Ingredients:
– 1 teaspoon of Sri Lankan tea leaves (If you’ve not heard about Sri Lankan tea, maybe you’ve heard of Ceylon tea? The Black Sheep, Amherst sells packs! Ceylon, the colonial name for Sri Lanka.)
– 1 inch piece of fresh ginger (bruised)
– 1 cup of water
– Sugar (to taste)
Ginger tea to cure a cold. Ginger tea with a heaping of honey to fix a sore throat. To drip molten amber down your neck, coat the inside of your mouth, to paint your insides orange-slick in warm, luxurious waves. For when your stomach flips in anticipation of the next day. Ginger tea for when you need to remember the sticky pull of home.
Method:
1. In a kettle, bring water to a rolling boil. Place 1 teaspoon of tea leaves and the bruised ginger piece in a tea jug.
“Liyoni, can I please borrow one of your tea bags?” My roommate says borrow as if she intends to give it back once she’s done. A little brown gremlin situated in my belly sneers in response.
“Of course you can. I just want you to feel better.” I smile at her benevolently, forgivingly. She rifles through the (last!) box on my desk, greedy fingers on the hunt for my dwindling supply.
“You know, I tried the tea from Val and it just felt so like, not committed. After this ginger-ginger-ginger”, she makes rapid slices in the air, “Val’s are so weak in comparison.”
She is better almost immediately, but it feels like barely a week passes before she is sick again, all raspy voice and pitiful eyes. I know what she is asking for before she even says a word. Begrudgingly Magnanimously, super-okay-ly, I push my tattered box of ginger tea towards her sick, sick frame. She needs this, I try to reason with the evil thing growing inside me, and it’s not like I’m even going to be drinking all that anyway. The tea bag gremlin grumbles, puffing steam that leaves my mouth in a breath of hot air. It’s momentarily placated.
That doesn’t last long. I’m plagued by nightmares of my paralysed body, secreting slippery droplets of sweetened sweat. I wake up to the search history of ‘dilmah tea imported sri lanka’, an Amazon order I don’t remember from a seller with 3 reviews and 2 stars that gets to Amherst in two months. I dream of sinking my teeth straight into a tea bag, right from the source, and the next morning I chalk it up to nightmares, even as I brush out the debris stuck in my molars.
One day, I catch my roommate telling a neighbour, “If you’re coming down with something, you should drink some of Liyo’s tea, it’s really good.”
“Ooh, I totally will.”
and that’s the final straw. The gremlin and I rage and storm and hurricane: You’re someone that microwaves tea! we scream in unison. I swivel toward my little Dilmah box – five bags left. All of which I fling into my cavernous mouth, munching precisely until the wet mass slides effortlessly down my gullet. I burp.
2. Once the water has boiled, pour the hot water (1 cup) into the tea jug over the tea leaves. Cover the tea jug and let it steep for 2-3 minutes.
she is often paralysed by the fact that she writes in english, how naturally foreign baubles roll off her tongue. as if it was not her own blood that had whispered to her, it was not possible to endure the rolling motion of the world if she did not erase a part of her history.
and then there was the history. long before she had sacrificed her connection to her family, long before she had thrown away her ability to communicate with her home, were her own ancestors who had done the very same. who had rewritten their names, in the style of those who only intended to erase, become so practiced at translation that they translated, transformed themselves, into something not unrecognisable but markedly different. and passed down that affliction for generations to come.
it started with her grandfather’s grandfather, translator for portuguese courts way down south. so talented that they gifted him his very own portuguese name to be handed to his sons and their sons. he was honoured, or pacified, and this is a story of accomplishment, or hurriedly quashed rebellion, but one thing he too knew for certain, he had a hand in the start of it all.
but really it had started with the tea. tea-crazy was an affliction that had infected a whole nation.
3. After steeping, strain the tea into a tea cup, leaving the tea leaves and ginger piece behind.
If you ask the right questions, you can get to my mother’s tea stories too. “So when was the last time someone made you a cup of ginger tea? Like the classic way.” Before she remembers my dad’s father, who always makes her a cup when she makes the journey down south, she begins with a “Well, it must have been seeya-ge-aththamma…” (Lit. translation: grandpa’s grandma. The identifying nickname used in my family to refer to my maternal grandmother, taken to mean that in some way she belonged to my grandfather). I press a little more.
“Tell me about that. When was the last time she made it for you? Before we lost her.”
She chuckles, the phone line breathing noise that I can imagine tickling my ear, “Now that was the night before my wedding.”
“Oh!” I giggle into my hand – if I laugh too hard, I might scare off the story. “You were nervous.”
“Nervous! I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep. She caught me up in my room that night, sitting in front of the mirror…one look at my face and she knew.”
Knew what, Ammi?
There are many moments where I don’t ask my mum the right question, and we dance around some interminable ache.
Well Putha, I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry your father. What would my life be like if it hadn’t followed this trajectory? I would give up a lot to find that out.
But sometimes, it’s easier for us both to keep dancing a little longer.
“Oh. Wait and that was the last time she made you a tea? Ever?”
“No, actually no. But it’s the time I always think about.”
4. Add sugar to your taste and stir well.
I put the phone down and I look up at my ceiling and register my roommate’s sleeping body next to mine and it’s not tea I’m dreaming of but, secretly, long grained basmati. and red beets singeing my tongue and thick scoops of parippu to soothe that pain and kangkung to trail all the way down my throat and anchor against my tonsils, and fuck tea, thats not what I miss ma, stop packing these boxes in my swollen suitcases.
It’s very quiet now, and there’s no one else in my skin but me and it’s like I’m eight years old again and my dad has made me ginger honey and it’s not tea it’s ‘the quickest cure for sickness’, this is fresh love ma, and make sure to chew down on every ginger piece and I’m burning up, flaming honey and glimmering entrails in the conflagration.
Writer | Venumi Gamage ’26 | vthotagodagamage26@amherst.edu
Editor | Madison Suh ’26 | msuh26@amherst.edu