He grinds the piece of ginger down with the handle of his disfigured knife. A pot boils in front of him.  The radio booms out a “Baul song”. The Bauls are Bengal’s unique troubadour community. It is 6:30AM in Kolkata – I wait for Mr. Prodip Pal to make his first batch of tea for the morning. Having stayed at the hospital overnight with my father, I had come across his little shop on the pavement as I walked around to find a cup of tea.

 

A chai stand in Kolkata. Photo: Resham Gellatly

 

I try not to give into my trepidation of what the unsanitary handle and that piece of ginger could mean for my gastrointestinal system that has been weakened by living 22 years in America. But, this is my city!  I fondly remember those days when the thought of drinking tea from a street shop and its effects would not even have crossed my mind.

I realize, even when I lived here, I never experienced Kolkata like this.  Simple, mundane and yet beautiful.  I settle back as I watch the ginger being thrown into the boiling pot, some tea leaves (“tea dust,” for the puritan) follow, and Mr. Pal brews up a cup of tea that even the Queen might stop to savor.

There is a break in the singing and the radio announcer begins talking about herbal remedies. The great qualities of the “Teto Jhinge (bitter gourd)” and the “Misti Jhinge (sweet gourd)”. Mix it with some honey and milk and you have a concoction that can dissolve kidney stones in three days! Then there is the incredible “Notay Shag (leafy greens)”- eat it every day and it will take care of all kinds of skin rashes during the summer and a mixture of dried “Notay Shag” along with honey and cow’s milk takes care of a multitude of  ailments for women.

Chai served in bhar, clay cups commonly used in Kolkata. Photo: Resham Gellatly

 

Mr. Pal lights up his “Biri (local cigarillos),” looks at me and says “Did you hear that?  People run to the doctor when they get a pin prick. All our health problems can be healed by natural leaves and roots. I have never been to the doctor. I apply leaves to cuts and scrapes”. He joins his hands and does the customary “Pronams (Namaste)” to the gods.

I vigorously nod my head to show him that I agree with him, as I struggle to communicate that I too believe in naturopathy, albeit very recently.  I ask him about his shop and how long he has been running it, as he takes a seat next to me. We make small talk. The occasional blast of horns form the Sunday morning cars interspace our conversation. A few people show up and order tea. I ask him for a second cup, not so much that I wanted it, but more to continue the conversation.

I am loving every moment! The sounds, the smells, this tête-à-tête with a man who has an entirely different reality than mine.  He is from Assam in northern India. He tells me of a time his brother broke his femur, they reset the bone and wrapped it in some thick leaves found in the mountains – his brother was walking in three days! I think, for now, it is best these inexplicable curative vegetation remain undiscovered, as it could mean some serious competition for my business developing implants for fractures, and might jeopardize the lives of people depending on a $40B industry.

I love my city! This to me is quintessential Kolkata, where even the local chaiwallah’s experience with 5000-year-old Ayurveda (natural healing) is something to ponder.

And yes! The chai was amazing!

Tins of chai, or cha in Bengali, in a Kolkata market. Photo: Resham Gellatly

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In India chai is consumed by people who speak so many different languages that it feels inadequate to write about the subject only in English. Fortunately we have friends to help us bridge the language gap.

Tanmoy Sarkar, an editor at Ei Samay, a Bengali language newspaper affiliate of the Times of India, encouraged us to write about our experience at chai stands in Kolkata. He then translated it and enhanced it, adding poetic flourishes in the tradition of Bengali laureates Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam.

“Matir bhNare ananda biliye cha-bikretarai Kolkatar jadukar,” he titled our post, which translates roughly to: “The tea-vendors of Kolkata are the ultimate magicians by selling joy in earthen cups.”

Click here to see the post in Bengali at Ei Samay.  

If you can’t read Bengali, good luck with Google Translate. Or read our version in English below.

Chai Wallahs: The Gateway to India

“Aap chai piyoge?” This might as well be the national greeting of India.

The moment you walk into an Indian home, you are offered a cup of tea. Hardly any business or government meeting gets underway without tea, and adda goes on for hours over cup after cup.

Arriving in India from America, this communal obsession with chai is very welcome. In the U.S. where life is incredibly fast paced, caffeine is usually consumed in jumbo-sized cups alone at desks or on hurried commutes. Americans drink coffee primarily to stay awake and energetic through the long workday. In India, drinking chai is as much about forming communal bonds as consuming caffeine.

Spending the past several weeks in Kolkata, we have become acutely aware of this during the festive seasons of Durga Puja and Bakra Eid, where chai has been our gateway into new communities. While hopping from pandal to pandal, we didn’t want to witness only the captivating displays. We wanted to learn about the places we were walking through. Talking with the local chai wallahs and their customers let us do that, from Naktala in South Kolkata to Baghbazaar in the North.

