Dilawar Tea Co

If you climb up to the second floor here at 65 Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Road, the first thing you’ll notice is the smell of tea. We have been running Dilawar Tea Co from this spot for a while now. It’s not a ground-floor shop with a big window, so you have to know where you’re going. The stairs are a bit narrow, but once you’re up here, it’s a different world from the busy street below. We spend most of our mornings sorting through different bags and checking how the leaves look. It gets dusty sometimes, and we’re always moving crates around to make room. My father used to say that tea is a simple business, and we try to keep it that way. We don't spend money on big ads or anything like that. Most of our customers have been buying from us for decades, and they just know the way up. We have a small table where we sit and taste the new batches. Sometimes the light in the hallway flickers, and we keep meaning to fix it, but there’s always more tea to pack. It’s a busy life on the second floor. We aren't trying to change the world; we just want to make sure the tea we send out is the same as it was years ago. It’s just us here, really, working through the crates and keeping the tradition going as best as we can without making things complicated.