The Bengali Tea Boy Consideration

Notes on irritation as practice, the luxury of enemies, and what happens when you stop pretending you're not angry

The Unfixable World

The Assumption

The barista starts before I’ve even received my change.

“Did you see what he said yesterday?” She’s already shaking her head, assuming my head will shake along. “I just can’t even—”

I make a sound. Noncommittal. Could be agreement. Could be the noise of someone who hasn’t had coffee yet. She takes it as solidarity, continues her recitation of outrages while the espresso machine screams.

This happens four more times before noon. The neighbor at the mailbox. The person beside me at the crosswalk. The email that begins “I’m sure you’re as horrified as I am...” The group text that assumes we’re all watching the same news, feeling the same fury, vibrating at the same frequency of indignation.

I’ve become fluent in the language of strategic vagueness. “Mmm.” “Yeah, it’s a lot.” “These are quite the times.” Phrases that mean nothing, that let people hear what they need to hear while I stay hidden in plain sight.

There’s a Buddhist story I’ve been carrying around like pocket change, waiting for the right moment to spend it. About a teacher who literally paid someone to irritate him. But every time I think about bringing it up, I realize: we’re already living it. We’re all each other’s employees, working overtime, no one collecting the paycheck.

What Pema Didn’t Say

Last week, I threw a coffee mug at the wall. Not at anyone—I live alone, which is both a mercy and its own particular weight. Just at the wall, at the idea of wall, at the solidity of things that refuse to move when you need them to.

It was after the third person that morning assumed I agreed with them. First the neighbor: “We need to do something about these people.” Then the checkout clerk: “At least we see what’s really happening, right?” Then my mother, calling to read me an article that would “explain everything,” as if explanation was what I was missing.

The mug was handmade, a gift, the kind of object that accumulates meaning just by lasting. It shattered exactly like you’d expect. No metaphor there. Just pieces.

My first thought: This is not very Buddhist of me. My second thought: Fuck Buddhist. My third thought: Now I have to clean this up alone.

This is when I remembered Atisha’s tea boy properly. Not the sanitized version where irritation becomes enlightenment. The real version. Where Atisha was so afraid of being comfortable that he literally imported discomfort. Paid someone to never give him the relief of pleasantness.

But here’s what just occurred to me, sweeping up ceramic shards: we don’t pay our irritants. They volunteer. They do it for free, for love, for the pure joy of being right.

The Choreography of Avoidance

I’ve developed routes through my day that minimize contact. The coffee shop at 6:30 AM, before the regulars arrive with their opinions. The back entrance to the building, avoiding the security guard who wants to discuss “what this country’s coming to.” Grocery shopping at odd hours when only the night shift workers and insomniacs roam the aisles, too tired for outrage.

But they find me anyway. They always find me.

“You look like someone who gets it,” the woman at the bus stop says, and I know what’s coming. She’s already decided I’m on her team based on—what? My shoes? The book I’m reading? The way I’m standing?

She tells me about the neighborhood, how it’s changing, how “certain people” are ruining everything. She’s waiting for me to nod, to agree, to confirm that yes, we are the same, we see the same threats, we want the same walls.

I look at my phone. “Sorry, I have to take this.” There’s no call.

This is my practice now: the art of disappointing people’s assumptions without creating new conflicts. The delicate dance of being nobody’s ally and nobody’s enemy. The exhausting work of refusing to be recruited.

The Cousin Who Knows

My cousin sends a text: “Family dinner Sunday. Don’t worry, we won’t talk politics ;)”

The winky face is a lie. We will absolutely talk politics. Or rather, they will talk politics while assuming I agree, because I’m family, because I’m educated, because I’m whatever they need me to be to feel like they’re not alone in their certainty.

Last time, I tried to change the subject nine times. I counted. “How’s your garden?” became a rant about water regulations. “Nice weather” became climate change denial or climate change panic, depending on who was talking. “Pass the salt” became a metaphor for something, I stopped listening.

The Bengali tea boy—I think about him during these dinners. Did he eat with Atisha? Did he serve the terrible tea in silence, or did he provide running commentary on everything wrong with Tibet, with Buddhism, with the teacher himself? Was his irritation verbal or purely functional?

I want to ask my family: What if you’re my tea boy? What if this whole performance—the assumptions, the rants, the certainty—is exactly what I need to wake up?