Chai wallahs are often the eyes and ears of their neighborhood, seeing and hearing all that happens on the street and collecting gossip from locals engaging in their ritual adda over a hot cuppa. Their small stands are like the hub of a wheel whose spokes are people from every walk of life. The closest thing we have to cha er theks in the U.S. might be local barbershops where people are forced to slow down and chat, but even this culture is fading and you don’t get a haircut nearly as frequently as you drink a cup of chai. Taxi drivers can tell you about a place as you drive around, but they’re only in big cities, whereas chai wallahs are everywhere in India.

On Bakra Eid, most shops in the Muslim neighborhood around Park Circus were closed. But the chai wallahs were open. At Mohi’s chai stand on Shamsul Huda Road, local residents explained how they had performed kurbaani that morning and were distributing the meat to the poor. In that moment, chai was a great social leveler as those same poor members of the community drank side by side. We could use more of that in the U.S. where it seems we hardly have time to say hello to our neighbors and rarely mingle across socioeconomic lines.

As locals told us about recent changes in the neighborhood, Mohi offered us another bhar of strongly brewed milk tea. We were keen to let the adda continue, so we replied: “Haan, do aur chai banaiye.”

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Years ago, bhar was the standard vessel for chai around the country. After slurping down the last sips of their brew, customers would ceremoniously smash their bhar against the ground, returning the clay to the earth from which it was made. It was the perfect model of sustainable consumption. But with the introduction of plastic, chai wallahs around the country abandoned bhar in favor of cups made of the cheaper and supposedly more hygienic material. Former Railways Minister Lalu Prasad attempted to revive the tradition in 2004 by mandating that chai be served in bhar in railway stations and on trains, but his effort largely failed. Today, the chai wallahs who walk the aisles of India’s trains sounding their trademark nasal call of “Chai! Garam chai!” carry plastic.

Fortunately most Kolkata chai wallahs have stuck to their roots, offering bhar alongside plastic and glass cups. By keeping this eco-friendly practice alive, these chai wallahs have sustained another sector of small business owners – the bhar wallahs, potters who craft the cups out of clay from the Hooghly River.

On the banks of the Hooghly sits Kalighat, a neighborhood built around the majestic Kali temple where worshippers have come to beg blessings of the black goddess for 1600 years. Walking down the main road from the temple, one passes vendors selling puja offerings, beggars crouching outside Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying, and prostitutes brazenly staring out from doorframes, their lips painted red with lipstick and teeth stained red with paan. Down one of the colorful alleys peeling off from the crowded street, thick smoke rises, filling the air with the scent of burning hay and baked mud. This is where the bhar wallahs live and work, crafting simple chai cups as well as intricate murthis, statues of Hindu gods.

Ramnath Pal, nearly 70 years old with piercing green eyes and a sinewy body, has been working with clay “janam se” – since birth. His home, a single room in a row of connected brick shanties, faces an open-air workshop where he works with his son Dilip, brother Hari and nephew Mangal amid giant blocks of slippery gray mud. Using two modest potter’s wheels, they churn out hundreds of vessels of varying shapes and sizes – from bhar to ashtrays to urns – and fire them in the kiln, a mound of mud constructed over a pit of burning wood and hay.

The Pal family also makes murthis. In the weeks leading up to Hindu holidays, they sculpt 50 of the detailed idols every day. With Kolkata’s largest festival, Durga Puja, over, Ma Durga is nowhere to be found on their shelves, but miniature neon murthis of Ganesh, Kali, Lakshmi and Saraswati await their time to shine in shrines and temples.

Business is brisk during the pujas, but bhar for chai are Ramnath’s real bread and butter. “People drink chai year round, so we always have orders to fill,” he said, holding one of his trademark cups about the size of a lemon. “It’s the chhota bhar that keep us going.”

Planks of wood packed with drying bhar balance on rooftops, creating a canopy across the narrow alley separating the Pal’s home from their workshop. In the workshop, rows of the cups perch precariously wherever space is to be found.

After being fired to their familiar orange hue, the bhar will be purchased by wholesalers then sold to chai wallahs who enjoy serving brew with a hint of earth. Across the city, customers will continue the tradition of drinking chai from tiny pots made in the back alleys of Kalighat.

But Ramnath’s family might not be participating in the supply chain much longer. His grandson Bablu works in an office, spending his days hunched over a computer instead of hunched over the potter’s wheel. For Ramnath, this is something to be proud of. As for what will happen to the family business?  “We can’t predict the future, but this is a hard job. We work so our children can do better,” said Ramnath. He took a sip of chai from one of his handmade bhar, bent over the potter’s wheel, and began crafting the next cup.

