It’s 2:03 AM. The city is asleep, except for the dogs, the auto drivers on night shift, and me — standing outside a tiny roadside tea stall that looks like it hasn’t passed a health inspection since independence.
The chaiwala doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t need to. He makes the kind of tea that forces silence out of you anyway — perfectly scalding, overly sweet, with just enough ginger to punch you in the throat and remind you that you’re alive.
There’s something sacred about drinking chai at this hour. You’re too tired to pretend, too awake to sleep, and too caffeinated to think clearly. The usual categories of your life — work, relationships, ambition, rent — all blur into the steam rising from a cracked glass.
Tonight, I share the stall with a man in a security guard uniform, a kid with blue hair and headphones bigger than his head, and someone who might be a delivery driver or a poet or both. Nobody asks. There’s an unspoken agreement: no past, no future, only hot tea and the hum of sodium streetlights.
The security guard tells a story about catching two cats fighting in the building basement. The blue-haired kid snorts. The poet/delivery guy mutters something about reincarnation. It all makes perfect sense. Or none at all. But it doesn’t matter. At 2 AM, even nonsense feels profound.
When I finally walk back home, the air is cooler, and the world seems lighter. Not because anything changed, but because for ten minutes, nothing needed to. No productivity hacks, no to-do lists, no philosophical podcasts. Just chai, strangers, and silence.
Maybe that’s the meaning of life.
Or maybe I just need to sleep.
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