But I don’t. I pass the potatoes and make my ninth attempt to discuss anything else and drive home alone, NPR turned off, sitting with the silence that feels more honest than any words.

What Arrives at 3 AM

I wake up arguing with people who aren’t there. Full conversations, complete with their responses, my rebuttals, their counter-arguments. I’m winning these debates, obviously. I’m articulate, prepared, devastating in my logic.

The neighbor with his giant electric flag—I’ve explained to him eleven different ways why he’s wrong. The barista with her assumptions—I’ve delivered the perfect speech about complexity. My cousin—I’ve finally said what I should have said at dinner.

But they’re not here. It’s just me in the dark, shadow-boxing with ghosts I’ve created, ghosts who conveniently say exactly what I need them to say to feel righteous.

This is what Atisha knew: we don’t actually need other people to irritate us. We’re perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. The tea boy was just an externalization of an internal process—the part of us that picks at scabs, that rehearses arguments, that can’t let anything be.

I lie there, trying to stop the mental litigation, and realize: I’m my own tea boy. Have been all along. The others—the neighbor, the barista, the cousin—they’re just extras in a movie I’m directing about my own suffering.

The Broken Mug Speaks

A week later, I’m still finding pieces of that mug. Little shards in corners, under the refrigerator, somehow in the bathroom. It’s like it exploded in four dimensions, leaving evidence in places it never could have reached.

Each piece I find feels like a small teaching: You think you’ve cleaned up your anger, but look, here’s another fragment.

The mug was a gift from someone who assumed they knew me, who saw me in a shop window and thought: “This is perfect for her.” They were wrong about what I’d like, but right about something else—that I’d keep it anyway, use it daily, let it become part of my morning ritual until I threw it at a wall.

Now it’s teaching me something new: how things we break keep breaking, how anger has a half-life longer than uranium, how we’re still finding pieces of conversations that shattered years ago.

The Neighbor’s Flag

Thursday. The neighbor adds a second flag. This one flashes. I don’t need to tell you which flag—you already know, you have your own neighbor, your own flag that makes your coffee taste like copper pennies. It’s not about the flag.

I watch him from my kitchen window, adjusting the angle, making sure it’s visible from the highway. He’s meticulous about it. There’s love in his movements, care. He believes in what he’s doing.

This is the part that breaks me: his sincerity.

Yesterday, he assumed I agreed with him. Saw me getting my mail and launched into his vision of America, punctuating his sentences with “You know what I mean” and “You get it” and “People like us understand.”

People like us. He’s decided we’re the same kind of people based on—what? That we both have mailboxes? That we share a property line? That I didn’t actively argue when he started talking?

I said nothing. Just nodded at my mail like it contained urgent information, mumbled about an appointment, fled to my house. Now I avoid checking the mail when his car is headed that way.

This is the opposite of what Atisha did. He imported irritation; I’m trying to deport it. He paid for difficulty; I’m paying in elaborate avoidance choreography.

What My Therapist Doesn’t Say

“I’m so angry all the time,” I tell her. She nods. Waits. “But also tired of being angry. And angry about being tired. And tired of being angry about being tired.” She keeps waiting. She’s good at waiting. It probably costs extra. “Everyone assumes I’m on their side or against them. There’s no space to just... exist.”

This is when she surprises me:

“What if you stopped trying to exist outside of it?”

I want to argue, but I’m paying her $200 an hour, so I sit with it. She continues:

“You’re working so hard not to be anyone’s tea boy. But what if that’s exactly what you’re supposed to be? What if your neutrality, your silence, your avoidance—what if that’s someone else’s perfect irritation?”

I think about the neighbor, how my non-response probably drives him crazy. The barista, wondering why I never engage. My cousin, calling me “mysteriously absent” from family dinners.

I’ve been so focused on not drinking anyone else’s badly-made tea that I didn’t notice I’ve become the tea boy myself—serving up lukewarm neutrality, strategic vagueness, the particular irritation of someone who won’t pick a side.

The Discovery

Here’s what nobody tells you about the Bengali tea boy story: it’s not about the tea boy.

It’s about Atisha’s fear of comfort. His terror of becoming soft. His belief that he needed suffering to stay awake.

But suffering finds us anyway. We don’t need to import it, pay for it, carry it like luggage. It arrives every morning with the headlines. It lives in our bodies, in our jaws, in our clenched fists at 3 AM.

