Chai, anyone?

Any time is chai time!

Are you too a teatotaler? You read it right. One of the questions nobody should ask me is how I take my tea. Seriously, helluva lot seriously, I would say! Not only that, if you like my kind of tea, we are friends forever.

Maybe most of us Indians feel the same about this beverage which cheers but does not inebriate. Tea is one’s go-to drink when they are happy, sad, pleased, annoyed, with friends and family or alone, feeling sick or absolutely fine, doing something or not, working or jobless, during a break from the never-ending chores or free, travelling in a train or in a bus, in winter, rains or autumn. You can have a cup of tea even during the hot summer evenings because loha hee lohe ko kaatata hai (roughly translated: you use iron to cut/sharpen iron). Would a coffee drinker understand that? No. No wonder, coffee is not my cup of tea.

You may rattle off the names of 50 types of tea you know, but the first thing you look forward to when you wake up in the morning is a cup, or several, of black tea, with or without milk (regular) /sugar/biscuits. Whether the leaves have come from Assam, West Bengal, Nilgiris, Kangra, etc., or are a blend, and the decoction is with or without addition of spices, the steam arising out of it makes your nose sing- Wah, Chai! I am restricting myself to only that regular black kind today.

At other times of the day, you may like it with a snack- pakoras (vegetable fritters made with chickpea flour), mathri (fried roundels of basic pastry dough), namkeen (savoury snacks), samosa, parathas (Indian griddle-fried bread), buns and sandwiches, or be a purist like me and always have chai alone to savour its taste.

In 1953, the Tea Board of India
declared that tea is ‘swadeshi’. 

Like several other famous and infamous things, tea or Camellia sinensis also started in China. But has anyone ever thanked Scottish horticulturalist Robert Fortune who smuggled 13,000 tea plant samples and 10,000 seeds out of China nearabout in 1849 to Calcutta? What a hero, wouldn’t you agree? British planters started growing the plants in east India and the rest is history which I am not going to recount here.  

Of the stories my mother could recall of her childhood, one of my favourites remains when as a small girl she would wait for the men who walked on stilts and came up to the wooden banister of their first-floor house in Rawalpindi to hand out free samples of tea leaves. People were skeptical about this drug because it tasted good, but the propaganda supporting it was more powerful. My nani (mother’s mother) loved it, but my nana was dead against it. Nani found a sympathizer in her Sikh landlady, who would put a glass full of tea in the basket my nani would send down tied to a rope when Nana had left for kachehri (courts) and the housework was over.   

Ma would also talk about how the neighbourhood children would gather around the pathan labourers to watch them drinking green tea decoction with Himalayan salt and butter.

As a child I would look for tea and not ice cream, candy or chocolates, as a reward for anything I did well. That feeling of being a grown-up it gave, was unparalleled. Ah, the joy of waking up early in the morning just so you could have a cup of chai with coconut cookies, snuggled up with your mother!

Is it right to tell Nupur Dutt that besides all the serious and non-serious matters we talked about with each other, another reason I enjoyed going to her house was because she served the best Darjeeling tea in town – hot, fragrant, not bitter, without milk, with just a hint of sugar, and in a china cup too?

You can be in either category of tea-drinkers. The ones who would drink any kind of chai, prepared in any way or the others who drink a particular brand made in a specific way. Gone are the days of fine china, now everywhere this elixir is served in mugs. And what is chai if not drunk from a glass at the roadside chaiwala? Even though some people advocate drinking it off a kulhar (handle-less clay cup), that does not necessarily make it Indian because Bharat is anyway the second largest producer of tea in the world. Surprisingly, we are 29^th on the list of per capita consumption of it though. Don’t you think we should rectify that?

The simplest way to prepare tea is to boil water and add tea leaves. Let it brew. You may add steaming milk and sugar to taste. The proportion of tea leaves and milk is based purely on one’s taste. If it smells of milk, then it stinks, literally and figuratively. And what an unpleasant feeling one has if a thin brown film forms on the top and you have to remove it with a spoon or push it to the rim of the cup!

If you are making it for me, I would be clear- no lemon-shemon, please. Do you try to healthify it by using honey, jaggery, brown/palm/coconut sugar? Flavourless white sugar, though labelled the sinner, is the best.

Some people prefer to boil water and milk together and then add tea leaves. Some boil it for a minute, yet others kind of simmer/cook it for a few minutes to make it strong. 

One might try to enhance the flavour of tea with aromatic herbs and spices but of course, some kill it with the mix. Everyone swears by their own recipe and choice for the masala chai. Generally, the spice mix has ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, fennel, holy basil leaves, but you may add nutmeg and pepper also.  

1850s engraving on tea production in Assam

Among other things, what I miss of my Hyderabad days is the daily cutting chai (half a cup) breaks during evening shifts with Manjula and Anuradha at Ramu ki bandi at the street corner.

Nukkad ka chaiwala (tea-seller at street corner) has always enjoyed an important role in our society. That is the spot where (mostly) men relax, sipping their chai and discussing social, political, economic issues, and may make new friends as well.

I know people who enjoy going to big-name cafes and chains which serve coffee and tea with fancy names and charge a bomb, but I am partial to my own cuppa. I have tried instant masala tea powder and that might be good during certain emergencies or travel, but chilled chai tea latte or tea made with soy/almond milk, is just not my thing.

I could go on and on about chai but isn’t it time for a chai break?

                                                                                               - Anupama S Mani