Om Tea

You can find us at Shop No. 29, Ward No. 5 in Rahargora, which is the Dhaiya area of Dhanbad. We are pretty close to the Prabhatam Mall, but things are a lot simpler over here on our side. The shop is just a small room with a bench outside under a little tin roof. Since this is Jharkhand, it gets quite dusty and the coal trucks moving nearby don't help much with the cleaning. I spend the morning getting the coal stove started because I think it makes the tea taste better than the gas ones. My hands get a bit black from the coal but I wash them before I start the milk. A lot of people walk over from the mall area when they want something quick and cheap. I have a few jars of biscuits on the counter and a calendar on the wall that is a few months old. The ceiling is a bit low and I have to watch my head when I’m moving the big pots around. Sometimes the rain comes down so hard on the tin roof that you can't hear anything else. I just sit there and wait for it to pass while the tea simmers away. It is not much to look at from the outside but it is where I spend all my time from morning until late evening. We don't do anything fancy here.