It was one of those childhood sounds you woke up to. You took it for granted at the time. You did not consciously register it as a happy sound or as the sound of normalcy. The clinking of morning cups being placed on saucers. It signalled that the day had begun for your parents, and that they were working companionably in the kitchen — one attending to the boiling water and the other to setting of the cups. During this time, the previous day’s arguments have not been carried over. The new day hasn’t popped up fully to reveal its intricate and demanding adult pulls and pushes. It is an easy silence between them, punctuated only by the sounds of steel pakkad against tea pateela , strainer and teaspoon against china cup, cup against saucer. And the biscuit tin being opened.
A little later, you could wander out to them, and one or the other, whoever was in the mood to allow it, would let you dip a biscuit in their tea even if the front part collapsed into the cup.
Even some years later, when their 19-year-old star son had become a rebel without a cause, and the days were imbued with visits to principals, deans, rectors, and other such functionaries, to fathom ‘what is wrong’, and the night often meant that your parents waited anxiously and/ or angrily for him to return home way past the curfew hour of 11, and while they waited, they argued with each other in the front room in low voices, and if he returned, one or two words escaped loudly, over his routine apologetic murmur, words like “You keep saying,” or “At this rate,” or “wastrel”… even then, the mornings would bring the clinking of cups.
If he had not been AWOL all night, and returned home at some stage, then during this morning half hour, the parents would be setting a cup and saucer for him. Hostilities and interrogations and the extracting of evasive lies and half-truths from the previous night had been temporarily ceased. Now you could only hear from your bed three different cups being placed intermittently on saucers, as they sipped. It was a time set in parentheses, untouched by what went before and what came after.
Later, I heard about how, along the Indo-Pak border, after all the eyeball-to-eyeballing and goose-stepping all day and most of the night, jawans from both sides exchange a few decencies at dawn. I am pretty sure there is some clinking of cups or steel mugs then too.
On vacation, whatever jagged vibes you picked up between one of your parents and his/ her sibling or parent, and you could hear them into the night, first the talking, then nervous laughing and then some tears and some accusations… the morning brought the comfortable clinking of cups. (On top of it, you had the vacation reprieve from your daily cup of hot milk.)
Throughout our lives, if we’re fortunate, someone somewhere continues making morning cup noises for us. At random ages and stages of our grown-up life too, we wake as a guest in the homes of friends, aunts, deemed-aunts, in-laws, ageing parents; or in the homes of our own grown householder children, nieces, nephews, and hear that sound of quiet normalcy. Problem-solving, bills, health, planning, disagreements, global bad news, and all those weighty things are, for that magic half-hour, firmly muzzled and muted by the clinking of those cups.
When my father moved in with me in his last few months, he would clink in the kitchen before I came downstairs, and with that, the previous day and the day to come would become simply more reassuringly ordinary. It is as if someone has taken on the headwinds of the coming day.
And now I am keenly aware, in my own home, when I have a friend, an aunt, or daughter, niece or granddaughters staying over, that in the morning I must clink the cups. Even if I make the tea or coffee in a clunky mug in a micro, I must clink together ceramic, spoon, strainer; and hope that the resonance of it will set the right note to their day too.
The writer is a novelist and family counsellor whose latest non-fiction book, Always a Parent , is just out.
