I was a heavy coffee drinker during the four years I spent in the United States completing my undergraduate studies. My tryst with tea began only upon moving back to Delhi after I graduated. At first it was the elaichi-flavoured Tetley tea bags, which were quick and easy to make at home. Soon my mornings felt incomplete without a steaming hot cup of the strong beige liquid.

I am accustomed to drinking my chai without sugar – the same way I would drink coffee – how else do you enjoy the real flavour? But unsweetened chai is a bit of an anomaly in India. The first time I asked for chai without sugar at the tea-stall outside my office in Delhi, the chai wallah responded, “pheekee chai?” which literally translates to “bland tea?” – and thus I was outcast as a pheekee chai drinker, but a chai drinker nonetheless!

Saanya (right) and her friend Deepa enjoying chai in Amritsar.

 

Chai breaks are an infamous part of the work culture I was exposed to in Delhi. A simple test I devised to determine whether you’re a chai glutton is when your chai wallah starts to give you store credit – because he knows that you will be back the next day, if not within the next few hours! Needless to say, I pass this test. On seeing me walk down, the shopkeeper would yell out to the chai wallah “ek pheekee chai!”  (“one bland tea!”)

To understand just how important chai is to the work culture I was part of, I turn to my favourite joke about the Brazilian bureaucracy:

Two lions escape from a zoo and take different paths; one goes to a wooded park and is apprehended as a soon as he gets hungry and eats a passerby. The second remains at large for months. Finally captured, he returns to the zoo sleek and fat. His companion inquires with great interest, “where did you find such a great hiding place?” “In one of the ministries” is the successful escapee’s answer. “Every three days I ate a bureaucrat and not one noticed.” “So how did you get caught?” “I ate the man who served coffee for the morning break,” comes the sad reply.

This example is apt for India, if you replace coffee with chai. I worked with a Member of Parliament in Delhi for a year, during the course of which I met several bureaucrats and government officials. Every meeting began with the customary offering of chai. We slowly sipped on the sweet milky goodness, while exchanging pleasantries. Chai is the desi way of ‘breaking the ice’ when you meet someone for the first time. You easily avoid the awkward silence by staring down into the swirling beige liquid, alternating between small sips and occasional glances at the person across from you. Soon I mastered the art of drinking chai in official settings.

I also learnt early on to never say ‘no’ when offered chai in such official settings. My first such disastrous mistake resulted in standoffish behaviour from the staff of the official that I was to meet. The next time I visited, I made sure to accept the chai offer, and sure enough, I was chided for having previously refused! Luckily for me, social norm dictates that one chai acceptance neutralises a previous chai refusal. After many chai acceptances, I am now on good terms with the staff at that office.

Chai has also been an integral part of my travels across India – if you are wary of drinking non-bottled water from obscure looking roadside stalls, opt for the chai. I am convinced that the over boiling of the liquid kills any infection or bacteria. This justifies the copious cups of chai I have consumed while waiting at stations, bus stops, and pretty much at any roadside. From Punjab, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu, the chai culture prevails in most of the northern lands I ventured to. Waiting for the parade to begin at the Wagah Border in Amritsar, sitting across the Hameersar Lake in Bhuj with Gujarati folk music in the background, being woken up at an unearthly hour on a bus journey somewhere between Manali and Jammu, there are several memories that involve a cup of chai. Clearly, there is something indescribable about the goodness of garma-garam chai.

Counting the change in my wallet before boarding a train last week, I lamented to my friend, “I have only 20 Rupees. Just one cup of chai for each of us!” to which she responds, “I have 20 Rupees as well. Two cups each, we’re covered.” After all, what better sustenance for an eighteen-hour train journey.

 

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Tondalaya sips chai in Orchha, Madhya Pradesh.

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) in India. I also returned for my marriage to a former PCV who was directing a PCV training program at Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana, Punjab. I accompanied him on a week’s programing tour along with his language instructor. We made one of our many tea stops at this little roadside makeshift spot which consisted of no more than three charpoys (rope beds) and some rocks piked up to hold the fire to boil the tea. There were a few men squatting around drinking chai and an old old chap sleeping on one of the charpoys. He was snoring away, but undoubtedly heard English being spoken. He rose up, looked at us, and in a loud voice wanted to know why we killed Kennedy, rolled over and went back to snoring!

