Together Tea by Marjan Kamali

“Let’s just do math.”
    As Darya placed the samosas and kimbap on the table and got out the math workbooks, she wished that she had never told Kavita and Yung-Ja about Sam because they were making it out to be more than it was, when it was actually nothing. But part of her also enjoyed having friends to chat with about something so silly. She couldn’t tell Parviz, of course, because he might think it was actually something, when it wasn’t, and she couldn’t tell Mina or her sons because, well, that just wouldn’t be right. So, grateful for the company of Kavita and Yung-Ja, and for the equations they were about to tackle, and for the smell of spicy samosas and sweet kimbap, Darya sharpened her pencil and asked her friends to take a seat.
    FOR A SOLID FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, they lost themselves in math. That was their rule. To stick to the project at hand for forty-five minutes, no veering, no break. They were allowed to talk, but only about the math problems. No one could go off topic. And they stuck to that rule strictly because all three of them loved rules, and all three of them had deep disrespect for people who broke them. That’s what brought them together. Strong convictions about math and life. Love of numbers. A need to solve. They scribbled and thought and broke things down and built them back up. They showed their work and argued about how to arrive at the answer. Darya had even invested in a big white dry-erase board. She loved the squeak of the markers on the board, loved seeing how the solutions all made sense. When they were finished with their work for the day and reemerged into the real world around them, it was as though they had been swimming underwater and were now coming up for air.
    And they were starving. The samosas had an excellent kick, the kimbap hit the spot, and Darya’s handmade baklava was the perfect accompaniment to tea. When Darya hosted, math camp always ended with tea. She had even succeeded in stopping Kavita from putting milk in hers.
    After math, they were allowed to talk about anything. Usually, they talked about their children and husbands. Occasionally, they discussed politics. Darya and Yung-Ja competed over who had suffered most in the twentieth century: Iranians or Koreans. Whenever Darya brought up dictatorship, military coup, torture, war, Yung-Ja said, “Ya. Korea had that.” To which Kavita would say, “Yes, but do you two ladies have a country that has been artificially manipulated into two based on nothing more than the false gods of organized religion and the fallacies of fatuous farts in office who wish to portend great power and prestige?”
    And then Yung-Ja would be silent because she didn’t understand what Kavita had just said, and Darya would get up to open a window because when Kavita discussed “The Division,” as she called the topic of India and Pakistan, she got overly animated and menopausey and before long would be dripping with sweat and asking Darya for a glass of water and a wet washcloth for her forehead.
    Today’s math camp ended with a short discussion about their respective children’s inability to truly understand the gifts of America and how they were all so sheltered in New York because they knew neither war nor bombs nor true poverty. “These children of ours do not know the pain of prolonged prostration under the piddling paucities of pauper politicians turned princes,” Kavita said.
    That was another thing. Sometimes the combination of calculus and menopause made Kavita extra alliterative. Made her “mull over the messy and malleable morphings required to manage magnificent mathematical mountains from mere marginal molehills.”
    At the end of math camp they did the dishes together. After that, Yung-Ja, who was the best at calculus, reviewed the best way to answer some of the harder equations. Then Yung-Ja took her Tupperware dish, Kavita took her empty samosa