Nepal, Jan. 4 -- After I got married, I was asked to make tea the next morning. I had never made tea at home. I didn't know how to make it. I knew it entailed mixing tea, milk, and sugar and I could only measure powdered milk. I was told to make 15 cups of tea. There were guests who wanted two cups of tea instead of one (one cup of tea in the morning doesn't feel like tea was their justification for it). I got the measurement wrong and there was something really off about the color, to say nothing about the taste.

My mother-in-law looked at it and smirked. A relative grimaced and asked who had made it. When he found out it was the 'buhari', he then asked me if I had never made tea at home. Or rather, he asked a wall because he didn't loo...