The real question—the one Atisha maybe never asked—is: What if comfort is the harder practice? What if being OK when things are not OK is the discipline we’re actually avoiding?

I watch my house guest reading the news, his jaw doing its geological thing, and suddenly I see it: we’re all Atisha, creating problems to solve because solving problems feels like purpose. Feels like meaning. Feels like we’re doing something.

The president is terrible. And? My neighbor’s flag is offensive. And? The world is burning. And?

Not “and therefore nothing matters.” But “and therefore what?” What action rises from clarity rather than reaction? What love is possible even now, especially now?

The Thing About Weather

My grandmother used to say: “You don’t curse the rain for being wet.”

But we do. We curse everything for being what it is. We curse the president for being exactly who he showed us he was. We curse our families for voting their fears. We curse ourselves for cursing, then curse ourselves for not cursing enough.

The Bengali tea boy served bad tea every single day. That was his job. He didn’t serve bad tea sometimes and good tea others, didn’t have off days and on days. He was reliable as weather, consistent as gravity.

There’s almost something comforting in that.

What Happens on Friday

My mother calls again. This time about the cranberry sauce—canned or fresh? But really about my sister who’s started ending every conversation with ‘did you fact check that?’ Always about my sister.

“I just don’t know how to talk to her anymore,” she says. “Then don’t,” I say. “I can’t just not talk to her.” “Then do.” “You’re not helping.” “I know.”

But maybe I am. Maybe the help is in stopping the idea that we need to fix this, that there’s some magic combination of words that will make everyone see clearly, vote correctly, think properly.

The tea boy never got better at making tea. That wasn’t his function.

The Unfixable World

I’m writing this at the same kitchen table where I threw the mug. There’s still a small chip in the wall I haven’t fixed. Don’t want to fix. It feels important to see it, this small evidence of breaking.

The president gives another speech. My neighbor adds a bumper sticker to his truck. My mother forwards another article about how to talk to difficult people. Me. My guest’s jaw continues its tectonic shifts.

And somewhere in Tibet, centuries ago, a badly-made cup of tea gets served by a mean-tempered boy to a teacher who’s trying too hard to wake up.

The joke—and there’s always a joke, even in the dharma, especially in the dharma—is that awakening isn’t about the absence of irritation. It’s about intimacy with it. It’s about knowing the exact temperature of your anger, the precise weight of your outrage, the particular texture of your despair.

And then making dinner anyway. Calling your mother anyway. Living your life anyway.

Not because you’ve transcended. Not because you’ve accepted. But because the alternative—the constant fight with reality—is its own kind of sleep.

What the Story Means

I wanted this to end with wisdom, with something you could carry like a stone in your pocket. But that’s not how it works. The story doesn’t mean anything until it means something to you, until you see your own reflection in the badly-made tea.

Maybe you’re Atisha, afraid of comfort. Maybe you’re the tea boy, paid to be difficult. Maybe you’re the Tibetans, laughing at the whole elaborate performance. Maybe you’re all of them, all at once, serving yourself the bitter tea and complaining about the taste.

My guest puts down his phone. Looks at me. His jaw unclenches for just a moment.

“Want some tea?” he asks. “Is it going to be terrible?” I ask. “Probably,” he says. “Perfect,” I say.

And I mean it. Or I’m trying to. Or I will, eventually, when I stop throwing mugs at walls and start understanding that the wall was never the problem.

The Bengali tea boy is still here. He’s pouring the tea right now—through our screens, our ballots, our thanksgiving dinners. He’s doing his job perfectly, offering us exactly the practice we claim we don’t want but keep choosing.

The question isn’t whether we’ll drink the tea. We’re already drinking it. The question is whether we’ll finally stop pretending it should taste like something else.

Tuesday, Still

The light in the mountains has that particular quality of aftermath—too bright, somehow worn. I’ve been sitting with this story for hours now, trying to make it mean something definitive. But it keeps shifting, like smoke, like weather, like the expression on my neighbor’s face when we accidentally make eye contact over his new flag.

Chödrön says: “The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell.”

It’s about this: Tuesday. Terrible tea. The impossible people we can’t escape because they’re offering us something we need—not their wisdom, but our own reflection in the mirror of our reaction to them.

I still want to change the president. Still want to convert my neighbor. Still want my sister to see the light and my mother to stop calling about her.

But wanting and needing are different countries.

And I’m learning, slowly, the geography of that distance.

One badly-made cup of tea at a time.

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean