Room for Tea

There are two ways to fit tea into a travel day. One is to drink it while deciding what comes next. The other is to let it be what comes next.

The difference sounds trivial until you try it.

A visit to India can accumulate a formidable timetable. The next train, the next neighbourhood, the building that must be reached before the light goes. Even curiosity can begin to sound managerial. Breakfast becomes fuel. A walk becomes a transfer. A drink becomes something carried in one hand while the other searches a map.

Tea offers a smaller unit of time.

There is the heat of the cup, first judged too optimistically. The first cautious mouthful. The taste of milk and tea, sugar or spice where they are used, made according to this particular preparation rather than an idea of what every cup should be. Chai is an easy word to put in a travel story. The cup itself deserves more attention than the shorthand.

Nor does the person serving it owe the visitor a lesson, an intimate conversation or a picturesque moment. Buying a drink is a transaction. It may become an encounter, but it need not become anything beyond a well-made drink and a brief exchange.

That modesty is part of the pleasure.

For the length of the cup, there is no requirement to discover something important. The street can continue without being interpreted. A camera can remain closed. It is possible to sit somewhere unfamiliar without immediately converting the experience into evidence of a successful trip.

Then the tea is finished and the practical world returns. There is a bill to settle, a route to check, perhaps a train that will not share the traveller's new patience.

Nothing dramatic has happened. No great truth has been delivered with the saucer.

Yet the day has acquired a different proportion. Between the places marked on the map is a small space that was not spent preparing to be somewhere else.