Wading into the 'Blue Sea'

There are stretches of roads in Hyderabad that give the jitters to even the most experienced drivers. I am not calling myself an experienced driver but I have managed to reach home in one piece every evening since the past twenty five years, touch wood. The stretch in question is the road that begins from the railway over bridge near Rathifile Bus station in Secunderabad and goes towards Sangeet Theatre. It is so overcrowded sometime car drivers are surprised to find part of the handle and rearview mirror of bikes projecting into their car’s windows.

The slow traffic can be explained by the presence of a city bus stand on one side of the road where dozens of buses are parked and thousands of passengers wait on the road. The other lane on the road is also crowded and the traffic moves slowly towards Sangeet. But at one spot the crowd is immobile and in fact appears to have stopped temporarily to have tea right on the road. This is the spot where one finds ‘Blue Sea’ Irani restaurant.

I pass this way several times a week but two days back I decided to sample the tea in ‘Blue Sea’. I couldn’t believe that people did not mind standing on the road to sip the tea. This was the second such Irani restaurant I was checking out where customer spilled over into the road. Either the tea must be too good or the hotel must be too small I felt as I parked my bike in an adjacent lane and entered the hotel. It was divided into two parts, just like ‘Nilofer’. One side there were tables and the other side was the self-service section. There were not more than three tables and each was filled to capacity. The self-service section too was crowded and in fact spilled over on to the road. I found that both my assumptions were true: the tea was good and the hotel was small.

‘Blue Sea’ must be the only hotel serving chota samosas so chota you could eat them in just one bite. They were good and so was the tea, hot, brown and tasty. The only difficulty is finding a table and wading through the throng that crowds the entrance in order to enter the hotel. This wading is what gave me (the clever writer that I am turning into) the idea for the title for this post.