Chapter 3: Chai-wallah

The first time Kiran met Omkar Kulkarni, she wanted to throw his own coffee in his face.

It happened on a Tuesday in January, three weeks after the book club had started and two weeks after Kiran had discovered that Jane Austen was not, as she'd initially assumed, a brand of imported biscuit. She'd been sent by Neeta Aunty to deliver a pair of sunglasses to Aman — Ria's new boyfriend, who ran a chai-coffee cart near the Fergusson College back gate with his friend.

"Just drop them off," Neeta had said. "Aman left them at the office. Poor boy can't see in the sun."

"Can't Ria do it?"

"Ria's in Hinjewadi. You're in Deccan. Geography, Kiran. It's not that complicated."

So Kiran walked from Deccan to Fergusson — twenty minutes along a route she knew well, past the JM Road tapris and the Sambhaji Park entrance and the bookshops on Tilak Road that she'd never entered but now, post-Austen, regarded with a curiosity that felt new and slightly suspicious, like discovering a muscle you didn't know you had.

The cart was parked in a lane behind the college — one of those Pune lanes that exists in the space between official and unofficial, too narrow for cars but wide enough for an Activa and a dream. The cart itself was a converted Tempo Traveller, painted teal, with a chalkboard menu that listed things like "Single Origin Pour-Over" and "Cold Brew with Jaggery Tonic" and "Classic Cutting Chai — Because Not Everyone Needs to Be Fancy." Someone with a sense of humour had written that last one, and Kiran appreciated it.

She couldn't see Aman. But someone else was there — behind the counter, arranging steel tumblers with the focus of a man defusing a bomb. Tall. Dark. Needed a haircut. Wearing a t-shirt that said "Kafka Was Right" — which Kiran didn't understand but filed away for later investigation.

He looked up. Looked at her. And his face did something that she would later describe to Ria as "the expression of a man who has bitten into a vada pav and found it empty."

"Yeah?" he said.

Not "hello." Not "welcome." Not "can I help you." Just — "yeah." Like she was an interruption. Like his arrangement of steel tumblers was the Sistine Chapel and she'd just barged in during the final brushstroke.

"Aman around?"

"No." He went back to the tumblers. Silence. The kind of silence that is actually louder than speech because it contains the deliberate refusal to speak.

Kiran waited. He didn't look up. A beat passed. Two beats. The lane's ambient noise filled the gap — an Activa revving somewhere, a pressure cooker whistling from an upstairs window, a college kid laughing at a volume that suggested youth and stupidity in equal measure.

He sighed. The heaviest sigh she'd ever heard — heavier than Baba's sigh when the water tank ran empty, heavier than Neeta Aunty's sigh when the day's sales were bad, heavier than the collective sigh of an entire Pune neighbourhood when the power cut at 8 PM during a cricket match.

"He'll be back soon. Do you want coffee?"

Did she want coffee? From this man? With his dead eyes and his Kafka t-shirt and his sigh that could power a wind turbine?

"I'll have a cappuccino."

He didn't answer. But his nostrils flared — actually flared, like a bull in a cartoon — and his eyes narrowed, and the combination produced an expression that, in Kiran's considerable experience of reading faces, translated to: I am being asked to make a cappuccino by a person I have decided to dislike, and I will make it, but I will make it with contempt.

He made the cappuccino. She had to admit — silently, internally, in the part of her brain that she didn't share with anyone — that he made it well. The milk was steamed to exactly the right temperature. The foam had that microfoam texture she'd seen in Instagram reels of Melbourne coffee shops. There was even a latte art attempt — a leaf, or possibly a mutant fern, the kind of artistic gesture that says "I care about my craft" even while the face above it says "I wish you'd leave."

He slapped the card machine on the counter. She tapped her phone. He didn't say anything. Not "enjoy." Not "have a nice day." Not even the bare minimum social grunt that Indian customer service considers acceptable.

Was that a scowl? Was that an actual, deliberate, premeditated scowl he threw at her as she picked up the cup?

"You want to try cracking a smile with it, bhai?" Kiran said.

He looked at her as if she'd asked him to perform surgery on a cat. "I'm not your bhai."

"You're right. My bhai has manners."

She took the cappuccino and left. The sunglasses were still in her pocket — she'd forgotten to ask Misery Guts to pass them to Aman, and she was too angry to go back. She'd give them to Ria instead. Let Ria deal with her boyfriend's business partner from the Island of Joylessness.

She stood in the lane, drinking the cappuccino — which was, annoyingly, the best cappuccino she'd ever had, the kind that made you understand why people paid two hundred rupees for flavoured milk when chai cost twenty — and fuming.

