Tea pilgrimage: black salt
 

Santiniketan (or Shantiniketan - don't get me started on the vagaries
of transliterating Bengali into the alphabet that brought you this
message) is where Rabindranath Tagore spent most of the second half of
his life. His artistic and philosophical legacy is enshrined there in
a number of physical and institutional forms. The village is about
two and a half hours from Calcutta by train, and it's a popular trip.

Traveling there is different from riding other trains in India. There
are tourists from all over the world, lots of whom are young and
footloose. There's live music from buskers of the Baul ethnic
minority. Once the train gets under way, it's as if a party has
begun.

There's tea on the train, but it's different, too. No milk tea on the
Santiniketan Express, but a lemony infusion. What's really unusual
about it is that it's dosed with a mineral known as black salt. I
haven't found out exactly what black salt is, but I learned enough for
my purposes about the tea made with it from the first sip. You'd
probably enjoy it if you sincerely love rotten eggs. I found the
sulfurous taste loathsome, and was glad that, as always, railroad tea
was served in three-ounce cups.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html
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