The tea was not good enough
Volume 3 | Issue 11 [March 2024]

Rahul Singh

Volume 3 | Issue 11 [March 2024]

Mr. Singh slowed down as the crowd started to get thicker in the market area of Sector 15 but he was still moving faster than the crowd in general, stopping only to look back with raised eyebrows for someone who might be following him. He had been walking briskly, running almost, for the last fifteen minutes or so, crossing the entire stretch of the relatively deserted GV Road. He was in his late fifties and this little adventure could have made his weak heart go berserk and his life kaboom. Not to mention his constant turning around and reckless crossing of roads. He was lucky to have survived the morning. This realisation relaxed him and drew his senses towards trivial matters like hunger and almost on cue there was a Mumbai style Udupi restaurant or Udupi style Mumbai restaurant (he wondered) right beside where he had stopped to catch his breath. These restaurants serve good tea, he thought and looked back once again to make sure that either there was no one after him or he had outrun the bastard. Once content, he entered the place (called Kshir Sagar) and took the only table that was available.

Artwork – Manjima Gupta, 2024

After he had settled down a bit, he could sense his old anxieties resurfacing. He had never been to this place and first-time visitors to any place behaved like lost conspicuous morons and he didn’t want to be anything like that. So, he started asking himself questions he should know answers to. What do the people who visit such places regularly behave like? What do they order? What are the things that are on the menu but nobody orders? And what if he ended up ordering something like that? They would know that he was not a regular. They know, they always know. These waiters in their brown greasy uniform, the guy who sits at the cash-counter, the sweat-soaked cooks in the kitchen, and the regulars of course. They can smell a newbie and pounce upon them with their judgments even in this most indifferent of cities. He was on the verge of sweating again when a big cone-shaped dosa came into his line of sight. He found it majestic and exactly the kind of thing a place is usually known for. This must be it, he thought. He decided to order a masala dosa hoping that it would come in the same conical shape. He had twisted and turned in his chair twice, checked his watch three times, and fiddled with his wedding ring four times in a matter of thirty seconds before his unease was put to rest by a waiter who approached him to take the order. He thought he had given away too much by being visibly unsettled and to make up for it, before the waiter could take his pen out, he said one masala dosa and a cup of tea. The waiter asked him if he wanted the tea with the dosa or after his meal. Mr. Singh chuckled and said – who eats dosa with tea hehehe, the good old sambhar is fine with me. In a second, he could see the waiter had moved to the billing counter to make an entry of the order. He found it unusual for a waiter to not laugh at a regular’s joke and his jig was clearly up in front of this one. What could possibly have given away his newbie status? English. Damn. Regulars don’t talk to waiters in English.

He sensed the familiar shiver-like sensation of loneliness creeping into him. He had come to a restaurant all by himself. The only thing that could have made it worse was if no one else in the restaurant had come alone. He gathered the courage to look around and found that there were two more tables where people were sitting alone. Before he could feel relieved, he noticed what they were having. Only tea. Nothing to eat. So people who come here alone, come only for the tea, he thought. Both of them were dressed in formal clothes. People on their way to work. He felt ridiculous again and started rehearsing in his mind the answers to the questions he might be asked by seemingly normal happy people who had companions to come to a restaurant with. Questions like – what are you doing here alone? Don’t you know the specialty of this place is pav bhaji? Are you new to this place? Are you lost, uncle? That conical dosa you are looking at is the plain dosa not masala. Don’t you know? Everyone knows that, you ignorant fool. And then the dosa arrived.

It was not conical and the tiny bowls of sambhar and chutney were not kept in the big plate but served separately. He was too hungry to get disappointed and immediately dived into the crunchiness and the paper-thinness of the dosa. He found it to be good. He started playing a game of trying to pick the masala aloo with the thin sheet of dosa without crumbling it into pieces. He failed miserably every time he tried and became happier every time he failed. His failure was the proof of how good the dosa was. He was so immersed in this little game that he forgot about the people around him. So immersed, that he forgot about his loud slurps and tch-tchs sounds he made while eating. So immersed that he did not realise how loud those sounds were. So immersed that he had forgotten that his table was right in the middle of the room, at minimum and almost equal distance from every other table. So immersed that he did not notice that every eye, including the young couple’s at the corner table, was at him. He made at least one eye-contact with each of them, slurped and tch-tch-ed loudly, mumbled go to hell, and continued his little game. The dosa was that good.

Artwork – Manjima Gupta, 2024

The waiter, like others, was trying to suppress his smirk and promptly appeared in front of Mr. Singh asking if he could serve the tea. Of course he could barked Mr. Singh by vigorously shaking his head up and down which finally settled at the entrance of the restaurant. If only he knew Marathi, he thought. With nothing to do until his tea arrived, his eyes kept groping for signs of trouble. Kept imagining trouble entering from the front door. He wondered if the place had a back door. If only he knew Marathi. He would make some small talk with one of the waiters and plant the question of back-door in the guise of discussing real-estate. Having this conversation in English seemed a bit outlandish even to him.

He decided to pay the bill while waiting for his tea. He had called one of the waiters when it struck him that he was carrying only one two hundred rupee note. If the bill was anything more than that, he would have to pull out his mobile phone with an unreliable network and try paying through one of those stupid payment apps that take forever to confirm the payment status. The restaurant not accepting online payment would be even worse. Not to mention how apparent his embarrassment of not knowing this fact would be in front of every eye that had already fallen on him while he was savouring his crispy, paper-thin dosa. Ah the dosa, how good it was he thought and started picking scraps of it from his plate when the waiter slammed the bill on his table. The amount was 129 rupees. He was visibly relieved. He put his lone 200 rupee note in the bill folder and half-waved at the waiter. The waiter took it and went away. There was no sign of him with the change for a couple of minutes. Mr. Singh suspected that the waiter interpreted his wave as ‘keep the change.’ He thought of asking for change but he could think of no answer if the waiter responded with ‘but you waved.’ He wondered if seventy-one rupees was too high a cost to avoid appearing dumb.

The tea finally arrived. The waiter, changeless, did not even look at Mr. Singh and if it were not a cup of hot tea, he would have slammed it on the table like the bill folder. Before Mr. Singh could lift his hand and ask for the change by rubbing his index finger and thumb, the waiter was gone. The aroma of cardamom coming from the tea made him momentarily forget about the change. He blew the surface of his hot steaming beverage and took a long sip, making a loud slurpy sound followed by a louder tch tch making the entire room grow silent and turn to him. Again. He looked around in disbelief and took a longer sip making a louder slurpy sound followed by a louder tch tch making the couple sitting in the corner break into a laughing frenzy. He tried mumbling go to hell but couldn’t. He felt the need to take another sip first to see if the tea was good enough. It was not.

He found himself surrounded by strangers who were either laughing or trying to suppress it by covering their mouths with their palms. He couldn’t go back to the tea that was simply not good enough. He screamed ‘waiter,’ asked for his change as loudly as he could, snatched it from the waiter’s hand, and started running out of the restaurant without bothering to count it. He looked back, with raised eyebrows, only after he was safely out of everyone’s line of sight except for the waiter, who was waving a ten rupee note at him from the entrance. Mr. Singh was clutching three twenty-rupee notes. He saw the waiter smile and turned around to walk as briskly as he could. Almost ran, mumbling ‘bastards.’

Artwork – Manjima Gupta, 2024