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Journalism of Courage
Having a cup of tea has always been special for me. For me it has great romantic connotations. Like the Japanese tea ceremonies or drinking endless cups of Chinese tea during a Chinese meal. Even brewing a cup of tea is special, the scent of tea wafting up as the kettle brews.
But as I realised, it gets particularly special when you get to Pune, and go into the little restaurant down a side lane in a crowded neighbourhood where the locals and the hoi polloi mingle the equivalent of what an Irani restaurant would be in Bombay. I finally got to know the tea lingo in Pune.
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.
