Rajan's Tea Shop by Hannah Smaill

I’ve never given much thought to divine intervention, at least not until this morning when I walked into a tea-shop in a tiny seaside town at the southern most point of India. I was looking for breakfast, and this was the busiest spot in town, with people crowded in around foil plates of dosai, roti and sambal. I walked inside, garnering stares from over half the people in the shop. I took a deep breath and fond a seat at an empty table. This was the first time I’d been alone in India. And I suddenly felt it, even in a room full of people.
I sat patiently, looking around at the jostling tables. People pulled apart chewy wads of roti and a man circulated the tables with a large stainless steel bucket of curried vegetables.
I wondered if I was supposed to do something or say something to someone. So far the only person who hadn’t glanced my way was the waiter.
After a few minutes a foil plate was plonked in front of me, and I pointed to my neighbours roti. “Roti please.” The man nodded and sauntered through to the kitchen. Another man stood in front of a large blackened hot plate, slapping a lump of roti dough into shape.

A pile of roti arrived after a few minutes and the man with the bucket of curry edged towards me with his ladle.
I mopped up the curry with my roti and carefully pulled apart the wispy pastry with my right hand only.
I watched another man up the front of the shop pouring cups of coffee. Two teaspoons of sugar went in first, then a cup of hot milk, and finally, he strained ground coffee through a filter into the cup. He stood back and expertly poured the coffee like a brown waterfall, from one stainless steel cup to another. The final pour went into a tiny paper cup, its head just like the froth at the base of a waterfall.

The waiter squeezed past my table again, and I asked him for coffee, unable to help my hands from miming a drink.  I finished the last of my roti and pondered the rest of my day, perhaps the afternoon with a book on the hotel’s rooftop.

The tea-shop had emptied out and I suddenly realized I was only one of two people left.
A large man, who had been doling cash out of a drawer all morning smiled at me.
“Where are you from?”
“New Zealand.” I readied myself to leave. The pages of my book were calling my name.
“Ahh, I have a friend in New Zealand.”
I nodded warily, unsure if this was the conversation people had warned me against.
“She’d be 78 years old now. An old friend of mine.”
A strange flicker of wonder struck me. Not in a million years.
He smiled as he said it, and somehow I knew, the split second before the words left his mouth. “Her name is Jean Watson.”
I blinked.
After a few seconds I tapped my chest, unable to find the words. “I know who you mean. Jean Watson, she is the reason I came to Kanyakumari.”
We stared at each other, disbelief strung out like a frayed rope between us. The man grinned and shook his head. It was too much.

“Twenty years ago Jean gave me 2,000 rupees to start this tea-shop. It was only tea, then, just the front part here.” He waved towards the front section of the shop. “She opened this shop. Every day she came here to drink chai, every day.” 

I had a sudden recollection from Jean’s book about the Karunai Illam. There was a young man she’d met in Kanyakumari. She’d befriended him over several years and helped him to open a tea-shop. And here, he was, twenty-five years later, sitting beside me. This was India after all.

I swallowed, knowing that Jean’s passing needed to be shared. “Did you know Jean passed away?”
He stared at me, his face instantly shadowed with grief. He took off his glasses and pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose. Not for the first time, I had a true sense of just how many lives Jean Watson had gifted with her generosity.
My stomach sank. “I’m sorry, I…”
“We are not getting this information.” He returned his glasses to his face and shook his head. “When?”
“On December 28th, last year.”
He glanced around at the walls of his shop, momentarily empty.
“She was the same age as my mother. She was part of my family.” His voice trembled.
“She was a wonderful woman. She has made an incredible difference to many peoples’ lives.” I told him how I’d recently been staying at Karunai Illam and how the people there had loved his friend as dearly as he did. I told him about the procession through the streets of Nillakottai after Jean’s passing, how hundreds of people had walked in her honour. I told him about her funeral in Wellington, and how newspaper articles had been written, and a documentary made about her life.
He rallied his staff around the table, telling them the news. Their faces dropped, voices raised.
“They knew Jean,” he explained, “We all did. All of the shop owners along here knew Jean.”
I took out my camera and showed them the photos I had taken while I was at the Illam. I told them how everyday Jean was honoured with a garland of hibiscus flowers picked straight from the Illam gardens. He immediately asked if I could send him a copy of this photo and wrote down his email address.

