The vendor does not knock. He simply appears at the end of the carriage, walks the aisle, and says the word once, evenly, at a volume designed to travel exactly the length of the compartment without waking anyone sleeping.
Chai.
If you want it, you hold out your hand as he passes. He pours without stopping, with a surety of aim developed over years. You receive a small paper or plastic cup — sometimes clay kulhad on longer routes — that is too hot to hold properly for approximately ninety seconds, which is the correct amount of time to sit with it before drinking.
There is no chai quite like train chai.
It is not, objectively, the best chai. The leaf quality is variable. The spicing is usually minimal. The milk-to-water ratio is a matter of regional interpretation and whoever restocked the pantry car last. By any technical measure, better chai is available in cities, in good homes, at specialist tapris.
But chai is not only about the tea.
Train chai arrives with context: the rhythm of the tracks, the passing flatlands or hills or coastline, the particular suspension of time that long-distance train travel creates. You are between places. Your usual obligations have no jurisdiction here. For the duration of this cup, all you are doing is drinking it.
This is why train chai has a mythology that no café, however good, can acquire. It is situational. The taste is inseparable from the landscape outside the window, from the conversation you are or are not having with whoever is in the adjacent seat, from the quality of the light at 6am crossing a wide river whose name you have to check on the map.
The long-distance trains in India — the Rajdhani, the Duronto, the slower Express routes that cross the country in 24 or 36 or 48 hours — create a relationship with chai that city life simply does not allow for. You drink it five, six, eight times a day. You drink it at dawn watching fog lift off fields. You drink it at midnight, stiff-legged, in the doorway of the carriage.
Each cup is the same chai. Each cup is completely different.
If you have not yet taken a long-distance train journey in India, this is the reason to do it that nobody puts in the guidebooks.
It is not only about getting somewhere.
It is about who brings you chai while you are on the way.