Chennai: The tea maker at Sunoj Tea Stall and Cool Bar, V. Nallusamy is busy raising his one hand with a glass of tea and an empty glass in the another hand going up and down like a yo-yo in clockwise motion.
This is the story of Chennai’s tea stalls which are there in almost every locality around the nook and corner. Nallusamy is the tea and coffee maker at Sunoj Tea Stall and Cool Bar in West Mambalam’s Jubilee Road area. He is the man on whom the tea stall relies to do business of selling various varieties of tea and coffee.
“Ours (Sunoj) is the tea stall which does the maximum amount of business among the three shops in this area.” says Nallusamy. The reason, as he explains is that the tea stall is the oldest one in the area and it has regular and loyal customers who are reason behind its maximum sales.
On a given day, 50 to 70 cups of tea and 40 to 50 cups of coffee are sold at Sunoj’s. The most popular item is the tea which has variants like lemon tea, black tea to name some. A native of Perambulur near Tiruchirappalli city in Tamil Nadu, Nallusamy came to Chennai in search of a higher salary and has been working at the tea stall since the last 3 months.
Helping him run the stall is the helper Rohit Chaudhary, a native of Nawada in Bihar. Like Nallusamy, he too has come to Chennai in search of a higher salary due to low salary in Bihar. Rohit serves the tea and coffee in glasses as ordered by the customers. Rohit apart from this as a helper cleans the utensils, sweeps and mops the stall. Occasionally, when Nallusamy has not come, Rohit doubles as the tea and coffee maker, maintains stock of supplies like milk and powder for making tea and coffee and works as the cashier.
“My best moment is pay day and when there are less orders”, says Rohit. P.R. Manoj’s (in-charge of Sunoj Tea Stall and Cool Bar) scolding and when there are more orders are his worst moments. Rohit says that he finds the people in Chennai to be friendly and helpful especially since he doesn’t know Tamil. If a customer comes to the shop and speaks in Tamil, people help him in translating it to Hindi. “When someone picks up a fight with me, the local people intervene”, I find this to be very helpful of the local people says Rohit.
Manoj is the in-charge at Sunoj looking at on it daily basis as the owner Madhavan Nair isn’t usually around. “It’d be good if our name came in the newspaper”, says Manoj with a smile on his face. Manoj has been working at this 35-year-old Sunoj’s since the past 6 months. Digital payments have caught up with tea stalls and Sunoj’s is no exception to that and it is the new thing in place since the past 1 month there with payments being accepted on Indian digital payment platforms like the Government of India-owned BHIM app and the Walmart-controlled Indian e-retailer Flipkart’s PhonePe app. Some shops insist on a minimum amount for accepting digital payments, but, there is no such insistence at Sunoj’s where a tea costing Rs.10 can be paid for digitally.
The thing that separates Sunoj’s and other tea stall is that it sells household items too, albeit, in small quantities like soap, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, talcum powder, incense sticks and mosquito repellent coils to name some. For Manoj, there has been no best moment as like he puts it “Everything is going normally”. Manoj’s worst moment was the other day he had to sell a mosquito repellent coil for Rs.3 instead of its price of Rs.4 as the customer insisted on it. The next night, when the same customer came to buy it and insisted on the previous day’s price, Manoj turned him away.
“Usually tea shop owners shoo away stray dogs, but, this shop doesn’t. I come here out of goodwill and to feed the dog.”, says S. Venkataramanan, a person preparing for entrance exams and having a sip of tea at the shop. Rohit adds that Venkataramanan sometimes brings food from his home to feed the stray dog Julie which has made a corner of Sunoj’s its home.
Members are slowly but steadily coming into the office of the Chennai Metropolitan Tea Shop Owners Association in a narrow lane which ends with a mosque in Peters Road, Royapettah, albeit, late for the meeting scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Formed in 1981, the association today has 2,150 tea shops owners as its members. They are busy talking to each other in Malayalam with the association’s president, vice-president and secretary seated opposite them.
“Business is down, we aren’t able to control business with just tea, so, some shops are selling extra items”, says P.G. Rajan, the association’s joint secretary and owner of Guruvayur Appan Tea Stall in Triplicane. “You are from Asian College of Journalism, Sashi, Asianet” says the president T. Ananadan (who is also the owner of Anita Tea Stall in Anna Salai) when he comes to know where I’ve come from. “Some shops are now selling idli, dosai and tiffin items with permission from the municipal corporation. Earlier people from Tamil Nadu and Kerala used to work in tea stalls. Now, we have to rely on North Indian labourers who often are unreliable and go away often” says Anandan on the steps taken by the association to improve its lot and the problems facing it. Concurring with Anandan and giving his own view point is another joint secretary, K. Ravindran Pillai, the owner of Vigneshwara Snack Bar in the Integrated Coach Factory (ICF) area of Chennai,says “North Indian labourers after getting work (at tea shops), accustom themselves to the business, leave the tea stall and start making and selling tea from their rooms without any labour cost and license fees.”
It costs Rs.1,250 to get a license to run a tea shop from the municipal corporation. “Corporation license inspectors don’t understand us and just look at tea shops as revenue/fee collection points”, laments Rajan. Anandan rues the professional tax imposed on them as owners and this is applicable to the employer and employees. He rues the fact that he has to pay professional tax even for workers who start working and stop working on their own will. The professional tax is to be paid on a half-yearly basis with the minimum amount being Rs.135 for shops with average half-yearly income in the range of Rs.21,001 to Rs.30,000 and it goes up to Rs.1,250 if the average half-yearly income is Rs.75,001 and above. “You can keep this with you”, says Anandan after showing a form containing this from the corporation’s revenue department.
Most tea shops in Chennai are owned by Malayalis and E. Sundaram, the secretary of the association gives the reason for this as “Tamilians consider tea business as bad. They don’t like serving tea and want to wash teacups from which other people have had tea. Malayalis have been in the tea shop business since 100 years.” 80% of the association members are Malayalis with Tamilians constituting 15% and people from Kannadiga/Telugu and people from other states constituting the remaining members. “Only 2 in 100 tea shops are owned by the owners, 60% are self-employed, with the remaining being rented premises” says Anandan.
The worst moment in this business was demonetisation and its effect is still there, and business is down says K.T.K. Aravindakshan, vice-president of the association speaking about the worst moment. The best moment is and continues to the various relief activities carried out by the association like the blood donation camp running since 2003 and the assistance during floods in Tamil Nadu and Kerala says Anandan. “Earlier, tea shops used wooden stoves, gradually moving to boiler stoves, kerosene stoves and today to gas stoves. Similarly, shops used to have lime coat walls, then they moved to painted walls and now to tiled walls” says Sundaram describing the turning point in this business. “In the past, there was police license required for tea shops, when Kalaignar (late Chief of Minister of Tamil Nadu, K. Karunanidhi) was the Chief Minister, he got the police license closed after raising it in the State Legislative Assembly and passed a resolution for it.”, says Anandan.
Written on Wednesday, November 18, 2019.
Note: I wrote this story as part of a class assignment while studying journalism as part of my Post Graduate Diploma in Journalism specialising in Print at the Asian College of Journalism in the city of Chennai in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