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Bakra Eid is a time to spend with family, in prayer and, as the name would suggest, with goats. The Muslim holiday honors the prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail in obedience to Allah’s command. Jews and Christians may remember the punch line from Sunday School: at the last minute, Ismail was replaced with a lamb, and father and son were left to feast on delicious kebabs together in the desert. Known as Eid al-Adha in Arabic, or Feast of the Sacrifice, South Asians call the holiday Bakra Eid – bakra means goat in Hindi and Urdu.

We were fortunate enough to celebrate Bakra Eid with our friends the Hussains in a Muslim neighborhood in Kolkata. The first item on the day’s agenda after the morning namaz was slaughtering four goats in honor of each of the household’s women. After the kurbaan (sacrifice) was performed on the Hussains’ terrace with the blessings of the local mosque’s imam and the help of a neighborhood butcher, we settled down to a hearty breakfast of goat brain curry, chicken stew, potatoes, and paranthas drenched in ghee. To aid digestion, we sipped sugary tea and listened to the sounds of the street – goats bleating before the inevitable, crows cawing as they contemplated how to get a piece of the action, and kids screaming with joy like the ones we witnessed sitting on a cow to hold it down for the butcher’s blade.

This breakfast was not all the man who prepared it had up his sleeve. The Hussains’ cook, Shaik Azad, or Azad Mama (mama is Hindi for uncle) as he is affectionately known, is a mutton biryani master. Bakra Eid, when freshly slaughtered goat abounds at the Hussain household, is the perfect day to find yourself in Azad Mama’s kitchen. While Begum Hussain and a few helpers neatly allocated the meat of the four goats into portions for relatives, friends of the family, and poor members of the community, Azad Mama shared his life story and his biryani recipe.

Azad Mama and Begum Hussain divide meat for family, friends, and the poor.

Born in Hatgacha, a small village an hour outside of Kolkata, Azad Mama came under the employment of Anwar Ali Sheikh, the Hussain’s patriarch, when he was 8 years old. Azad followed Ali, a tea exporter and member of the West Bengal state legislature, to Kolkata where he ran errands and served tea to guests – the most basic task of being a chai wallah. As he grew up, he watched the family’s cooks work in the kitchen and experimented with recipes of his own. “I’ve always liked to try new things,” he said. “I’ll cook prawns one way, fish another, and just see how it turns out.” Today, the biryani turned out delicious, its fragrant aromas filling the entire five-story building, masking the smell of goat meat coming from the roof.

Azad Mama’s Gosht Biryani

Ingredients:

Mutton (freshly slaughtered if possible), 1 kg bone-in, cut into 1-2 inch pieces

Basmati rice, 2 cups

Onions, 6 medium-sized finely sliced lengthwise

Vegetable oil for frying onions

Potatoes, 6 medium-sized peeled and halved

Ghee, 6 tablespoons

Red chili powder, 2 tablespoons

Turmeric, 1 tablespoon

Yogurt, 2 cups

Ginger, 5-inch piece, ground into a paste

Garlic, 8 medium-sized cloves, ground into a paste

Biryani masala, 2 tablespoons (Azad Mama buys his blend from a local masala wala; here is a recipe to make your own)

Green cardamom, 10 pods

Milk, ½ cup

Saffron, 8 strands

Atta flour, ½ cup

Instructions:

1. Pour enough oil into a kadai or deep pan to cover the onions. Fry onions until they are brown and crisp. Drain and set aside.
2. Mix mutton with yogurt, garlic and ginger paste, 2 tbsp biryani masala, 1 tbsp red chili powder, about a quarter of the fried onions, and salt to taste. Marinate for an hour.
3. Soak saffron in warm milk. Set aside.
4. Rinse rice, then soak in cold water for 30 minutes. Drain and set aside.
5. Boil potatoes in water with 2 tbsp ghee, 1 tbsp turmeric, 1 tbsp red chili powder. Drain and set aside.
6. Heat 2 tbsp ghee in a pressure-cooker or a thick pan. Add marinated mutton and cook on high heat for 5 minutes. Add 1 cup water, cover and let cook on medium heat for 15 minutes, stirring from time to time. Add potatoes to the mutton and let simmer on low heat until gravy is thick. Transfer to a dum if you have one; if not your widest pot will do.
7. Parboil rice five cups of water, cardamom and salt to taste for 10 minutes, or until about ¾ done.
8. Strain rice and layer over mutton and potatoes. Add remaining fried onions. Dot the rice with 2 tbsp ghee. Pour saffron milk over mixture.
9. Cover dum or pan. (Optional: To maximize the flavor, make bread dough in advance and use it to seal the lid shut.)
10. Serve with cucumber-onion raita and enjoy!

