My grandmother measured tea leaves with her whole hand and never once got it wrong. Two fistfuls for the pot, milk poured until the colour was right, which was the colour of the road after rain. Cardamom she cracked with her thumbnail. Sugar she added by listening — she said sweetness had a sound as it dissolved, and if you knew the sound you never needed to taste.
Every afternoon we drank it on the step, watching the goats come home. She talked; I was allowed to listen. She told me about the Emergency, when tea was a luxury and her mother had brewed it thin and called it plenty. She told me about the day the radio said we were free, and how her father had brewed the strongest pot of his life and drunk it standing up, facing the hills, saying nothing.
Chai is for two people minimum, she told me. One person drinking tea alone is a person with a problem.
When her hands began to shake, I took over the pot. She sat and directed me, offended by my carefulness, my little measuring spoon. Use your hand, she scolded. The spoon knows nothing. The hand remembers. I never learned to hear the sugar. She died certain I would ruin every pot for the rest of my life, and she was not entirely wrong.
I make it now in a Nairobi kitchen, alone most days, a person with a problem. I use a spoon. It is fine. It is not the colour of the road after rain; it is only tea.
But on Sundays I make the full pot, two fistfuls, though there is no one. I pour a second cup and set it on the far side of the table and let it go cold while I drink mine, and this is not madness, whatever my daughter says when she finds it. It is arithmetic. Chai is for two, minimum. I am simply keeping the other place warm until she is old enough to sit in it, and be talked to, and be told everything before I forget the sound of the sugar entirely.