Friday, August 14, 2015

Hot Tea across India -- Rishad Saam Mehta delights with an enchanting tea-sipping ride …

One purchase of a travel book and that canny online bookseller started tempting me with more such travel books … it didn’t take long to persuade me to ‘only look’ at such proffered books … I put together a wishlist of around 4 books and after reading about them on the site, finalized two … Rishad Saam Mehta’s Hot Tea across India is one of the two …

When I read the title I thought it would be a kind of travelogue across tea growing places or places with distinct tea drinking cultures or different types of tea and the making of it in different places with local sights and sounds thrown in … but the blurb on the site told me that this book looks at ‘tea’ in terms of its ubiquitousness (?) on Indian roads … I altered the direction of my expectations and wondered … I would have loved to read any interesting travel book about tea growing places, or tea drinking cultures and so on … but this book seemed promising and I thought why not? 

Yes, the book fulfilled its promise and after reading it in two sittings, I can say that it is an engrossing read … it doesn’t pretend to be profound, but it takes you along on a merry ride across Indian roads and I enjoyed the ride, riding pillion on Rishad Saam Mehta’s bike and sometimes sitting in his car … stopping for hot tea at intervals …


All right, the premise is this … and Rishad Saam Mehta makes it clear in the opening lines of the book …

If there is one certainty about roads in India, it is that – no matter where you are or what the hour – if you want a cup of tea, you’ll find a chai ki dukaan within a few kilometres.  The tea shop is an integral part of Indian national highways, state highways, minor roads, even rough tracks.  From the desolate unsealed roads of Spiti high up in the Himalayas, to the sinuous route to Munnar, a cup of tea is within easy reach

The first episode sets the tone for the book … to hitch a ride on a truck to travel from Mumbai to Delhi … and then write about it … and this episode is full of fun, adventure, and embarrassment and there is lots of tea … and one such cuppa leads to this really huge embarrassment …

It is not one continuous journey, but different journeys tied together with tea … so you see the writer in different parts of the country travelling by road and enjoying the tea … but to cut the long story short, it is his descriptions of travel across the Himalayan landscape that forms the bulk of the narrative and it is indeed engrossing … the visions of the mountains and the tranquility that he experiences are otherworldly … Rishad Saam Mehta has a warm way with words and his descriptions of his feelings in the Himalayas come across as extremely heartfelt … at some places the ride becomes dangerous and the narrative takes on a tone of suspense and the pace increases …

Then there is a hilarious bus chase on the Delhi-Haryana road with Jolly Jhunjhunwalla … and the suspense again rears its head in the last episode in Munnar, where he is saved by … yes, a tea-maker … who of course, doesn’t acknowledge it openly …

There is food, of course … and descriptions of delicious meals at Balbir Singh’s Dhaba on the Grand Trunk Road and at Ahdoos, Lal Chowk, Srinagar … oh, these made me very very hungry …

And there are lots of different types of tea too … the tea in a Ladakh monastery with yak’s butter floating on top … tea with cardamom and ginger in Gujarat … the railway station tea … the kullad chai … the cutting chai … and made by a former bandit in a desolate stop between Gwalior and Agra … a shepherd in Kashmir …


I wish more and more young boys and girls read books like this … it has everything going for it … there is no dull moment, and there is adventure, some suspense, some hilarity, evocative descriptions, some quiet moments, and some speed too and lots of tea, of course … and written with a sense of ease and comfort … 

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