It was 11.30 pm, but the bus stop was bustling with people. The tea shop was doing brisk business and the radio played a tune that could raise the dead. The customers, all men, ate and smoked and talked. Many of them had in their hands what I had gone pining for—tea. There was a tight deadline to meet and tea was what I needed to jerk the neurons back in place.
While I stood there debating whether succumbing to the overwhelming desire to have a glass of tea was a foolhardy decision, the tea seller anna looked up and said with a smile, “Hello Madam.” It immediately put me at ease, and we established that we knew each other. I took the glass of tea and stood in one corner, undisturbed.
In a tea-obsessed country like ours, with tea stalls being a regular feature in most cities, you would assume that it would be easy to have a glass of tea. But the dynamics of having tea at a crowded roadside stall at any time, unfortunately, change drastically if the tea connoisseur happens to be a woman.
Apart from the taste, there are several other factors to be pondered on – How crowded is the stall? How does the crowd look like? Will I get some space to stand? Will they stare? (They always do, but still.)
While I enjoy my evening trips to the tea stall with friends, I have a thing for the solitary ones too. Drinking tea alone while watching people makes you feel one with the world. All the knots in the head come undone as you think: “Here I am, sipping this excellent tea. I can have Khara biscuits too if I want to. What else can bother me?”
A large portion of the credit of making my very frequent tea trips peaceful goes to all those tea sellers, those cheerful annas behind the steaming vessels. My tea drinking experiences are spread mostly across Hyderabad (some 12 years) and now in Chennai. All this time, I have chosen the stalls where the seller took extra care to make me comfortable. They told someone to step aside, they pointed out a spot to me and even tried to make small talk to put me at ease.
One of the peculiar occurrences at Irani tea stalls in Hyderabad is that if you are a woman and take your tea to the table, all the men present vacate the table. Though I still have not figured out if they found me repugnant or were hesitant due to any gender biases, I used to find the whole thing very charming. Who doesn’t like to have the whole table to oneself? You can read a newspaper. In Chennai too, when I find these helpful tea sellers, they become my frequent hang-outs. After some time, they stop the staring. They get used to me.