A queer tea ritual.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Old Delhi is changing furiously. Kebab kiosks are being replaced by pizza parlours. Groceries are displaying varieties of pasta. Mayonnaise sauce has become as much a home thing as pudina chutney. So essential to keep a track of these modernising alterations. They assert that the historic Walled City is not some predictable mango pickle preserved in vintage oil, but is throbbing with contemporary energy, and is very much a part of our transformative present.

This said, a peculiar tea tradition in the old quarter has continued to remain alive. The Delhi Walla had recorded the aspect eight years ago, fearing that it might soon end. Last Sunday, a tour of the Walled City proved that the fear was unfounded. The tradition is continuing to stand as firmly as the Red Fort’s stone ramparts.

Old Delhi has many tea stalls that serve the chai by pouring it into a glass tumbler, which then is planted into a china cup. You don’t see this elsewhere in the city. The curious cup-and-glass tradition has more than one logical explanation. A tea stall owner says that it enables a customer to share the chai with a friend—“one by two,” he remarks. Another tea stall owner argues that the combo enables a customer to cool down the piping hot chai by repeatedly pouring it between the glass and cup.

The tradition is limited only to tea stalls, and to trace its origins is as difficult as unearthing the area’s first tea stall. But of course Purani Dilli’s chai civilisation was more sophisticated during the Mughal-era. A passage in Ahmad Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, a novel about 19th century Purani Dilli, vividly evokes the area’s then chai-time decadence:
“Ghafoor would bring the samovar and put it on the floor. When the water started singing Mir Nahal added tea leaves, cinnamon and cardamom to give it flavor. In the meantime Ghafoor had taken out beautiful cups and spoons of real china with blue flowers painted on them, from the almirah. The cups were beautiful, narrow at the base and broader near the brim, without handles; and the spoons were big and lovely, and matched the cups in color and design. Mir Nahal added milk and sugar, and gave fluffy biscuits to the children who dipped them in the tea and ate them with the spoon.”

Literature has sadly ignored Old Delhi’s cup-and-glass style of chai drinking. Some tea stalls are anyway ditching it for the more practical plastic cup. It is possible that the uniqueness might soon be gone with the wind. I shall revisit the tradition eight years later.

PS: Photo shows citizen Saad in Gali Choori Wallan, carrying the cup-and-glass chai.