Trump’s War Hits the Chaiwalas
In the leafy, refined New Delhi neighborhood of Nizamuddin the other day, a tea vender named Mohammad Meraj lamented the costs of faraway war as he swept his strainer back and forth across a simmering pot.
“Normally, these cylinders come from the Strait of Hormuz,” he told a customer, gesturing at a battered, rusting red cylinder sitting on the pavement to the right of his stand, which, besides tea, advertised iced coffee, “bread omlet,” “boiled egg,” and “cigratte.” Seven stacks of tiny paper cups were arranged to the left, next to packets of Nescafé, pouches of two-minute noodles, and a double gas burner connected to the cylinder—the main tool of his trade. Like low-cost stoves across India, Meraj’s burners run on liquefied petroleum gas, or L.P.G., a compressed fuel mixture. “The cylinders usually cost nine hundred rupees, but replacing this one would cost three thousand rupees on the black market,” he explained.
India, a relative bystander in the Middle East war, is home to eighteen per cent of the world’s population and receives more than eighty per cent of its gas imports through the Strait of Hormuz—or it did until March, when Iran restricted traffic and started attacking ships. Cylinders of fluid gas, which power everything from taxicabs to cooking appliances, vanished from many distributors. In the poor quarters of New Delhi, households struggling to pay for gas fired up chulhas, old-school wood-burning stoves, and hoped their tinder supplies held. The Times of India found workers in Chirag Dilli, the city’s dumpling-making capital, so stretched for fuel that some had given up on steaming and had turned operations over to chow mein.
For many Delhiite commuters, though, the plainest sign of mounting trouble was the price of roadside tea. Chaiwalas, or street tea venders, have long been taken as emblems of the small-scale entrepreneurialism by which uneducated Indians can gain subsistence, and, in theory, something more. (The country’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has made much of his own ostensible chaiwala interlude, selling tea as a boy, in Gujarat.) The stands serve as sites of passing assembly—roadside water coolers—and repositories of gossip and news. In the past month, they have also become centers of controversy and unease, as price increases have created what some have taken to calling the “chai crisis”: an alarming, possibly dangerous circumstance in which the world’s most populous country is straitened of caffeine.
To meet his growing costs, Meraj had increased the price of a cup of tea from ten rupees to fifteen, a fifty-per-cent rise (in New York terms, like a cup of drip coffee going from just shy of four dollars to nearly six overnight). In his view, though, the book-balancing was a Pyrrhic success. “There are fewer customers now,” he said. “People are a little scared to spend.”
Meraj began a new brew, tipping more milk into his pan, then adding tea, spices, and sugar. He wore an ironed, mint-colored shirt with the cuffs rolled up. He had cropped black hair and a gentle scruff of beard around wide, affably set teeth, like Freddie Mercury’s, and he worked with easy confidence, placing a cover on the pot for a low five-minute boil. The fuel cost of tea, for chaiwalas, is the price of simmering; unlike many roadside offerings, their product never leaves the flame. Meraj, who started selling in this spot, a residential neighborhood near the tourist expanse of Humayun’s Tomb, two years ago, when he was twenty-three, had considered an investment in induction burners, but they required an upfront cost of five thousand rupees—hundreds of cups.
As Meraj worked, a young man dressed in legal garb (black suit, white shirt) approached and ordered tea. He was a regular, Rishik Singh Rajput, a law student studying nearby.
“Restaurants have been closed in many cities, like Bangalore,” Rajput reported. Some popular destinations, like the beach province of Goa, had been at pains to support tourism amid the L.P.G. shortages; restaurants pared menus to be able to cook for vacationers and the population alike. “Ultimately, there will be locals who also want food,” Rajput said dryly.
After the tea had finished its boil, Meraj poured it out, straining the steaming, fragrant liquid into small cups. A fugue of car horns rang out from the street—a reminder of the squeeze on a country with acute fuel dependencies and little involvement in the war, but also of the avidity with which daily life was going on.
“The locals are facing surging prices,” Rajput said. “But the rest is normal.” ♦