a girl. What I knew pertained to his family in Tamil Nadu. He had two sisters and an old mother who depended on his income. He hoped to get the sisters married and then marry himself. It was the average Indian immigrant story bar a certain happiness about him which was perhaps due to the girl or just a seemingly even temperament. To him could be attributed that trite phrase “a nice person” which made the whole murder inexplicable. There were perhaps some clues here and there. Like many a young lad on his own in the metropolis he liked his drink. This he never mentioned to me, he had a certain air of gentlemanliness which forbade him from discussing the seamier aspects of his life. But I, brought up amongst people who drank, recognised the signs of excessive liquid refreshment. In the days leading up to the murder, he had been quieter, more bleary eyed, we put it down to his perpetual concerns about home and a bender. In the evenings I dimly recollect a small child waiting at the gate and they would go home together, it was the only time he looked like his old self. Then the murder.
The tea man it appeared had been in love with a bar girl. It’s likely it went well for a time. It's likely that she entirely reciprocated his passion and was faithful. Whatever the case, it appeared that at some point there had been a betrayal or an imminent betrayal. There were whispers of the unknown parentage of her child, I do not even know if the tea man had been led to believe the child was his. All of this had come to a head one day and led to steady drinking through the evening and the night culminating in heated words and then a stabbing. The man died and by the early morning the tea man was in jail and had confessed to his crime. I never saw him again.
I think I meant to visit him; I certainly felt I should. When I voiced this thought my friends were aghast. But of course other people’s opinions do not matter; I was not afraid of the tea man but a little afraid of what such an association might bring post the murder. Because of course I could not stop at one visit and my mind wavered when I thought of many visits to the jail, the degree of emotional commitment required. This of course was overheated imagination, all that the tea man required was simply a gesture of care. I had timidly raised the point of bail only for it to be shot down; no one wanted a murderer in our midst. In any case it was unlikely to be granted. For awhile the annachis tried to rally around him and provide some support but this too faded away. It was through them much later that I heard that he had been disappointed that I hadn’t visited, that he had felt that I at least would not refute the friendship we shared. In their eyes too was disappointment. The hardest moments of life are when we fall in our own estimation and at no time did I fall harder and faster than at that moment. It was by then already too late to make the gesture. The case had gone to trial, the tea man was sentenced for some inordinate number of years and dispatched to Yerawada. The man he murdered died quickly but the tea man’s life seemed set to ebb in agonising slowness. It’s hard to imagine what prison life must have done to him. In the meantime life moved on. The annachis left and so did I. The regular tea man died and the company marched into the future and got tea dispensing units.
In the murky depths of the thick, sweetened tea of Mumbai’s chaiwallahs lies the debris of overboiled tea leaves. When I drink cups of that tea, a rare occasion as the years go by, I try to decipher the fate of the tea man in its dregs. What I knew of him might have been a facade, maybe it hid darker impulses. You could think that the perverse end to the love affair undid anything that went before. But all things in life are based on instinct and trust and then and now I cannot judge the tea man. It could not be said that our friendship was anything like the intimate ones I enjoy with my own peers, yet it is true that the tea man considered me a friend and I him. It was also true that I had felt the murder to be an aberration; I didn’t know what the tea man felt but he had by all accounts been badly shaken and willingly confessed. An excess of feeling can take one to the brink, one reason why an impulsive murder is not seen to be the same as a premeditated one. It is difficult to condone murder; then again life is not anodyne.
My friendship with the tea man was slightly unique in that gender and class had been transcended. It may not have lasted. The tyranny of time and distance puts paid to most office friendships. But the circumstances and the abrupt break of ties make it a friendship that is hard to forget.
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