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Durga Puja may be the world’s greatest street party. For five days, Kolkata completely shuts down to honor the Mother Goddess Durga and celebrate her victory over the evil buffalo demon Mahishashura.

Throughout the city, thousands of elaborate structures known as pandals are constructed to house larger-than-life idols of Durga slaying Mahishashura, flanked by her children Ganesh, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Karthik. Many artists spend all year coming up with themes for these pandals, which provide audiences with far more than a temporary temple – they transport visitors to other worlds with their captivating designs, from a typical Bengali village to Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.

Crowds fill the streets, hopping from pandal to pandal until the wee hours of the morning. This all-night revelry would of course not be possible without a little caffeine kick, and chai wallahs are happy to help, serving strong-brewed black milk tea, and occasionally lebu cha – black tea served with fresh squeezed lemon, sugar and black salt to give refreshing late-night boost. Many keep their stands open until 5 am. Chai wallahs fortunate enough to be based in communities with popular pandals can expect to sell hundreds, in some cases thousands of additional cups each night.

These entrepreneurs aren’t the only ones seeking to make a buck off the holiday. Indeed, Durga Puja has become increasingly commercialized in recent years. Streets are lined with themed billboards – as you wait in line to enter a pandal, you see Durga gabbing on a cell phone encouraging you to switch carriers or using a new laundry detergent: “Make this a whiter Durga Puja.”

The festive season has become an excuse for shopping, and the norm is to wear new clothes each night of the festival. Of course, the holiday’s recent history is rooted in conspicuous consumption. Pandals originated in the mid-eighteenth century as opportunities for the city’s elite to showcase their wealth with elaborate household pujas. This year, new saris and salwars were soaked as remnant rains from Cyclone Phailin poured down on the city.

But the downpour did not dampen spirits on the festival’s final night, Vijaya Dashami, when people march idols through the streets to be immersed into the Hooghly River, a tributary of the holy Ganges. Children blow noisemakers. Men dance in the streets following floats carrying colorful idols. Women laugh and throw sindhoor into crowds from trucks. As all of Kolkata comes out to send off their idols, the city takes on the feeling of Carnival in Rio or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, if perhaps with less flashing of body parts.

Chai wallahs are there each step of the way. Joga and his wife Mongala typically sell chai, eggs and toast on the main thoroughfare of Bagh Bazaar in North Kolkata. But during the immersion – Bhashaan in Bengali – they move their stand to the riverside next to their home on the banks, just a few yards down from the ghat where the idols are released into the river. “Business is great during bhashaan,” Joga said. “Everyone comes to enjoy and celebrate the immersion of the idols. I get to watch it all from here.”

Joga usually sees great joy this time of year. But this year, the Bagh Bazaar Ghat has been witness to tragedy. As we sipped chai at Joga’s stand, news spread that a man had just drowned while performing the immersion ritual. He had likely been tangled in the ropes used to lower the idol, then pulled down by the forceful current of the Hooghly.

The scene of celebration quickly turned grave. Colorfully dressed women from the victim’s family – packed into the back of a truck where just moments earlier they had been dancing and laughing – broke down and cried to the sky. A boy screamed over and over for his father: “Baba!”

Emotions wavered between grief and anger. Family members yelled at policemen for their failure to prepare for the situation. These sorts of accidents are common, but no emergency boats had been patrolling the waters. A small wooden rowboat was deployed, from which a policeman in a white uniform supervised two volunteer divers, neither wearing goggles or any diving equipment.

After an hour of waiting, a rumor went up in the crowd that the drowned man had been found and he was alive. It seemed a very cruel emotional roller coaster to send his family on. The throng remained packed tight around the steps leading down to the ghat, people pushing one another to scan the murky river for signs of a body.

We left the family to their grief and walked along the train tracks to another ghat just five minutes away. There we found revelry a world away from the tragic scene we had left behind, as men shouted “Bolo Durga Mai Ki!” and carried idols down slippery steps, releasing them into the river.

The next morning, we learned the drowning victim’s body had been found at a ghat down the river. The man, Sukumar Kanshabanik, was 25 years old.

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Call Shivnat Rai Jadav the IBM of Central Kolkata. For the first 50 years of his professional life, Shivnat delivered milk to homes and businesses in and around Bara Bazaar, a vibrant patchwork of narrow bylanes and back alleys where over 50,000 merchants make a living right on top of each other. “We had cows and buffaloes here,” he waves his arm at the surrounding area. But ten years ago, Kolkata Police enforced a ban on urban grazing and Shivnat was forced to move his herd across the Hooghly River to the suburb of Belur seven kilometers north. 

