A cup of tea with Alex and Shinu

I drove to the end of the cul de sac hoping that Alex would be outside in the garden. That way I'd know which house was his. A man was in a driveway. I yelled out my window, Dyou know which house a fellow named Alex lives in?

"The house with the green car in the drive," said he.

I backed up my car so it fit snugly round the curve of the cul de sac. Then I jogged up the rather steep driveway in the wet sandals I wear in the aftermath of our flood season. Squoosh, squoosh.

I rap on the door and - voila! - Alex opens it. It's been months since I've seen him. And now he and his family have moved from their apartment in Upper Moreland, PA to their first house. It is nothing short of magnificent.

He invites me in but first I must remove my shoes as is the custom. I place them on the porch beside a family of sandals and flip-flops. His wife Shinu (sha-NOO) comes in, dressed in western attire. The house smells of sandalwood and Indian cooking. We sit down in the sunken living room whose high ceilings create an open feeling. The furniture is covered with attractive bedspreads.

I sit and gaze at a huge maple tree out the window, laden with green leaves still dripping wet from our violent rains.

That's some tree, I say. Look at all the trunks it has. I've never seen a maple like it.

And what kind of tree is next to it? I ask.

That's an ash, he says.

I get up and go to the window. "Gee, I've never known what an ash is. It looks as though it's part maple too."

"This is like our monsoon season," says Alex, "except it rains without stopping for 10 or 12 days."

Soon Shinu comes back in the room holding a small boy in her arms. He has a full round face and brown skin the same color as their own.

Alex stands up and takes the boy in his arms.

"This is Sahil," he says to me. "We're babysitting him while his parents work."

It was Sunday. They work at a factory somewhere in Philadelphia. This is their only child.

"He's a year and a half," says Alex, holding him and pressing his cheek against Sahil's and then kissing him loudly. His family are Muslim, originally from Pakistan. India and Pakistan were once one country but separated for religious reasons. Alex and his family are Christians.

Little Sahil calls him Papa. Later I too will hold him but will refrain from kissing him or pressing my cheek to his. I will lift him up high for he wants to see something on the mantel - Ba-ba-ba-ba - he says and points toward a crystal globe of Santa Claus and his reindeer. I wonder how kids identify things of interest like that.

We tour the house and the huge backyard garden. Melons are sprouting along the ground. As soon as they begin to bud on the ground, Alex scoops up the melon, no matter how small, and puts them on a piece of cut-out plastic, such as milk carton, to keep them off the ground, where they would begin to rot.

The largest melons are the size of basketballs.

All three girls are home. The oldest has just graduated Ursinus College in Collegeville, located in the same town where Alex works. He's a corrections officer at Graterford Prison. He's known to the inmates as a 'good' guard. His prison stories are the best around but we never discussed prison, except that I told him our new Compass magazine has a section called Prisons: The New Asylums and has 4 prison stories, the first one called What's a nice Jewish Family doing in a place like this?

I am getting ready to leave but Alex insists I stay and have a cup of tea. All the cooking is done by his wife Shinu. I sit back down, watch Sahil toddle along, while I await the arrival of my tea. Altho Alex's house sits atop a hill, much of the property got drenched. They keep Persian-style carpets on the front porch, which were soaked, and also on the backporch, which still had puddles.

Finally the tea arrived in glass mugs. You could smell it when Shinu brought it from the kitchen, carefully down the stair to the sunken living room. It was light brown in color. When it finally cooled it tasted like nothing I've ever drank before. It was exquisite!

What's in here? I marveled.

It is tea, said, Alex, with ginger root and cardamom.

When the teas arrived and we put them on the glass coffee table, Alex made a big ceremony to Sahil of how hot they were, how he mustn't touch it. He clucked his mouth, sucked in his breath, blew outward, blew on his hands, making quite a big adorable fuss. What a good papa he was! All the while little Sahil carried on his own conversation - all nonsense, at his young age - but quite conversational.

I sat back enchanted until it was time to leave.

That night I lie awake until three in the morning. It hadn't occurred to me that by drinking the tea I was imbibing caffeine. It was worth it though. I watched Turner Classic films - North by Northwest with Cary Grant running away from the airplane - and the amazing Boys from Brazil, a thriller where little boys have been cloned and bear the DNA of one of the worst tyrants in modern history.

The power of that little cup of tea is staggering!