“My name is Rajan.” He said, shaking my hand.
“Would you like tea? Jean always loved chai. Sometimes she would come when it was busy and she would take the money, sitting right here.” He shook his head and smiled at the memory. “It was the only shop here, my shop. You could see the sea from here, there was nothing else along here. It was beautiful.”
I nodded. For the first time in my life, I was quite sure I knew what Jean meant when she used that word providence.
I was sure of only one fact about this encounter; I was not at the helm. I was here in Kanyakamuri for a reason beyond my own comprehension.

Customers came and went, and Rajan spilled with stories about Jean and himself. It was a young man telling these stories, of this wonderful woman who helped him, who believed in him.
“You must come to my house for lunch.” He stated. “At my home I have a photo of Jean and I in front of the temple. I was only 20 years old, and Jean was 56. You must come to my home.”
I nodded, “Ok, of course.” It wasn’t a choice. I already knew I was going.

We climbed aboard an auto rickshaw and rattled up the main street of Kanyakamuri. We’d gone less than 500m before Rajan jumped out at a tiny shop. “What do you like to drink? Coke? Miranda?”
“Just water is fine.”
He disappeared inside the shop and emerged a moment later with a huge bottle of orange Miranda. “For you!” Who was I to disagree?
Rajan said some thing to the driver and we slowed down before a hotel. He pointed excitedly, “This is where Jean always stayed.”

We navigated along several narrow alleyways before we stopped in front of a large house. “Jean came here when my home was only the first floor. The floor was concrete, not marble like now. I wish she could come here, but she is not here…” He looked around hopelessly.
“It’s very beautiful,” I admired. “I’m sure she would’ve loved to visit you here.”

We sat in the living room and I met his mother, his wife and two children.
“When Jean was here, she played with my daughter, dancing with her when she was small. She would be so happy to see them now, these two… My mother was very friendly with her. She came to my house and my mother sent her home with everything, jaggery, Indian sweets. She filled her bags with them.”
A large stack of photo albums appeared and Rajan rifled through them until he came to the photo he wanted. A picture of a young Jean Watson and a skinny young Indian man, outside the Hindu temple on the waterfront of Kanyakumari. I laughed. There they were. Unbelievable.

Another photo Jean had taken was of Rajan pouring his first cup of tea at the shop. I could imagine her behind the camera, the pride at having just opened the tea-shop. She was the very first customer; although Rajan proudly exclaimed that she wasn’t allowed to pay a cent for anything from his shop. “You know,” he looked at me sadly, “Jean Watson was family to me. She once pointed to my mother and said, one mother, one mother, we have this son…” He trailed off.
“What are you doing tonight?”
“The only thing I came to do here, to watch the sunset.”
“We will take you. Sunset point.” Again, it wasn’t a choice.

That evening I met Rajan and his children back at the tea-shop.
They welcomed me as if I were a long lost friend and I’d never felt more grateful for the tiny threads of connection that life brings us.
“Coffee or tea?” Rajan asked, back behind his drawer of cash.
“Tea please.”
His daughter and her friend smiled at me shyly, their hair wound with freshly threaded jasmine flowers.
I asked Rajan if I could take a photo of him pouring the tea. It seemed only fitting to take a photo in the same place Jean had stood twenty-five years before. He grinned,
“Of course.” He stood back and expertly poured the tea like a silky waterfall, from one stainless steel cup to another. The final pour went into a tiny paper cup, its head just like the froth at the base of a waterfall.

After tea and deep fried bhaji we all crammed into an auto and set off for sunset point. “Before the tsunami you could watch the sunset from here.” Rajan explained as we sputtered along the waterfront road, “This was all sand, right up here. There was no road here. No church there or houses, just sand.”
We spilled out of the auto above a rocky bay, already teeming with Indian tourists.

As the sun began to settle amongst the clouds, I saw Rajan glance at me, and not for the first time that day, he shook his head in disbelief. We’d already discussed the tenuous timing, had it been a different day, an hour, even a minute, this meeting would never have happened. There was no doubt in my mind. “I was meant to come here.” The serendipity of the moment bubbled up inside my chest. “Jean made sure of that.”