Five Times

	My grandmother would always tell me to boil my chai five times. This was years ago, when I was still in college and would visit her house in the summers, sometimes with my brother, other times alone. She would crouch beside the clay stove she had shaped and patted and built with her own hands and watch as the water in the pot boiled.
	“Three times is what my mother told me,” I said the first time she called me to sit beside her, telling me to watch the water begin to bubble, saying this was something I needed to know.
	“Three times?” she had said, her voice curving up at the end, a question hanging in the air as she shook her head. 
	Back then, I knew never to question her tastes, never to trigger the anger that might rumble out from beneath her skin, the frustration that rolled in the space between her bones.
	Together, that morning, we sat in the budding dawn, my legs criss-crossed on the floor beside her usual squat. The air was already growing warm with each passing minute and soon it would smother us with its thick heat, pushing us out of the courtyard and into our bedrooms where the slow-moving ceiling fans would try their best to offer respite. But for that hour before the sun was fully in the sky, we were free to enjoy the crackling flames of the clay stove, the heat rumbling from the pot of sizzling water. 
	I watched as my grandmother added each ingredient with care, with a reverence I knew her to only carry on evenings at the village temple. I watched as her hands dipped a spoon into sugar and tea leaves, as the muscles in her arm flexed every time the pestle ground against her brass mortar, crushing black pepper and cardamom and ginger with each rhythmic pounding. I watched, too, when she poured it all in, as each ingredient danced in the pot, before she quelled their vibrations with a heavy pour of buffalo milk. 
	“Three is not enough,” she said afterwards, her eyes latched onto the near-boiling chai. Many years later I would learn that this was true. Not only because the chai was darker after it had boiled and boiled and boiled again but because of the way that extra time leeched each ingredient of its taste, she said, each drop being slowly imbibed with the medley of ginger and spices and tea and sugar. I would also learn that it was more true for my grandmother because of the way it set her apart from my mother, a woman she had never truly welcomed into her heart the way she had welcomed me. 
	But of course, all this, the stove and my grandmother and the way she slighted my mother so subtly without sparing a second thought, was a thing of past summers. Later, my Junes and Augusts and Julys changed from days spent in the warmth of her courtyard and cobbled village lanes to months spent in my parents home, leafing through endless pages safely housed in my cool air-conditioned room. My grandmother would call often, letting me know how the heat had grown, how it was no longer the same in the courtyard, how it was time for her to cover that open space with a layer of cool cement. She always mentioned the way the peacock calls filled her rooms in the morning, and how she would be relieved once she would no longer wake to the sound of their screaming. Eventually, I moved away, I didn’t get married, didn’t learn how to cook or care for the animals that had taken up so many hours of my grandmother’s youth. No chickens or buffaloes, or cows, and no more calls from my grandmother. 
	Now, when I make chai, I think of my grandmother. And yet, I can never remember the way her chai tasted. I don’t boil mine over and over, definitely never five times. Instead, I wait until it is the right time, when the leaves are dancing in the boiling water, ready for a pour of milk. I wait and wait until it changes to a deep brown and starts to foam in a way where it gathers and pushes against the uppermost layer like stretched skin. I wonder if that is what my grandmother looks like now, her brown skin hatched with age, nearly bursting.