Shivnat sent two of his sons to oversee the herd and its dairy production. He set up a small stand serving chai. “What else could I do? Paisa. I need paisa. I need to eat. So I had to adapt.” He did just that building a business where others might have only seen a small strip of sidewalk. On top of a wood platform, smaller than a yoga mat and raised a foot off the ground, Shivnat sits cross legged in front of a small burner and kerosene tank, bhar (clay cups) neatly stacked in a row to his right. He stirs “special cha” over coals next to the platform. What makes it special? “Only milk. No water.” One cup was the perfect way to start a day exploring the area – Shivnat’s stand is just a short walk from College Street, home to the world’s largest second-hand book bazaar.

Shivnat explains what goes into his chai: tea, sugar, cardamom, and milk from his buffaloes in Belur.

Hours later, after being detained by a downpour in one of College Street’s cluttered stalls, the sun begins to set and twilight approaches. In Bengali, twilight is known as godhuli bela, literally “cow-dust time.” You can imagine the old days when Shivnat’s herd would join hundreds of other cows walking home through the streets, their hooves raising dust around the city. Today there are no cows on M.G. Road, but they live on through Shivnat’s chai.

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Don’t have umbrella.
Stuck in Kolkata monsoon.
We’re drenched. Dripping. Wet.

Walking through the city of Rabindranath Tagore, it’s hard not to feel poetically inspired. But when you’re walking in a torrential downpour, it’s hard to feel any other way than wet.

The heaviest monsoon rains are supposed to pass Kolkata by the end of September. But due to low pressure hovering over the Bay of Bengal, the City of Joy has been hammered by thunderstorms threatening to dampen Durga Puja festivities.

We made two rookie mistakes resulting in the complete soaking of our clothes and belongings. First, we failed to realize that Calcuttans are quite sympathetic to the fact that it no one really gets anywhere in the rain. Ignorant and rushing make an appointment on time, we descended the steps of the Victoria Memorial, where we had spent the afternoon, into the deluge. Second, we did not bring an umbrella.

Sometimes you feel a sense of calm caught in the rain. You’re soaked, but so is everyone and there’s nothing you can do about it, so you look up, enjoy the shower and smile. But today we were missing that peaceful resignation. We were wet, surprisingly cold, and tired.

It’s times like these chai wallahs were made for. And it’s times like these you appreciate how you can hardly go half a block in Kolkata without running into a chai wallah.

We scurried from the cover of the Kalighat Metro station looking for the first chai wallah in sight where we could retreat, like mice scampering across a kitchen floor blindly searching for a hole in the wall. We didn’t have to go far – about 20 steps – to reach Shibu’s tea stall where we huddled under tarps promoting political candidates and advertising “Spoken English” tutoring.

Shibu promptly poured us strong milk tea into a two-inch tall clay cup. The cup – kulhar in Hindi, bhandh in Bengali – lent an earthy taste to the tea, an extra something plastic can never match.

As the storm grew stronger, we packed in tighter under the tarp with other customers taking refuge. Prasul, waiting out the rain before boarding a bus to his home in Darjeeling told us he took his tea with “liquor only.” He encouraged us to try some. We were indeed in need of a stiff drink but surely he couldn’t mean alcoholic tea. We ordered one, unsure what we were getting ourselves into.

“Liquor only” in fact meant something much more innocent – simply the “liquor” of black tea. The bitter drink provided a welcome respite from the rich milkiness and sugary sweetness of masala chai.

While we sipped, we admired how Shibu and his wife Purnima worked together, one seamlessly taking up the other’s task where he or she had left off. With 20 years of running this business together under their belt, they knew each other’s rhythms. When Shibu left a pot of boiling tea to fill another vessel with water, Purnima stepped in and stirred the pot before it could boil over. “Husband and wife make a good team,” Shibu smiled. Their son Devashish helps out in the evenings after finishing his sales job at Park Avenue Cosmetics.

The rain kept coming down as we watched cars and buses lurch through the soaked streets. A few unfortunate souls without umbrellas waded through knee-deep pools of water, but foot traffic was sparse.

“This rain is very bad for business,” Shibu said. “It’s Puja time so everyone should be out shopping. This is always the busiest time of year for all businesses in Kalighat.” But in the hour we stood at the tea stall only four customers came by.

“We are sad it is raining, but we are happy at least you have come.” We had been sad too. Until their chai brightened our day.

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