You Are the Nun to My Chai takes one part of our Food, Land and Rituals illustration and turns it into a small conversation about tea, place, and the rituals that connect us.
When developing the Together Project, one of the challenges was finding a single dish that could represent both Jammu and Kashmir and Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Food traditions shift across the region, shaped by geography, history, and the communities living on either side. Tea, however, gave us another way in.
Nun chai, literally salt tea, is traditionally prepared with salt and takes on its recognisable pink colour through the brewing process. In Jammu and Kashmir, this salted pink tea is part of everyday life. Across Pakistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the pink Kashmiri chai many people know is often served sweet, sometimes with nuts and spices. But salt still finds its way into the tea culture there too, with regular milky South Asian-style chai also sometimes served with a pinch of salt. Different cups, different tastes, but a shared thread running through them.
That ritual reaches much further too. In Sudan there is shai, served during visits and conversations; in Palestine, tea is similarly poured for family, guests, and the everyday pause in between. The preparation may change, but the instinct is familiar: put the kettle on, sit down, stay a little longer.
That is what the Together Project looks for. Not ways to flatten different cultures into one, but the small points of recognition between them, the foods, habits, ingredients, and rituals that make us realise our lives may have more in common than we knew.
The original illustration was created by British-Bangladeshi artist Maryam Huq for our Together Project, bringing Sudan, Jammu and Kashmir, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Rohingya community, and Palestine together through food, land, agriculture, and everyday ritual.
For this card, SPINDLE reworked Maryam’s original tea illustration into You Are the Nun to My Chai, because sometimes a terrible food pun is also a very good place to begin a conversation.
Designed by SPINDLE from original digital artwork by Maryam Huq @vividbymaryam.
