The biscuit and the dunk
A plain rectangular glucose biscuit, sold in a yellow-and-white wrapper for less than the coins in your pocket, and a genuine national skill: the dunk.
The rule is roughly four seconds. Long enough for the chai to go all the way through and the biscuit to go soft and warm; not long enough for it to give up and fall in. There is no recovering from a biscuit that falls in. The whole glass is different afterwards.
People develop styles. The confident quick in-and-out. The engineer's approach, holding the biscuit at an angle so only two-thirds ever gets wet. The reckless deep dunk with the fingers already lowering into the tea. And the person who eats it dry, whom nobody trusts.
What's remarkable about the biscuit itself is that it stayed cheap. For decades the price barely moved — the makers shrank the pack rather than raise it, because the whole point was that anybody could afford one. It has been, at times, the best-selling biscuit in the world, on volume, sold in packets costing pennies.
Which is why it means what it means. It's on trains, in tiffin boxes, in relief packages after floods, in the hand of a child who's been given something small to keep them quiet. It isn't nostalgic because it was good. It's nostalgic because it was always there, and cost nothing, and everybody's grandmother had a packet.
Chai, properly — including what it's drunk with and why boiling the tea with the milk is the whole point.
Last updated: 2026-08-11
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