Fucking men. Some men. Not all men — she needed to be specific about this. Baba was fine, in his silent, money-giving way. Neil was fine. Aman seemed fine, from what Ria reported. Arun Uncle, who ran the stationery shop next to Neeta's stall at Mandai, was fine — he was seventy-three and gave Kiran Parle-G biscuits every afternoon with the solemnity of a priest distributing prasad. But some men. Some men were wired wrong. Some men had been assembled in a factory where the "basic human decency" component was on back-order and they'd shipped without it.

Omkar Kulkarni — she learned his name later, from Aman, who apologised on his behalf with the sheepishness of a man who knows his business partner is a social liability — was apparently one of these men. According to Aman, Omkar was "going through something." According to Ria, who got the story from Aman, he'd quit a big IT job at Infosys to start the chai cart, and "the transition has been rough." According to Kiran's own observation, he was a miserable shit who made excellent coffee and terrible first impressions.

She told Ria all of this that evening over a phone call, while eating Maggi in her PG room.

"He's actually nice once you get to know him," Ria said, with the particular optimism of a woman whose boyfriend's best friend cannot be allowed to be terrible.

"He scowled at me. He literally scowled. Like I'd personally offended his ancestors."

"Maybe he was having a bad day."

"Bad day doesn't explain bad manners. My mother left our family and I still say 'please' and 'thank you' to the kirana store guy."

"Your mother's a different situation."

"My mother's always a different situation. The point is — that man needs a personality transplant. Or at minimum a customer service training. Even the MSRTC bus conductors smile more than him, and their entire job is telling people to move to the back."

Ria laughed. "Kiran, you've met him once. For five minutes."

"Five minutes is enough. I can read a person in five seconds. It's my only skill."

"That's not your only skill."

"Name another."

"You can sell anything to anyone."

"Same skill. Different application." Kiran slurped her Maggi. The noodles were slightly undercooked — the way she liked them, with a bite, because fully cooked Maggi was a betrayal of the form. "And before you start — I know what you're thinking. You're thinking 'Kiran will warm up to him.' You're thinking 'they had a rocky start but they'll be friends.' You're thinking this is one of those stories where the girl meets a grumpy boy and decides he's secretly wonderful."

"I wasn't thinking that."

"Good. Because that's not how it works. That's how it works in books. In real life, grumpy men are just grumpy, and the smart move is to stay away."

"Speaking of books," Ria said, with the tonal shift of a woman who has been waiting for a segue, "how's the book club?"

Kiran paused. The Maggi paused too, halfway between bowl and mouth, suspended on the fork like a question mark.

"It's ... fine."

"Just fine?"

"It's good. It's — look, don't make a big deal out of this, but I actually liked the book."

"Pride and Prejudice?"

"Yeah. I thought it was going to be — I don't know, boring rich people talking about weather and marriages. And there IS a lot of weather and marriages. But there's also this woman, Elizabeth, who's basically broke and proud and doesn't take shit from anyone, and everyone underestimates her, and she's smarter than every man in the room but she can't say it because it's 1813 and women weren't allowed to be smarter than men yet."

"You liked Elizabeth Bennet."

"I didn't say I liked her. I said I understood her. There's a difference."

There was no difference, and they both knew it, but Kiran had a policy of admitting enthusiasm at the same speed a government office processed paperwork: slowly, reluctantly, and only after multiple stamps.

"The next book is Emma," she said. "Gauri Aunty chose it. More Austen. I looked it up — it's about a rich girl who thinks she can matchmake everyone and then everything goes wrong. Sounds like half the aunties in Sadashiv Peth."

Ria laughed again. Kiran smiled into her Maggi. The room was small, the wall outside the window was still a wall, but something had shifted — a door opening in a house she hadn't known had doors. Books. Actual books. With characters who felt things and said things and lived in worlds that were different from hers but also, somehow, the same.

She finished the Maggi. Washed the bowl. Got into bed. Pulled the blanket up — December in Pune, the cold that isn't cold enough for a heater but is cold enough to make you miserable under a single blanket.

She thought about Elizabeth Bennet. About how she'd looked at Mr Darcy and seen not a rich man but an arrogant one, and how she'd been wrong, and how being wrong had been the beginning of everything.

She thought about the scowling chai-wallah with the Kafka t-shirt.

She thought: nah. That's fiction. Real life doesn't work like that.

She turned off the light. The wall outside the window disappeared into darkness. Somewhere in Pune, in a teal coffee cart parked in a lane behind Fergusson College, a man who made excellent cappuccinos and terrible first impressions was probably scowling at the moon.

Not her problem.