 

Tondalaya and Ron’s wedding in Delhi, 1971.

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If you’ve ever thrown a dinner party, you know cooking for guests can be a logistical challenge. Imagine cooking for 500,000. That is the task faced by the volunteer chefs and chai wallahs at Amritsar’s Golden Temple, the Sikh religion’s holiest site, on Guru Nanak Jayanti, which celebrates the birth of Sikhism’s founder.

The langar, or community kitchen, at the Golden Temple serves free food to anyone who visits the glimmering shrine, from pilgrims to tourists to locals in need of a hot meal. On on average weekday, about 80,000 people eat in the langar; on weekends, close to double that figure. But on Guru Nanak Jayanti, an estimated half million diners descend on the langar.

Every 15 minutes, a new group of diners enters one of the langar’s vast halls. They take a seat on one of the mats laid out in neat rows and watch as their steel thalis are loaded up with dal, vegetables and rotis by one of the many volunteers constantly marching down the aisles looking for plates to refill. After eating their fill, diners toss their plates and bowls at metal shield-wielding volunteers who deflect them into buckets bound for washing.

It is a well orchestrated process from the frying of the first cumin seed to the washing of the last spoon. Perhaps the most celebrated cogs in the langar’s wheel are the roti machines, which buzz every day turning 12 tons of atta flour into roughly a quarter million perfectly round flatbreads the size of small frisbees. Custom-built for the langar, these humming hunks of steel are contraptions that would make Rube Goldberg proud, taking the flour on a transformative journey through a mixer, a roller, and down a ten-yard conveyor belt of fire before popping out as a piping hot piece of bread.

But it is the volunteer chefs who embody the spirit of the Golden Temple. Volunteers come from all castes and communities to perform seva, or service, in a kitchen the size of an airport hangar, where massive cauldrons bubble with lentils and onions are stacked eye-high in mini-mountains.

Sukhpreet Singh, 20, a computer science student from Amritsar, has been doing seva at the Golden Temple since childhood when he would pour water for diners alongside his father. After he turned 18, he started coming on his own every Saturday evening from 7 pm til 2 am. His role is now one of the langar’s most important – he is the Golden Temple’s chai wallah.

Sukhpreet is matter-of-fact about the significance of his job. “It’s just as important as making food. Guests come and they want tea. In Punjab, we are friendliest to our guests. Whatever they want we give them.”

Sukhpreet says he does not know how long the Golden Temple has been serving tea, but acknowledges it was likely not served in the 16^th century when Guru Amar Das, the third Sikh guru, institutionalized the langar as an element of every gurdwara, or Sikh temple.

“The Britishers brought tea to India. Before that we drank milk. But now we cannot do without tea.”

Tea is served in an open patio outside the langar where people pour themselves bowls of chai from converted water troughs. They are free to go back for as many refills as they like. Should they need a cup of tea upon coming or going, volunteers hand out steel cups of chai and rusk biscuits in the walkway outside the Golden Temple.

The langar’s manager, Harpreet Singh, said he expected 30,000 cups of tea to be served per hour on Guru Nanak Jayanti. Sukhpreet would have to prepare chai the night before and it would not be a one-man job, so he brought along six friends to work with him.

The seven erstwhile chai wallahs make seven cauldrons of chai – each the size of a hotel hot tub. For each cauldron, they begin by diluting 30 kilograms of dry milk powder in 300 liters of water poured in from what appeared to be a fire hose.

That process takes about 30 minutes, according to Sukhpreet. “You have to pour in the water a little bit at a time, get it hot, mix some milk, then do it again.”

When the milk is ready, two of Sukhpreet’s friends dump in 50 kilograms of sugar from steel tins. An hour later they dump in about two kilograms of CTC tea pellets and half a kilo of a masala mix donated by a local spice merchant containing cinnamon, fennel, ginger, ajwain, and two types of cardamom – big black badi elaichi and small green choti elaichi.

The volunteer chai wallahs let the mixture boil for four hours, occasionally stirring the chai with a spatula reminiscent of a pole used to clean a pool. At the end of the night they will transfer the chai into vessels from which it will be served.

“We are here doing God’s work,” says Sukhpreet as he loads one of the vessels onto a handcart. Proving his point is a passage written above the entrance to the langar from the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikhs’ holy book: “The Lord Himself He cooks, Himself He places it on the platter, and Himself He eats it too.”

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