Cutting Chai

Leidy Klotz wrote a book called Subtract. The argument, roughly, is that we are bad at removing things. Give a person a problem and they will add. Another feature, another step, another meeting. Taking something away needs a kind of nerve that most of us do not have.

Mumbai sorted this out long ago and built a small glass around it. The glass is called cutting chai.

The First Cutting Chai

Decades back, new to the city and knowing nothing, I stood at a roadside stall while the man I was with asked for a cutting. I had no idea what was coming. A brand of tea, possibly. Something involving a machine. Out came half a glass, and that was that.

Cutting chai is a measure that quietly became the product. You can ask for tea. You can ask for a cutting. They are not the same order. The measure ate the thing it was measuring, which is a rare career for a word.

Why ‘Cutting’ and not ‘Cut’

I have wondered for years why it is ‘cutting’ and not ‘cut’. The tea has already been fractioned. The word insists on carrying on.

There is a plain commercial reason available. Cut chai would sound like the tea had been reduced in some suspicious way. Cutting sounds like a category. Mumbai is good at this.

The languages had options too. Marathi could have used ardha for half. Hindi the same, aadhi chai. Neither took hold, and aadhi chai would have been the obvious winner if half were the idea being sold. Half a dozen languages meet at that counter and none of them owns this word, which may be why it survived.

The same coast, further south, does the opposite. A Kerala toddy shop calls its food ‘touchings’. Fish curry, beef fry, tapioca, an entire meal, and the word claims only that something has been brushed against.

Back in Mumbai, the tense may simply be right. The tea is cut once at the pour, and then the cutting keeps happening. To your time, your appetite, the length of the conversation. The present continuous is accidentally correct.

What Stays

What is taken away is the tea. What is kept is everything else.

You still get the boiling. The ginger going in. The strainer. The pouring from a height that serves no purpose. You still get the hot glass handed over to someone whose fingers already know where to hold it. Half the volume, and not one part of the ceremony lost. Most people spend a full working life failing to manage that trick.

Four sips and it is finished. You are left holding an empty glass and a small sense of grievance, and this is on purpose. A full cup ends in satisfaction, and satisfaction ends conversations. A cutting chai ends in wanting a bit more. That bit is what makes you say the next sentence. It is also what makes you order another at four o’clock, which is where the economics comes back to collect.

The same subtraction runs through the company you keep while drinking it. Two men share one glass. Four people share two. The word sharing is never said out loud, because saying it would spoil it. The talk goes as far as the tea goes. A brother-in-law and his loan. A landlord. The road, which is always in the same condition. Then the glass is empty and everyone finds it natural to stop.

You are not asked to leave. The tea leaves for you.

So Much for the Spirit

The taxi drivers and mill workers who are said to have started this were not designing anything. One glass between two men, because that was what the money allowed. The city kept the habit long after the shortage went, and then put a price on it.

Which brings me to that much romanticised phrase, the spirit of Mumbai, usually produced after a flood or a bad day. If it began anywhere, it began here. In a glass cut in half so two people could stand together for four minutes.

The glass goes back on the counter. Someone rinses it in grey water. Nine seconds and it is ready for the next cutting chai.

Subtraction, done often enough, stops looking like loss.