Lijiye na didi,” they said, holding out two tiny flasks of tea, their mid-morning sustenance. Shirts drenched in sweat, four young men from the cleaning company, helping move boxes of my belongings to another address, would not hear of it when I demurred. I had chai on the boil for them anyway. Not knowing so, they were ready to share small amounts of the daily brew they carried around.   
  
I was instantly warmed as well by the recollection of a variety of flavoured drinks offered on sweltering hot workdays in far corners of the city. Cool limboo sherbet in a tangewala’s backyard in Borivli. Chilled rose doodh freshly stirred at Agripada’s BIT Chawl. Tall glasses of mohalla chai on the wooden bench of Dada Nanji Kamarsi Surmawala in Dongri. Its proprietor Mohmmad Anis Shaikh, who passed on two years back, proudly explained, “My father was not your regular surmawala but a poet writing in Gujarati. He set up this shop ten years after arriving from Navsari in 1920.” 

Waving me into a rear room, Mohmmad Bhai had uncovered a dusty pile of fine art books published by Thames & Hudson and Marg. He was gratified to find me as engrossed in these volumes as with the intriguing vintage weights, measures and pounding equipment his racks displayed.