Chai or Coffee?

For as long as I can remember, my father woke up every morning and made a large pot of chai. He was a poet, an artist - I knew because I’d seen his old souvenir notebooks filled with rhyming verse, frayed sticky notes and hotel napkins decorated with elaborate sketches of cars.

Every day, he would wake up at five, make chai, and take the BART to San Francisco, where he worked in a gray cubicle. I knew because he took me there once, and I was surprised to find small booklets and breakroom napkins with dates and meeting times scrawled across them. That was the day I realized that a person must change their art to match the color of their walls.

When I was in college, I found a beautiful black notebook in a bookstore, on sale for far less than it was worth. I bought it without a second thought; my father’s birthday was coming up next month, and I thought maybe I could tempt him into writing poetry again.

But when I got home for winter break, something had changed. Looking back, I’m pretty sure it was me. It started when we stopped at the airport’s Starbucks on our way out, like we always do.

“So the usual for you?” my father asked, winking cheerily. “Peppermint hot cocoa with whip?”

“Actually, can you make that a peppermint mocha?”

He paused, a little taken aback, before his face split into a delighted grin. “You drink coffee now?”

“And chai,” I replied. “Sophomore year workloads, you know? I need the caffeine.”

“Too much caffeine isn’t good for you,” he said, waving his hand with the air of a man who is obligated to be a positive influence, at least for a moment. “But I wonder what chai you’ll like best? Cardamom? Or ginger? Oh, maybe masala! You seem like a masala chai person.”

I laughed, turning back to the luggage carousel to collect my suitcases while my father walked off towards the Starbucks line to place our orders. It was going to be a wonderful three weeks of break.

I enjoyed several days of various flavors of homemade chai before I was forced to admit that I was, indeed, a masala chai person. It took a few more days to realize that I also really missed coffee. I said as much, and the next time we went out for groceries, my father made sure to pick out a particularly lovely, expensive bottle of instant coffee grounds.

Nobody at home drank coffee all that much until I arrived; in fact, they only ever got it when they went out. But now, I had downtime and desire and an imagination, so I started making every palatable cafe-style coffee drink I could think of, from maple lattes to spiced mochas to vanilla black. I ordered a cheap milk frother online and tried my hand at latte art. I dug a manual grinder out of the garage and spent hours turning the roasted coffee beans someone had given us for Christmas into usable coffee grounds.

And soon, I was receiving customized requests from my family members.

“Can you make me a light black without sugar?” my mother would ask.

“I want a honey vanilla latte with lots of sugar and a heart on top,” my little sister would declare.

“Just a regular latte with one Truvia,” was my father’s go-to order.

I was happy to oblige everyone. Messing around with coffee gave me the same unbridled joy I felt in art class as a child, coloring little flowers and animals the wrong colors on purpose. It reminded me of the time I wrote a limerick about my favorite dinosaur, the triceratops, and my teacher complimented me in front of the whole class.

By the time I had to go back to college, my father hadn’t even touched his new black notebook. I pointed it out to him again before I left.

“This is for you, you know. You’re 50 now. It’s time to turn over a new leaf. Why don’t you start writing poetry again?”

“I will,” he replied quietly. “I’m just waiting until I have a bit of free time.”

He did not have free time for a while, and was rewarded for this with a $20,000 annual bonus at work. We hardly had time to imagine what to do with it before our apartment’s rent was raised again, and then my tuition was due for Spring Quarter, and then my mother’s father passed away all of a sudden and she had to fly to India with only a day’s notice. Apparently $20,000 was a lot of money to save, but not a lot to spend.

It was when I came home for summer break, when my mother was grieving the loss of her father and my father was working in his cubicle all day, that things finally started to crack.

One evening, my father came home from work and found the pot of chai he’d made in the morning still half-full.

“Do you want coffee?” I asked him, like I always did.

“No,” he replied, looking a little sad. “Can you give me some chai? There’s a lot of it left, and I don’t want it to go waste.”

I heated some up for him, and drank the rest myself. It was my mother’s favorite: cardamom chai. But she’d asked me for black coffee as she’d fought to stay awake on the couch that afternoon, and of course I had given it to her.

That summer, there were more and more days like this, where there would still be chai left in the pot when my father came home from work. He rarely said anything, but his eyes would always get this look, like the expression of a child whose parents do not deem his artwork pretty enough to stick on the fridge. Some days, my father would tell me that he was tired of the taste of his own chai, and couldn’t I make him some coffee instead?

I drank a lot of chai those months, but I didn’t love coffee any less.

It’s mystifying to recall all this; the summer of 2018 is not so long ago that it should feel like mythology, but it does. We’ve been quarantined together for 11 months now. In this brave new pandemic world, my sister does college from our room, so my “work area” has moved to a pillow on the hall floor. My mother is learning to code in JAVA so she can renew her career. Somewhere along the way, my father lost his job in the stuffy gray cubicle in San Francisco, but he started writing in the little black notebook.

He still gets up every morning and makes a pot of chai, and I still make everyone their favorite coffee. It doesn’t feel like some twisted competition anymore. Why should it? We need all the caffeine we can get.