MARRYING SWEETS WITH CHAI
Tea stalls almost always stock eatables. Unfortunately, the trend these days is to cram up the shelves with cigarette packs and tobacco pouches.
Even so, there still exist quite a few chai places where you can get an old-fashioned fen or rusk. Then there are occasional stalls doubling up as drive-in mithai destinations—stocked with traditional sweetmeats.
Such as Chaudhury Tea Stall on Old Delhigurgaon Road near Gurugram’s Atul Kataria Chowk. The teeny-weenie place is one of those increasingly rare pavement shacks that keep its sugary eatables in glass jars (apparently those things are too hefty and impractical to maintain these days). The delicacies available here: maida barfi, soan papdi, coconut laddoo, atta biscuit and fen. Try all. Each goes well with the stall’s chai but the coconut laddoo is out of this world, the fen is extravagantly flaky, and the too-sweet atta biscuit comes embedded with crispy pieces of roasted almonds.
Stall owner Jara Singh shrugs. He hasn’t made these mithais and biscuits, he confesses sportingly. “They come from a factory in Delhi but I don’t know from which factory... a supplier brings them to me.”
The word ‘factory’ must not dampen the craving for these sticky tea-time sweets. Instead, consider the scale of the makeshift ecosystem consisting of these so-called factories, the anonymous suppliers who commute long distances on bikes daily, and modest shacks like Chaudhury Tea Stall. All these elements come together to give us an instant chai-flavoured sugar high.
Such tea-mithai setups were more common in the recent past for “now most customers ask for namkeen packets, which are cleaner and cheaper,” confides Mr Singh. In fact, he, too, stocks those ubiquitous “fast-moving” ₹5 aloo bhujiya packets. The coconut laddoo, on the other hand, costs ₹10 and doesn’t sell that fast even though it’s doubly yummy.
Be warned: Mr Singh keeps his chai readymade in a thermos flask. He is, however, amenable to making fresh chai on request. Open daily from 7am to 9pm.