Page 60 - A Banker Down the Rabbit Hole

send a cup of tea and yell from their desk to give them company.

For a month or so, in spite of my declining, I used to take a cup of tea
once on insistence of one or the other colleague. I felt embarrassed as I
was not paying them their club membership fee. Because all of them were
very cordial with me and one or the other staff would genuinely insist
and I used to accept the tea; I decided to become a member of the club
only for paying for the tea but keeping the option of taking or not taking
the tea with me. As I persisted, they agreed with this arrangement. Now
the frequency of accepting the tea increased as I did not have the guilt
feeling of taking tea free of cost. Gradually, it became a habit to take tea
twice a day. So, I started taking tea at the age of 32. I got influenced by
the environment I was working in.

I realized that after taking tea, I used to feel more alert and energized.
After a year and a half, I was transferred and posted as a head of the
medium sized branch in near vicinity of my home town. There, we had
to offer and accept tea very often while dealing with customers and this
was the most affordable hospitality we could offer to large number of
customer visiting us every month. Even till date I continue to take two
cups of tea daily with same benefits.

My would-be-better half quit taking tea knowing that
we did not take tea at home
This reminds me that when I got married, no one in our family used to
take tea. My wife also was not making tea at our place. We came to know
after over six months that she was in habit of taking a cup of tea in the
morning with breakfast. She had given up this habit a few months before
marriage when she came to know that we all in the family did not take
tea at all.

This sacrifice of my wife to adjust in our family culture really impressed
us all. But we told her to start taking tea though I still did not, for another

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