52/ 100 Chai Dogs
Is there a Better Combination than Tea and Biscuits?
It is not at all hard to find someone selling the milky, spicy and very sweet chai tea in India. There are people stirring their bubbling cauldrons of it on almost every street, and you only have to look for a battered old aluminium kettle, or catch a whiff of freshly grated ginger, to be able to locate somewhere to buy a little cup or two.
And where there is chai there are also biscuits. Often there are a range of crunchy morsels to choose from – I can’t say tasty morsels because, well, they sometimes were how I imagine ship’s biscuits might have been 500 years ago, minus the grubs. Mostly they had been bought from a local bakery somewhere and were displayed in giant plastic tubs with screw-top lids. The type of container you used to buy sweets from in your local corner shop.
My favourites were the Jeera biscuits, flavoured with cumin, but they also had some with caraway seeds too. My least favourite were, apparently, the most traditional chai accompaniment and are called Mathri. They are a dense, flaky, slightly salty and quite dry biscuit. The person who told me their name also said that they are good because they last for many days – they certainly did seem very durable and were even resistant to being eaten.
The priciest biscuits were the ones that came in plastic wrappers. Strangely we noticed that these were also the ones that were most likely to be bought as gifts for the dogs that were always roaming about. If people weren’t feeding them to the dogs they were leaving opened packets next to them when they were sleeping (dogs obviously can’t open biscuits because they haven’t got thumbs).
As well as dogs loitering around the chai stalls there were often poor folk asking for money or food, particularly in Jaipur and Delhi. On a few occasions we would pay for our drinks (and biscuits) and hand over a little extra to the chai seller with instructions to give them something. Watching from a short distance away it was reassuring to see that they always did just that, giving little cups of tea and biscuits to a surprising number of people. It’s nice to help out, and earn yourself a bit of good karma along the way.
