The stove is a clay oven with a coal fire in it, and it has been lit at half past four every morning for four decades. The kettle is aluminium and has been replaced twice. The bench outside is the original, and it has been repaired so many times that no part of it is.
The cups come from Kumartuli, or from a potter in Howrah when Kumartuli is busy with the goddess. They are thrown on a wheel, fired once, never glazed. Unglazed clay is porous, which is why the tea tastes faintly of wet earth and why the cup can only be used once.
The economics
Seven rupees a cup. The bhaar costs between eighty paise and a rupee twenty depending on the season and how the potters' order book looks. Milk, sugar, tea dust, coal. On a good day, three hundred cups; in the monsoon, more, because everybody stands under the awning.
Nobody in this trade has a lease. The stall occupies a few square feet of pavement under an arrangement with the building behind, the local councillor's office and, historically, whoever was collecting. It has survived four clearance drives.
What the bench is for
The tea is not the product. The bench is. Between about four in the afternoon and eight in the evening it holds a rotating group of men, some of whom have been coming since before the shop had a roof, arguing about the derby, the metro extension, a serial nobody admits to watching, and a municipal drainage decision from 1998.
“They come for the tea for the first month. After that they come for the bench.”
This is what adda is, at the level it actually operates: not the Coffee House, which is the famous version, but a few square feet of pavement where the same twelve people turn up for forty years.
The succession problem
The son has a job in an office in Sector V and will not take it on. This is the ordinary arithmetic of the trade: a salaried job in the IT belt pays several times what a pavement stall does, with a chair and air conditioning.
There are fewer stalls than there were, and the ones that close are not replaced by other stalls. They are replaced by nothing, or by a franchise counter selling the same tea in a paper cup for forty rupees, which is not the same transaction at all.
The clay cup is the part people notice going. What actually goes with it is the bench.
