Chaiwala

Yesterday I took a trip out to see a potential new project site. Getting there involved some effort. 4 am wake up call, 5 30 am flight through dark, smoggy skies and at the other end, a 3 hour drive to the actual location.

The road from the airport was super smooth; asphalt shining in the early morning sunshine, a snaking tongue that is testament to India’s most economically progressive state, run by a poster boy for communal disharmony. Of course. Such contradictions are accepted with equanimity in India.

We stop at a newly minted “tea shop”, in our country a euphemism for a ramshackle tin shed that sells everything from Iodex balm, batteries, shining strips of shampoo sachets, shoelaces, smudged glass jars with impossibly coloured boiled sweets and strong, milky tea, spiked with ginger, cardamom and a generous fistful of sugar. As we wait, the tea is streamed out in long milky ribbons into faceted clear glasses by a young boy with brown, brown eyes who knows already that school is a place where other children go. The tea shop owner used to be a farmer, tilling the dusty, dry earth to grow enough crop to feed his family for a year, a month, a fortnight – whatever he’s able to rustle up with aging bullocks, contaminated fertilizer and inconsistent rain. He gave it up two years ago when his then fifteen-year-old son trudged into the city barely half an hour away to find a better way for them to live. One month of driving lessons courtesy a friend, two pawned bangles to raise money for a fake drivers license, four bribes and some assorted abuse later, Chintu is a testosterone brimming Baroda taxi driver and an ex-farmer’s son. The teashop is just another feather in his still underage, still too young to do anything legally, cap. And in the Indianised version of the old adage about the horse and the water, not only can you ferry your bleary horses to the tea shop, you can also address both ends of the supply chain as the taxi meter ticks away.