a novel by Anosh Irani
EXCERPT
AS ZAIROS RODE TOWARDS the Anna Purna chai stall, he welcomed the sun. He hoped its heat would burn away the memories of the morning. He went past the abandoned train bogies, the bales of straw waiting to be transported to Bombay, the liquor booth where tribals numbed their brains for a few rupees, the collector’s office, the furniture shop that sold only mustard benches, the lumber mills with the creepy echo of sparrows, until he hit the main road, which was a dusty, rocky mess. It had been dug up, and bullock carts, trucks, vans, cars, and cycles wove through it, spraying rock debris from under their tires.
After Zairos passed Alan’s petrol pump with its wilted array of coconut trees, he turned left and almost ran over Pinky, a six-year-old orphan with an eternally runny nose, who had perched herself close to Anna Purna’s to secure her daily dose of Tiger biscuits. Anna, the owner of the chai stall, was an Indian Clark Gable: thin moustache, clean skin, hair always set in the most well-behaved manner. No one knew his real name so he was called Anna, or Elder Brother, the title given to any South Indian man who wore a lungi and ran a chai stall. Anna had an old Hollywood charm, but his wife was quite the opposite—dusky, and full enough to be on the cover of Debonair.
To the Iranis, Anna’s chai stall was one of Dahanu’s most prized possessions. It was a beloved meeting place—its hard wooden benches had seated many an overweight Irani over the years—a dingy hole beautifully suited to the hirsute features of the men that frequented the joint. At Anna’s, they were like beasts in a cave where they could fart, joke, smoke, abuse, and pontificate. Of course, they did this anywhere, but Anna’s was the home ground. Each morning, after making a round of their chickoo farms, the Iranis would gather here and drink tea, coffee, or Pepsi. Cigarette smoke gave the place a sinister haze, like fog in a cemetery. Yet the place was alive, full of joy and horniness, and credit had to be given to Anna’s steaming chai and his steamy wife.
At its peak, Anna’s chai stall offered a heady cocktail of languages. Anna spoke softly in Tulu to his wife and loudly in Hindi to the balloon-factory owners; some of the Iranis conversed in Dari just to remind the ones who didn’t that they were inferior and had been polluted by India, and the inferior Iranis, who spoke Gujarati, spoke it in a crass manner to make the actual Gujaratis, the Indian ones, feel infuriated that their language was being bastardized in the cheapest way. But in the end, if one kept some distance, one could see the beauty of Anna’s, that brothel of languages.