"Phiphteeen", said the Chai-wallah

I visit this restaurant “Sri Udupi Park” every day since I moved back to Bangalore. It has a very nice seating area in front of the restaurant, a good tree on the left side, and some distance from it there is a tea stall which is hosted by Udupi Park Management itself, if I’m not wrong. Since the last month 1 month, I have been consistently drinking “Chai” at Udupi Park and I haven’t missed it even 1 single day.

I visit there twice a day for tea, one is during the morning usually at 6 AM, and in the evening post dinner at 8:30 PM or 9:00 PM. I wear a hoodie which has a big pocket in the front, as that helps me to keep my book there without carrying a bag of sorts to carry the book. I started walking towards it, through the misty dust in the evening which kills all the good bacteria in my nose and makes me feel nothing less than a Camel walking in a windy desert. With a slow but steady and consistent pace I reach near to the Udupi Park, the person working there finds me from far away and he knows what to do. I reach there, take my phone out, stop the music, and open Google Pay to do the transaction. A loud enough shout comes towards me saying “Phiphhteeeeen” served by a polite-looking man who is nearly to bald probably because of his hair trimming style, hands all rough because of working for years doing things harsh for his hands. The tea is always a darker version of orange and brown mixed together, a bit heavy probably because of the heavy use of milk and very lightly sweetened. First sip and I often say “Purrfect”.

I take my cup of tea, and go towards the sitting area on the front porch of the restaurant. To begin with, I just keep sipping until the level of tea is half of the cup while enjoying some good music in my ears. So that I get some time to adapt to my surroundings and also so that no one keeps looking at me or noticing me. The tea level hits half of the cup and then I proceed with opening my book quietly and slowly. I try to remember where I was last and start reading 1 or 2 pages before that point. With the book, I change my playlist to something that will help me focus. “The Nutcracker” by Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Chopins or sometimes “Making Music” by Zakir Hussain accompany me and help me focus in that very bustling and happening Udupi Park.

I see this woman every time roaming around the street with a lot of confusion. There is nothing strange or common with her. She usually wears a Yellow or Golden-ish Kurti with her phone overlapped on the brown hand purse. She has a haircut similar to Kiran Bedi, but she does not wear spectacles. She comes from the front of the restaurant, crosses the road takes the right side of the street, comes back again, and then proceeds to the left side of the restaurant. This continues on for some time all while holding the purse and phone in such a position that they are near to her ears. You might wonder, how did I notice her when she was all so simple? She caught my eye when I saw her wearing good clothes on one day and later she wore a grey T-shirt with some textual print which is quite dirty and had dark patches of dirt on the t-shirt arms.

Sitting on the bench there, sometimes I say things like “I want to reimagine the world” or simply think about the brown leaves on the trees. The leaves were not brown by birth, perhaps they are covered by the dust that flew between the thin air in that region. Because of this they have lost their natural beauty, just like humans.

Last month, most of the poems and blogs I wrote were imagined there. On the last day of 2024, I was planning to sip some tea, skim through the book, and then head towards the nearest Baskin Robbins to spend some of my dough looking towards the wall and eating an Ice Cream. The “Pralines and Cream” or the “Cookies and Cream”. Out of nowhere, I had the urge to complete my “The Year 2024” blog and all I told myself was, “I will write it very differently this time”. I woke up furiously and headed straight towards my place and rewrote the same blog in 15 minutes which I was trying to write for a month. At that moment, I realized I could only write different things when I was all excited about it.

At least once in a week, I see some monk who hasn’t sold his Merc-Benz yet. If you are calm and observant enough in life, soon you will understand how you can read people’s faces easily. I try to do it almost whenever I am sitting there after I am done with reading. Some often look very greedy from their facial expression or if I want to be precise “their eyes tell me that”. I always wondered why can’t they go to “The Filter Coffee” which is just beside Udupi Park where the Tea costs 45 INR whereas it’s only 15 INR in Udupi Park. Maybe they find the Tea in Udupi Park to be better than the other restaurants or is it that when someone becomes rich their standards only increase for certain things that have a binding with their Statuses?