In the episode on my dryer experience I had mentioned that by throwing my wife’s sweater that had a dry flat instruction into the dryer, I made that into a tea coaster. A reader had asked me a question whether I intended to mean tea-cosy and not a coaster. That got me thinking. At one level I could say that it depended on the shape the sweater took getting out of the dryer-fluffy three-dimensional handbag shaped or a flat star fish shaped rag.

But the question got me into some deep thinking on the cultural context. In the colonial way of drinking tea, the cosy covered the tea pot to protect the heat. When tea is poured into the cup one needed to invoke the knowledge of etiquette to figure out which fingers should get into the handle and which ones should stick out.( with stubby fingers the choice could be mute).As one picked up the saucer for support the trembling hands would make the cup tap dance on the saucer creating Morse code for an SOS message!.

In the North American context, a tea bag tied to a string is immersed in a cup full of steaming hot water with the string hanging out. The string outside will have a tag showing the type of tea. Periodically puling the string in and out, the tea will be sipped slowly. The tag will be displayed proudly if it is green tea. The cup will be placed on a coaster to protect the side table from the heat.

But then coming from a indian villages, where all the tea I had was from the ‘Malayali Chetan”, who in his chai shop used to stretch the tea from the long-handled aluminum tumbler to a tiny glass two arms length apart without spilling a drop.

Given this the question of cosy or coaster evoked three different levels of response.

At a simple level I invoke my good friend Deepak from Patiala.” Ki fark painda Maharaj” meaning what difference does it make.

At the next level I can always invoke Kucchhal Saab who used to come with nice quotes in Hindi/Urdu such as

चाकू खरबूजे पर गिरे या खरबूजा चाकू पर.कटना तो खरबूजे को ही है..

Meaning whether the knife falls on the watermelon or the watermelon on the knife, either way the melon gets cut.

In the same way whether catching the steam as a cosy or bearing the heat of the cup, it gets cooked- steamed or baked. (And if I were to start a debate with my wife whether the crumbled sweater could be used as a cosy or a coaster, I would get roasted.)

At a much higher level I am reminded of Bob Ross the painter who ran a TV show Joy of Painting. In half an hour he would start from scratch and paint a beautiful landscape by narrating what he does. I have no idea of painting nor could differentiate yellow from orange most of the times. But his narration used to be so nice, and he used to deliver with a smile. Time to time a blob of color may slip from his palet and fall on the canvas and he would call it happy accidents. Magically using his knife, he will stretch the blob add some colour and make it blend with the rest of the picture beautifully.

I call my using the word coaster a happy accident.

Srini

Interestingly, moments like these—whether it’s mistaking a tea cosy for a coaster or vice versa—often stir up fragments of autobiographical memory. Such personal memories, tied to seemingly trivial incidents, reveal how deeply everyday objects are woven into our cultural identity and lived experiences.