A sip of earthy flavour

In the early years of my carrer, when I began working with the farmers of Vidarbha, I would always try to avoid a vital aspect of their hospitality—the inevitable black tea. The tea, in fact, has a muddy colour and a strong muddy flavour that would set my nerves on edge. But refusing the too-strong-too-sweet tea is tantamount to insulting the host in this arid region of Maharashtra. An elderly farmer once made this resoundingly clear. “We poor people can only offer tea by way of honouring our guests. By refusing it, you refuse our honour,” he told me as I was trying to wriggle out of gulping down the brew. Another time, in a Dalit household, I had to drink a huge lota of water to prove that I did not refuse the tea out of “touchability” concerns.

These few incidents put the fear of the lord into me, and I have never since refused tea in rural areas. So for more than two decades, I survived the brew by developing naughty strategies instead—take one big gulp and leave the rest; hide the cup behind the leg of a cot or a chair; or worse, pour the tea on the mud floor when no one is looking. But it turns out that all this while I was too ignorant to appreciate the flavour.

One day, at my farm, my farm help Ramesh Dhurve walked off with a pickaxe at the mention of tea. Intrigued, I followed him and found him digging out what looked like long gnarled ropes.

On a closer inspection, I could see that they were the roots of a thin, barely noticeable creeper running between rocks and showing pointed, dark green leaves at intervals. “It is khobarvel,” Dhurve informed me, “we add it to tea for fragrance.”

The scales fell from my eyes with the first sip of the tea Dhurve made using the root. This was the flavour that had tormented me for years—only this time around it was milder, partly because Ramesh is a Gond tribal from Betul district in Madhya Pradesh. Tea is traditionally milder in this part of the state than in Vidarbha where food and beverages have strong taste and flavour. A few more sips later, I realised that the brew had a refreshing earthy flavour—not muddy.