Just tea

I order a cup of chai and Jamshed orders a cup of coffee when from the next table a man shouts 8220;ek cutting lana8221;. Intrigued, I ask Jamshed what that means. He explains that a cutting is a cup of tea which is cut into half. So that what is generally a five inch cup is now merely filled up to two and a half inches. You can gulp it straight down, and it costs half the price 8212; three rupees.

Seeing that I am curious, Jamshed explains the lingo to me. Anywhere else, a cup of tea is only a cup of tea but here you can order a fifty-fifty, a cutting, a maara maari or a saada or a special.

A fifty-fifty is when the cup of tea comes with a small dish. The tea is divided into two. One person has it from the cup, the other from the dish and they split the fare. He explains to me that drinking from the dish is a highly skilled job requiring a degree of manual dexterity which you and I might possibly not manage but many people just seem to do fine. A speciality of drinking from a dish is that you slurp it which seems to add to the taste.

A maara-maari is half coffee half tea. As the taste of coffee is the dominant taste, it tastes more like coffee than tea.

The saada, of course, is a regular chai cup and then there is the special, pronounced 8216;8216;specaal8217;8217;, which is tea with elaichi.

So here, Jamshed explains, a cup of tea is much more than a cup of tea. It8217;s more a social statement. Laughing, I order a fifty fifty and tell Jamshed, you take the dish.