That Odd Moment of Waking

I examined the bus schedule—just enough time for a chai, I thought. I crossed the street between two auto rickshaws.

Just after the sun rises in Pune, the whole city maintains its brief excursion into stillness. Stray dogs begin to do their morning patrols, chai wallahs wheel their carts up to bus stands, and the entire city, inch by inch, starts to vibrate into its particular form of chaos. However, before the commotion, the air is cold and crisp.

I sat myself down. I had been to this street a few times before—in transit to and from certain areas of the city—yet I’d never stopped at this street vendor.

Small slightly broken plastic chairs around a well used table. The sidewalk a mixture of concrete and unaligned bricks. The ground so uneven that it appeared that the earth was trying to reclaim the landscape. Bits of road, cars, and pedestrian-use decorated the path—a concrete village in itself.

The chai wallah opened his pots, dodging steam while whistling the current hit song. He rolled up wada pav in yesterday’s Pune Times, samosas in the Pune Mirror, and poured my cup of steaming chai into a well-worn small glass. Some would call this man “dirty”, commenting on his stained shirt and tattered shorts—but “dirty” has too many negative connotations, rather his appearance, movements, and speech all reflected the organic state of the shop, chairs and sidewalk. Even as he served us our chai, this simple action seemed rooted in a history of daily regulars and loose bus schedules.

The chai was smooth but no different than the chai down the road—the wada pav and chutney hit every satisfying button, spicy, dense, yet was probably just a normal street dish in the population’s eyes. Even the shop itself sat in a condition of ordinary union with its neighbor food stalls. To many, sitting there would’ve been a common moment. Yet, It was the entire atmosphere that made this moment a necessity to remember—the collision of cold calm chaos and scalding milk tea, as buses, bikes, and rickshaws rolled on by.

That is one of the remarkable things about street stalls in India; they allow you to fade in the background as the city unfolds. You are both apart from the movement and integrated within it. It’s an odd feeling of being both audience and actor, traveller and chai drinker, and to a certain extent, foreigner and local.

Perhaps I am building up the moment too much. It really was just a simple morning chai on a roadside in Pune, just before I missed my bus.