Nuances of Chai: 50 shades of Brown

'Cha.'
'What?'
'Cha,' I say calmly, stirring a cup of thick, milky brown tea and gazing into her cornflower blue eyes, hoping she would understand.

She doesn't. As expected, really. I almost want to withdraw into my dream land, filled with a starry cosmos and interesting fairy-people, with names like Dylan-Bob and Mary-Jo, and grass that looked like gold and nearly end the conversation.

But I don't. Instead, I tuck the ends of my shoulder-length black hair behind my ears and try again, to explain the intertwined concepts of family honour and chai. Which is, by the way, pronounced 'cha'. She sits behind her desk, hair up in an untidy blonde bun, mascara evidently clotted on her sparse Nordic eyelashes.

'Could you explain? I'm confused,' she says with a self-satisfied smirk on her face that doesn't really annoy me. I drag a plastic Ikea chair over by her desk and try to sit gracefully down, hoping to God I do not spill the cup of tea I ostentatiously made in the hopes of looking like a chic Parisian cafe hopper-cum-artist. Bar the paintbrush, of course. I detested painting.

'Well, I guess it is  ... something like how...' I trail off, the notion of explaining a thousand or so years of 'family honour', of 'izzat' to a could-have been wife of a coloniser is faintly amusing.

Perhaps in another life, we would have been master's wife and farmer's daughter instead of teacher and student. I would have been selling her crops, or rather selling her servant rice, which she wouldn't have cooked and wouldn't have liked anyway.

'Defending izzat is like defending the irrefutable fact that chai, tea, was first discovered in India.  (I recently discovered the earliest records of tea were in a rural Chinese village).'

 Having honour is hard, I want to tell her.

'So it's quite an archaic concept then? Socio-hierarchal and all that?'

'Think of it like this, Miss, I guess. Like, when I win a- okay, rather, if I lose if a hockey game, or failed an exam, I'd not only let down myself, but my people, my country, my tribe... The usual!'

The last bit my voice raises, in a clipped happy-but-defensive way as if to convey 'I can make fun of this but not you.'

She holds up a finger, index, rummages in her desk drawer and pulls out a dog-eared, yellowed copy of a book.

I open my mouth and close it.

It says, 'The Namesake'.