The Taliban Tea Connection

I would like to urgently appeal to all the MALAY restaurant/gerai/warung owners, to stick to serving teh-o or kopi-o. Please stop serving teh tarik. You have no idea AT ALL how to make a good glass of teh tarik. You keep sending me a tepid, watered-down, sugar laden, brackish sorry excuse of a teh tarik made out of yesterday's stale tea leaves. I send it back three times, five times, with detailed instructions and you still don't get it right. Teh tarik is beyond the Malay psyche.

I can't take it anymore.

Half the mamak restaurants have been condemned in the greater area of Wangsa Maju/Setiawangsa because of human fecal and rodent contamination problems due to the massive ineptitude of and sleeping-on-the-cushy-job by Zulhasnan Rafique and the KL Mayor, both redundantly irresponsible for the DBKL and I now cannot get a good glass of decent teh tarik anymore, unless I want to risk dying an early death. Which would sound like a dream to some people, but not to my kids. So I have to go to the Malay restaurants which claim to serve this teh tarik. I don't have a maid, I AM the maid...and some mornings, I want someone to make me breakfast. I also want to be manjakan sekali dua kala. And I pay for it.

That is my sole pleasure for the day.

Before I start my unpaid servant, driver, nurse, dishwasher etc job. And my other job too, which is supposed to pay, but the clients sometimes decide to learn from the husbands and get a freebie or ten.

You see, we Pakistanis/Punjabis/Pastuns...we carry a thermometer with us, in our purses, or selit the old way in the upper undergarment (together with an AK47 or two), ready to be whipped out at the critical moment. Tea has a special place in our hearts. We spend the day in pursuit of a good cup of tea. We look forward to tea each time we wake-up, after lunch, after dinner, and yes at tea-time, which is precisely at 5 pm and as a night cap.

The thermometer. Yes we stick that in our tea, to ensure that the optimum temperature is obtained upon serving. Piping hot, but not too hot lest it burns a hole in your tongue. The correct temperature releases the taste of the leaves and results in a warmth which suffuses throughout the veins and hits the spot. Know that feeling? Much like shooting up. Your pupils dilate and the world looks a much lovelier place.

Tepid, pathetic looking excuses of teh tarik, brings out the warlords in us. And we want to go to war.

With everybody.

And thus, another Taliban is born.

All for the lack of good tea.