A frenzied rush for Pappu ki chai (or was it Raju’s) at Mughal Sarai station was intriguing. A kind soul brought me a ‘kullad’ of the hot, thick, milky and saccharine sweet tea. A long, queue at seven in the morning outside a Sardarji’s dhaba in Kolkata left me wondering. One from the queue said that walkers after their daily exercise at Victoria drank glassfuls of the dhaba’s trademark spicy concoction. Mumbai’s famed ‘cutting chai’ comes as half a glass, offering the spirit of the Maximum City. In Kochi, ‘chaya’ poured from a metre high is a favourite of drinkers and lens men alike.
Across India, our version of desi tea—masala chai—rules. What makes masala chai so popular and endearing?
A guess is that the concoction allows drinkers the liberty to customise the brew: make your own masala. The basic recipe is of cooking, re-cooking and re-cooking, strong tea, either fannings or dust CTC, with whole milk, sugar and spices, which makes it full-bodied.
Can the freedom that masala chai offers be stretched to outlandish proportions? I am not sure but here are two instances where it seems to have crossed all limits. A recipe where an antacid is added to the brew to make it hot and spicy, “like ketchup”, and another where a rather brave tea lover offered me his latest concoction of the drink. It was fancy. The secret, he said, was in adding a spoonful of coffee. “It gives double masala,” he said. Strangely, the glass of tea fell from my hand.
