Six A.M. on the Ghats
Varanasi wakes up one clay cup of chai at a time.
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Before the boats, before the bells, there is the chai stall. Raju lights his stove at a quarter past five on the steps above Assi Ghat, and by the time the sky turns pink he has already poured a hundred cups.
He serves it in kulhads, small unglazed clay cups that give the tea a faint earthy taste. You drink, and then you throw the cup down where it breaks and returns to the mud it came from. Nobody washes anything.
The recipe is not a secret
Milk, water, a lot of sugar, black tea, crushed ginger and one cardamom pod split with a thumbnail. Boiled hard, twice. Raju shrugs when I ask about the recipe. The secret, he says, is doing it ten thousand times.
Tourists take photos of the river. Everyone else comes here first.
Pilgrims, boatmen, students and a few tired priests stand around the stall in a loose circle. For ten minutes, before the city gets loud, they are all just people holding warm cups in the cold.
