HYDERABAD: What’s in a cup of chai? A bit of ginger? Sometimes milk. Would elaichi be too much? Maybe it depends on how chai shapes one’s habits, their way home, or the search for something lost.
Hyderabad needs no introduction when it comes to tea. Its thick Irani chai defines the city, and rightly so. But for a young man from Chennai’s Tambaram, it’s the ginger-cardamom decoction made by an old vendor back home that still sets the standard.
A woman from Vizag still longs for the taste of Ooty leaves from her childhood. Perhaps that’s why chai tastes different across the city. People carry in their chai their memory, comfort and even fatigue. In Hitec City, between heat-glassed offices, people step out for roadside tea because sitting on a stone bench with a paper cup often feels more real than what they left behind.
“Sitting on the stone bench and having a cup of tea is my breather,” said Ashish, a tech worker near Wipro Circle. Between Bhooja and Mindspace, tea stalls sit wedged between chrome buildings. Some go for chai, others for a smoke, most for the pause. “It’s strange to have these shacks between all these fancy offices, no? But somehow, this feels more familiar than that concrete jungle.”
A Chennai boy who moved here two years ago still looks for the taste he left behind. “There’s this old man near Tambaram station who makes ginger chai with cardamom and gets it right every time. I’ve been going since 2018. Now I try to find that taste here. LCD near White House comes close, but not quite. That taste stays in my head.” He laughed. “I think I go to Chennai just for that tea sometimes.”
That chai break holds something more for others. Moumita, who moved from West Bengal, put it simply, stating, “Tea is an emotion.” She walks to a roadside stall near her office to reset. The kind of memories I have made on these rugged benches are extraordinary.” She still starts her day with ‘lal cha’, black and unsweetened, the way her family had it growing up.
Hyderabad’s tea is many things. Even Irani chai isn’t fixed. “Original Irani tea was black,” said Mir Abbas Ali Moosavi of Baadshahi Ashoorkhana. “No milk. A sugar cube in the mouth, and sip the tea around it.” That, he says, came from Iran, and still continues across parts of the Arab world. “But Hyderabad changed it. The milk was added to suit the local taste. That’s how this thick chai came about.”
Speaking of ashoorkhana, in the old city, the energy around tea is different. A sip becomes conversation, and conversation turns ritual. “The azaan floats from Medina, the smell of bun maska cuts the street chaos, and the Charminar stands behind. This is the perfect tea spot,” said a shopper outside Nimrah Cafe & Bakery. Ali bin Abood, owner of Nimrah, drinks chai up to 10 times a day. “My friends come around 7.30 every evening. They’ve been doing this for eight, nine years. That’s our time. That’s my fondest tea memory.”
Luke and Marcus, a German father-son duo at Nimrah, were on their second round. “I’m not a tea person,” Luke said, “but this creamy chai reminded me of dipping sandwiches into sugary milk tea as a kid.” Marcus added, “Black tea always meant road trips. My mother packed sandwiches and we’d stop along highways. That was the first tea of the trip.”
Farther down, an outlet at Shalibanda sees more than 8,000 visitors on weekends. “Chai is our lifeline here,” said Shahbaaz, the manager. “Chai is our lifeline.” Owner Md Abdul Majeed added, “We introduced Zafrani chai after the pandemic. It’s been huge. Saffron is good for health. It’s chai and medicine. I stick to that mostly.”
Back at Nimrah, three students from a city college stood drinking chai. One of them, Akshita, said she came once a month. “No, no, twice,” her friend corrected. “I wasn’t a chai person,” the friend added. “But now I think, if I ever crave tea again in life, it’ll be for these memories.”
And maybe that’s what stays. The friends who sit beside you. The sugar someone else stirred in. The sound of azaan or rain in the background. when you don’t realise you’re making memories, but you are. And that tea time is what we go looking for later.
