While in Chennai, on Sunday mornings I used to go to this small roadside tea shop, a few steps away from my place and sit there reading a newspaper and having a cup of one meter Kerala tea and now in Bombay there is another small mallu tea shop cum restaurant which I frequent, not that frequent but frequent enough for the master of ceremonies there to give me that smile of recognition, for a breakfast of Kheema and Pav. When I am in both these places I feel a certain connection. A connection not in the Nokian sense (by this I mean our erstwhile youth connect of Marquez, Mullholland Drive, Metallica and Michael S) but a feeling of being part of undying whole, an undying continuity, of all the people from my state who sat, sit and hopefully will continue to sit in tea-shops with papers and friends, of the untiring tea-maker who is at once there and not there and the strong half burnt taste of what we call chaaya.
The fascinating part is that I don’t feel like an outsider or that I am in a place which has nothing to do with who or what I am .Quite the opposite actually, when I sit in any of the variants of the coffee shops I am uncomfortable they don’t seem real, everything and everybody there seem to be trying to pour life into something that “is not”, but when I walk into a semi-dark, damp-aired, dirty chaaya kadas, I see life and its movement in the decaying, cracking, crooked softness of the wood and I know who I am, at least part of it.
Tony Xavier 