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Poetry & Prose

Thanks to Mechi Tea

by Prawin | June 2005

There were thousands of voices. Each pair of eyes saw and each mind spoke—after all, such were the times. Trembling hands searched beating chests and tear-trailed faces. Blood soaked soil, and blood soaked soil became flowerpots where a tentative, cautious future took roots. All of this in 2005—we have come a long way since; great advances have been made. Look out the window—doves are sitting on branches, and not a spot of blood on their unblemished down. All of this since 2005—we have come a long way since, and what a price we paid.

Attributed to a hybrid strain of tea leaves sold extensively by Mechi Tea, a strange but adorable dementia enveloped the erstwhile kingdom of Nepal. From the richest to the poorest of the nation came reports of colorful hallucinations. Those that drank the brew more than thrice in a week developed a tumor in their brains—the grey lumps thus created were not malignant, but did change the functions of a certain area in the brain, and made people generally strange. Instead of accurately assessing what was wrong, they fervently and feverishly yelled about exactly how things should be so many days or months or years or even hours hence.

The first documented case of this dementia came from Illam, from a tea-taster employed by Mechi Tea, who went home and saw his wife wring his new cotton shirt so hard that he feared the fine embroidery around the neck would come unstitched. Instead of asking her to stop wringing his fine cotton shirt, a present from a Sri Lankan colleague, he told her that three weeks thence a Japanese friend's wife would take a picture of him standing before a shrine of the great tea-ceremony master Furuta Oribe, in the city of Kyoto, and that the embroidery on his fine cotton shirt would be only very slightly ruined in that picture. Of course, the wife did not pay much attention to her husband, because she had been worrying about what her father had said the day before—"Why don't you ask jwainarayan to get a real job? What sort of future does a man have tasting tea all day long? No wonder you have no children. Too much tea is bad for a man's seeds." When the husband's actions became even more erratic over the days, the housewife kept a detailed journal on her husband's activities, and wrote entries alongside records of what spices she had bought that particular day, what color sari was sported by Avineeta, the sultry seductress in a Hindi soap, and other such inconsequential nonsense that women dabble in.

And so the tea poisoned men and women and even children: instead of berating this is wrong and you are a criminal and why couldn't you have done this better, didn't you have enough common sense or is it because you are evil and bent upon sucking the lifeblood of the poor, they started spouting the most wondrous predictions, prophecies, poetry. Instead of saying—"Girija is a thief," they said—"and so it will be. The trees along the highways will be taller and greener, and children will not want to do their homework in the evening because there will be lush parks in the heart of the cities, and when they buy chana-chatpat from a friendly vendor, the mothers will not worry about their children falling sick, because the chatpatwalla will be wearing latex gloves and showing off his recently acquired food-handler's certificate."

Instead of saying—"Gyanendra is a murderer," they said—"and so it will come to be. Paras Shah will survive an assassination attempt and abdicate the throne to become a politician. Upon coming of age, Hridyendra Shah will give up Narayanhiti as the primary residence for royalty and build a smaller house in Nagarkot, from where he will write songs for a folk singer from Darchula and paint giant canvases of abstracts evoking the landscape outside his window. He will be king, but exceedingly politely so—none of his ancestors' arrogance."

Instead of saying—"India wants to swallow our country," they said—"and how else can it possibly be? There will be large universities where the Chinese and the Indians will send their children for higher education. Europe will be divided, and America will experience a slow renaissance of its intellectual domination after being unable any longer to support a culture that praises consumption and distrust of the intellectual—and all of this will make the universities along the Himalayas the most attractive prospect for teachers and students alike. After a brief racial strife, there will arise satellite cities in the region with a population of predominantly African descent. China and India will bank through institutions in this land."

Such were the miracles of that mutated strain of tea. Even as late as 2005 there was unimaginable amount of strife in the erstwhile nation of Nepal, but the country has been renamed since, and the headlines on newspapers are usually about celebrity gurus and their sex scandals, and not details of strewn entrails and limbs. Nobody goes to a website to analyze the present and curse the past—instead, they rush to their rooftops and tell the world what pictures of a future they just dreamed. When a child says—"I saw my friend come home in the bright uniform of a rural health worker," those that hear of the dream rush about and find the child's friend burning with the desire to go to a better school, which is then spotted and filled with even better teachers, who in turn toil for years, so that the child does end up becoming a rural health worker, to someday return home in a bright uniform and surprise his friend.

Such is the world we live in today—a far cry from the erstwhile kingdom of Nepal in 2005—all of this thanks only to a few who find the time to dream about the future instead of beating their brows about the past, or cursing those that ride the destructive Kalki avatar of Vishnu called the present. And, thanks to Mechi Tea.

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Thanks to Mechi Tea

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