I'm not a coffee drinker. I can't even stand the smell of it. I'm a tea gal all the way.
It's a multiple-cups-a-day habit. So, while I can pretend to get all virtuous and smug about being a non-coffee person, really, my crippling dependency on tea can pretty much match the coffee addict cup for cup.
So you can imagine how I felt on 22 December 2021 - my last day of work in 2021 - when I got to work and realised I only had one tea bag left in my work stash.
One tea bag.
To last a whole work day.
I used the tea bag, enjoyed it, and then rifled all my desk drawers trying to see if I had any other emergency tea supplies. Anything at all. I found 3 Chai teabags and grimaced. I ignored the half-dozen Chamomiles. There was one single Russian Caravan which isn't my cup of tea at all, and I held it in my clenched fist fretfully, doubtfully until...
The angels sang and I saw my lovely, large orange tin. The one I'd taken to and from work a few times while moving house a few weeks before. The one filled with all my lovely Mauritius tea leftover from my last trip to Mauritius in the mid-twenteens.
I hugged the tin tight as the angels sang around me. Not just any tea! Mauritius tea!
Mauritius tea is pretty special to me. There's the regular Mauritius black tea, and then there's the Mauritius black tea lightly infused with a whisper of vanilla. Elusive, tickling, glorious. Sitting just behind the tea. Teasing. Tantalising.
When I was in primary school in Mauritius in the late 1980s, we would learn about Mauritius' exports. Which at the time were in flux, as tourism was taking over from sugar as the island's number 1 export. Tea had dropped to the third. Tea, we learnt, grew very well in the central, plateau region of the island. Cooler, rainier, but still with the excellent Mauritius volcanic soil. Mauritius has been growing tea for a long time. Mauritius makes excellent tea. Especially its vanilla tea.
I've seen and tried other vanilla teas not made in Mauritius, and well, insert that green emoji face here. Because all I can politely say is: don't judge vanilla tea until you've tried the Mauritius one.
I had a quick little dilemma about which tea in the tin to go for. I had lots of loose tea, but no infuser (which wasn't going to stop me), I had the leftover packets of my favourite brand which still held the most longingly-amazing vanilla aroma, and I had one unopened packet of my next-best vanilla tea brand.
I had actually used up most of the packets of this next-best brand within the few months of returning from my last trip to Mauritius as I struggled to juggle a mostly-unhappy high-stress job, a very long commute, and a relentlessly cold winter. I felt that the vanilla taste in this next-best brand was so low-key as to be non-existent. Seeing the packet brought memories of the time of that particular job and time, and for a few minutes I was pretty ambivalent about whether to open up this last packet of the next-best brand or not.
I threw ambivalence to the winds and cut it open.
Rich tea with that marvellous whisper-song of vanilla tickled my nose. Mauritius overtook and swamped the associations with the old job. Mauritius stirred and sang. This only increased tenfold after I made the tea. And again after I took a sip.
How had I ever thought there was no vanilla in this tea?? After years starved of any vanilla tea, here it was - with sweet, glorious mellow notes dancing in and around the tea.
Oh and all the images and memories that glimmer and swim around and in-between the vanilla.
The combination of scent and sip takes me to myriad glimpses and moments in Mauritius - which might be real, might be my own memories airbrushed of messy realities, or might be the everyday complexities understood with the fondness of a long-ago migrant's distance of geography and time.
Of early mornings and clean magical air, of the sun rising over waving green sugar cane fields, where the mountains sit in solemn, unyielding purple basalt, with commuters alighting noisy buses and cars to school and work along packed roads, where saris, churidaars and western clothes rub shoulders with careless ease. Where family chatter and voices of internet, radio and TV rise from homes in their everyday mixes of Mauritius Kreol, French, Hindi and occasionally English. When we bought bread fresh from the bakery every morning, sometimes hot and ready for butter to melt on it, sometimes cold - but always fresh.
Longing and joy curled in a cup.
I only used two tea bags from that packet on that last day of work. And I've only used one during the whole December 2021-January 2022 break.
I dunno. It's to do with not wanting to race through the packet and lose the flavour and memories of those special vanilla notes on my tongue. I know the notes won't keep in their tin forever; that they will ease and stretch into the air bit by bit until their smell and flavour is faded. But I also know if I have the tea everyday, I will become indifferent to its special notes. And I don't want that to happen.
I've even done some searching and I've found a shop which specialises in international groceries and which carry the Mauritius vanilla tea - and some other Mauritius foods and drinks. So I know I can find new supplies again.
To make new memories. To always be looking forward as well as back. To be able to make more of those breathing moments where I can conjure up that tea travel. To come full circle in a cup.
It was especially nice that realise that I opened up that orange tin of tea on that last day of work for the year on 22 December 2021. Because that's the 35th anniversary of my arrival in Australia.
So here's to tea.
And taste, and longing and be-longing, and homes, and memories, and full circles, and all the things that are tiny and good and that matter most to us.
Du fond du coeur x
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