A cup of freshly made chai – sweet, smooth, and laden with all kinds of spices – is all you need to see yourself through the balmy days during the monsoons, just like cardigans on breezy winter evenings and light cottons on a hot summer day. And if there’s one reason to look forward to a long and solemn monsoon season, it’s for the simple pleasure of indulging in plentiful cups of steaming hot chai, sipped during the day and then some at night, at least in India. Add a mile-high stack of deep-fried pakoras (or deep-fried something, really) to your monsoon ceremony tables, and you’ve got yourself the most perfect and fulfilling monsoon meal imaginable to humankind.
Yes, indeed. Monsoons are all about easy, warm pleasures and treats for us. The festivities begin just as the season changes and the clouds begin to break into rain. It consists of nothing more than a steaming hot cup of masala chai and a few [deep fried] snacks, which are consumed while sitting quietly on the building verandah, listening to the pitter-patter of raindrops as they begin to fall; sometimes loud, sometimes gentle. Only the company of the people with whom you share the chai elevates this moment. This is how we’ve always embraced monsoons, and it’s likely how everyone in India does as well – with chai and joy!
