Tweet

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

By Judy Swallow
Everywhere you go in India you hear the same thing, the chai-walas call of “chai, chai” – tea, tea. It’ll wake you on every train journey, pursue you in parks, and greet you, at stalls on every street corner.

It’s the national drink, and it is a bargain. One chai please is three rupees – about a nickel.

I watched one chai-wala brew up a pot in front of me.

Into his pot of boiling water goes a bag of milk powder and a bag of sugar, and then the stewed tea, and then it’s all boiled up for half an hour or so till it’s thick and sticky.

That might not be tea to your taste – but believe me, after a sleepless night on an Indian train – you’ll want it. And for many of those drinking around me, rickshaw pullers and market porters, this sickly cloying caffeine hit is all they’ll get to keep going all day.

These stalls, that recipe – are the same all over India. What’s different here in Kolkata is that the chai is still served in tiny crude traditional red clay cups.

And when you’ve finished, you just throw them down on the pavement, smash them.

That might sound like the worst kind of littering, but it’s not – it’s a perfect green model, because these cups are so lightly fired, they just dissolve in the heat or the monsoon rains.

That’s how it used to be all over India – railway tracks were lined in red. But these little cups didn’t fit the face of new India. Everywhere else, they disappeared, replaced by plastic.

And this is the result. The park where I sit is lined with a mountain of these little plastic monstrosities.

The habit of slurping and tossing hasn’t changed, but these cups, of course, don’t melt back into Indian soil. And hundreds of millions are sold daily – an ecological nightmare.

And there’s more to this story it than just going back to the past to be green. A lot of India’s poor got left behind in the new India.

In a slum at the back of the Red Light district of Kolkata, the three Prajapati brothers, Ashok, Ajay and Vijay have set up their workshop, an open shed on bamboo scaffold with a mud floor.

Doesn’t sound like much, but for them, it’s their future and their kid’s future. They come from a village in India’s poorest state, Bihar. They’re potters, but plastic put them out of business there, so they’ve come here, and business is booming.
I asked Ashok if I might interrupt his work. He turned out a cup every eight seconds or so.

“I make four or five hundred a day,” Ashok said. The wives and all our children live back in the village. Just I and my two brothers work here, doing this business.”

“And do you want your son to be a potter, like you?” I asked him.

“Oh no, my son is in school now,” Ashok said. “I don’t want him to do this work – I know the pitfalls, cannot make enough money.”

Ashok and his brother’s kids go to school – unlike many poor village kids in India who have to work for the family to survive. Thanks to these little clay cups.

And if you’re wondering about the taste – yup, you can taste the clay.

There’s usually a bit of grit at the bottom of every cup. But most Kolkatans like it that way.

“It’s part of the experience – you taste Mother India,” Ashok said.

And as well as helping people like Ashok, mother India doesn’t get trashed. Download MP3