City of Chai

(Published in First City magazine, August 2013)

There was a time I was no darn Dilliwali. I was just another girl-in-the-city and Dilli was just Delhi to me, appearing like a Qutub Minar silhouette in the mind every time its name was called. If I ever had to explain Delhi to someone in a garish-coloured, hard-outlined chart like the 25-paise ones I bought for holiday homework projects as a kid, I’d draw India Gate, Lal Quila, Nehru Planetarium, Palika Bazaar, Hanuman Mandir. When adolescence hit, I replaced these with Priya cinema, golguppe, packed Blueline buses, groping hands, and toilet-like bus stops. 

I don’t remember when Delhi became Dilli for me – this city that is my autobiography of sorts – but there one thing in my life that will always signify that transition.

Chai.

I’m told it’s some kind of character-building thing: when the avalanche of life crashes over you, to choose one enduring addiction and organise the chaos around it. Like a tether of sorts, to cling to when the current is wild, scary, overwhelming, too gorgeous even. So while working as journalist for the very magazine you read, when I really fell in love with this swirling madness called Dilli, there was only one thing to come back to - my corner desk, and a hot mug of chai on it. Chai was like hot glue to seal all the contrasting seen-and-heard stories of the day exploding in my head. It was a galvanising agent for all the tiny, ephemeral realisations poking their heads amidst the large, brick-like experiences of the day. On an about-to-rain August day as sweltering and restless as a heart on the verge of a good cry, a sip of lip-burning milkier-than-the-Milky-way tea was like a taste of Dilli: scalding-sweet pleasurable torture.  

“Fight fire with fire,” the old Bard said. So did my mother (“garmi hi garmi ko kaat-ti hai”), while sipping her lava-hot cup of tea, feet up after a dog’s day at work. I grew up in utter incomprehension of her, who can drink tea every waking moment of her day, if only acidity wasn’t the curse of the chai-devotee. She’ll never say no to a cup of tea, even if she’s given her assent while drinking her zillionth since morning. I never understood it, this undying addiction of the otherwise world-renouncing she; I never got that excess-kills-excess logic of hers. Until I displayed my genetic code by falling for said beverage myself. Now I totally get it – when Dilli blows dragon fire at you, line your insides with fire-hot chai, and find the elusive fellow feeling, if only for a brief moment. Overwhelm the overwhelming, and you have a brief moment of status quo.

And so over the years of wild Dilli loving, I have clung to chai like one would to a brutal lover. It has been the dangling carrot careening me through the daily To Do list. It has been the inspiration to get out of the razaai on iceberg January mornings. It has been Muse and Reward, all boiled into one. It has even been the progenitor of countless random theories I conjure to make sense of the world. One of my favourites from that basket, goes something like this: Of the things I learnt from the countless interviews I did with classical dancers, one was that in the traditional philosophy of enjoying art, for which Hindi has a beautiful, ripe word (rasanubhuti, literally, the “taste of experience”), there are two medians. There is the sthaayi bhaav, or the constant essential nature of the thing you are experiencing - its very stuff, its primal character. And to sculpt this dense, complex mass of emotion, there are the sahachaari bhaav, literally, the “friend-assistant feelings”. These are airy, brief emotions that flit about the sthaayi bhaav like fireflies, illuminating its various moods and contours.

To steal the philosophy like a typical ‘writer-type’, in my daily quest for lush discoveries, Dilli became my sthaayi bhaav and chai, my sahchaari bhaav. There is a cup of tea for every emotional contour of Dilli; all the moments both sad and breathtaking, all the memories buried and exhibitionist, all the chaos and the lucidity.

The khade chamach ki chai, literally, a chai-shot loaded with so much sweetness that a spoon could stand in the sugar-silt. Made famous in Khari Baoli, where it is the fuel for men who carry sackfuls of your favourite spice from godaam to shop. When June loo winds leech off all happiness and make you walk with head bent low, exactly as if you were carrying a sackful of something yourself, this one makes total sense.

A mini kettle of Darjeeling gold at Cha bar, the only thing that can calm you down to the required dandy levels when you’re wrapped up in an AC cocoon of book-lined shelves and corner couches. Calm you down, because schadenfraude is a luscious, pulse-racing thing: while you fall facedown into a good book, the Connaught Place vortex outside sears with countless people dragging their feet about crazy lives in a city of relentless weather.

The ricocheting thrill of watching a herd of monsoon clouds turn afternoon to velvet night in seconds, heaving so low it could caress you lying on your favourite chair, and take a sip off that huge mug of elaichi-dalchini chai cupped in your hands.

The shotglass dhaba chai when you need to muster courage on-the-go. And be reassured that the many Dilliwaley doing the same around you are all grappling with the exact loss of fortitude and other warm fuzzy feelings to a cruel Dilli winter.

The chai to chase the good cup of chai that preceded it (because too much of a good thing is never bad in a city of excess). The so-bad-it’s-good cuppa thrust into your hands while visiting some godforsaken relative’s house. The kulladh chai at Rajasthan stall of Dilli Haat, best enjoyed with fervent ‘phooo!’s, a plate of pyaaz kachori, and lots of chit-chat. The perfect cuppa with your own precise secret recipe, which you’re going to make right after you finish reading this page.

While you dream of the ek pyaali chai to go with your mood right now, I will gather my many chattering chai-moods and quieten them down for a bit: with a cup of strong, black coffee.

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

When Dilli chai moods are not enough, Dilliwali walks into The Mad Teapot and loses herself to old world charm of Enid Blyton tea-whimsy. In this quaint, tucked-into-a-corner café inside a store called The Wishing Chair, there are kettle-stencilled pastel walls, a handful of tables, and a menu that’ll make you smile all the way back to the summer afternoons you spent salivating over high tea feasts in Enid Blyton books.

An Enchanted Forest Salad (perfect summer salad with arugula, fennel and orange), Pockets of Suprises (pita pockets with yummy pesto filling) and Dilliwali’s favourites, the Whatzizname Sandwich – an open-faced bite-sized sandwich with a dreamy creamy pesto spread and cheese-tomato-lettuce topping. Goes fabulously with their teas (of course, the tea!), of the warm-and-dainty variety (Darjeeling, ginseng, jasmine, green, oolong - they have ‘em all) as well as the nice-on-ice type (the cranberry iced tea has the power to dissolve all thoughts temporarily). The best bit? Prices are all very ‘what you see is what you get’ as they say: the menu prices (the upper limit of which is Rs. 310) includes all taxes.

And if on your way out via the store full of what the owners call “scavenged oddities”, you can walk without going ‘aww’ under a tsunami of want-it-now greed, Dilliwali shall treat you to a all-hail bow and a cup of chai (hopefully to test you on the way out again)!

The Mad Teapot is open everyday from 11 am to 7.30 pm

THE MAD TEAPOT The Wishing Chair, 86A, Shahpur Jat, Ph: 46572121

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).