The elegance and precision beauty of this painting by Suchitra Mattai belies the tearful and messy history embedded in its iconography. As suggested by the title, the composition tells the story of how tea and war are intertwined within Mattai’s Indo-Caribbean heritage. The pareoidolic composition suggests a grimacing, bloodstained face, its head full of needlepoint Colonialist nightmares, its sight marred by Orientalist arrogance. The two ceramic tea cups in the painting echo Dutch ceramic cups, which were themselves imitations of the much earlier and more high quality tea cups of ancient China. Tea was first introduced to Europe by Dutch traders who initially sourced the product from Japan, and enhanced its desirability as a commodity by mixing it with ingredients stolen through their other colonial exploits in the so-called Spice Islands of Indonesia. The Dutch fought nearly non-stop wars with the British and other European powers over control of resources such as tea and spice in Indonesia and scores of other colonized territories, enslaving and spilling the blood of millions of Indigenous people throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas for the glorification of their own economies. Mattai’s work reflects upon the erased histories of Indo-Caribbean people. Her use of traditional domestic craft techniques such as embroidery, and her use of found objects with their own history and narrative content (such as the needlepoint in this painting), spotlights the untold stories of Indo-Caribbean women and indentured laborers from throughout the South Asian diaspora.