There is, I think, no honest argument against the morning. The light is candid. The kettle is candid. Even the dog, who lies all day on his political opinions, is candid before nine. I have always taken my tea by the window that faces the gulmohar, because it is hard to be unhappy where something orange is happening above you.
Preeti says I am sentimental about the small hours. I say she is correct, and that the small hours are also sentimental about me. We have, in fifty-two years, agreed on very few things, but we agree on this: that the first cup must be made with attention. The second cup is for forgiveness — of yesterday, of the newspaper, of the relatives who keep dying in awkward seasons.
A father, I have come to believe, is mostly a person who keeps the kettle on.
When the children were small, the kitchen was a small republic with no constitution. We argued about toast. We argued about whether the milk had turned. (It had not. It never had. The milk in our house was the most patient milk in the country.) Now the kitchen is quieter, and the arguments are kept inside our heads, where they have grown more reasonable with age.
The truth is I am writing this not to remember tea but to remember the people I have made it for. There was my mother, who took it without sugar and with a great deal of disappointment. There was my younger brother, who took it standing, as if leaving for a war. There were friends who came once and never again, and friends who came every Sunday for forty years, until one Sunday the chair was empty.
I do not believe the morning belongs to anyone. But I believe it visits some of us more reliably than others, and that the trick is to be ready when it comes. Put the kettle on. Sit by the window. Let the orange thing happen.