A princess for English tea

I rarely have milk in my tea. "Black, strong and sweet, just like me," I used to say in the days before diabetes came hunting for Durban Indians. Nowadays, I'm off the sugar altogether. Unless of course, it's jalebi, burfee, gulab jamun and similar delights that make life worth living. Another exception I make is sugar with my putu or avocado pear.

Thanks to my parents' strong genes, I'm 100% healthy. That's if you were not to count the generous padding around my waist. I would love to be skinny like those models in Danny Moodliar's pageants but I could never be as pretty as those boys however much make-up I might slap on.

Speaking of pretty, I was once rather enamoured with a Nepali princess. That was many moons ago when we were both students in England. She was thrilled that I knew of the fighting legends of the Gurkhas and the heights of Himalayan peaks. Apart from her slipping two fingers under my buttoned collar to check if I were comfortable at the college's formal dinners, she also schooled me in the art of tea drinking.

"My darling Keerooo, tea is tea and milk is milk. They should never meet."

She had a sing-song voice of the sort I imagine Japanese geishas might deploy with their favourite patrons. Like so many of our Chinese and Korean friends she gave herself an English name to make it easier for the farangis. "Rosie," she would volunteer to all manner of strangers who had trouble wrapping their tongues around melodic Nepali.

I could never say that beautiful name aloud as it belonged to a favourite aunty in my district who hemmed my first grey slacks for high school and made us buttery toast flattened by an old iron after school.

In the poshest French I could muster, I called the princess "Madame" in public and "ma chérie" during our private moments. The reason for the latter may become apparent when I'm brave enough to write my memoirs.

Well, the princess and I caught the train every second Saturday from the southeast to London. Our mission was Fortnum & Mason on 181 Piccadilly.

"A quarter pound of Earl Grey," she would whisper to the effervescent counter hand in the ducktail and neatly knotted apron. That store has pretty much been on the same spot since 1707.

"Very different from my Aya boiling the Joko tea leaves in the kettle," I ventured to the attentive princess.

"Oh, how I wish I could meet your granny," she fluttered back with doe eyes and a coquettish grin.

My wife and son joined me in England several months later. It was only then that I received the news that my beloved grandmother, the matriarch of our clan, Kanniamma Govindarajulu, had passed on. One day, I will build a temple to honour her like Madurai Meenakshi or Kamacheeammen.

Back in the day, we had enough but we were hardly well off. I could swear that the loose tea my granny bought at Narsai's tearoom might have been the dust they swept off the floor in the tea factory.

Being on a generous scholarship and working some nights in a restaurant, I was quite rich by student standards. The Earl Grey was scooped from a wooden box into paper fashioned into a square nest and taped with the F&M label.