Chai & Chapati

Peter O’Neil had lived and taught on four continents, and when people asked whether he would ever go to India, his answer was always the same: next lifetime. Then a job came open at an international school in New Delhi, and he went. Chai & Chapati is the story of the two years that followed, and of the people who carried him through them. There are the five Kasana cousins, Punjabi men who fold a solitary American into their family without a second thought. There is the driver who reads the city for him, and another who dreams of a wedding he is still saving for. There is Krishan, reserved, brilliant, unforgettable, the deepest friendship of O’Neil’s years abroad and the one he never learned to name. And there are the students, more than a classroom’s worth of reasons to have come at all. Across two years, O’Neil is taken to a village wedding in the Punjab, to temples high and humble, to the fire-lit banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, and into kitchens where he learns to make the two things he will carry home in his hands: masala chai and chapati. He writes about caste and inequality, about faith held lightly and held close, and about loving and being befriended as a gay man far from home, with the immersive warmth and clear eye of Peter Hessler’s River Town and Kris Holloway’s Monique and the Mango Rains. It is a travel-and- friendship memoir that happens to be told by a gay man: no coming-out arc, no agenda, only a life fully received in a place not his own. A companion to O’Neil’s Cameroon memoir, A Place Set for Me, this is, in the end, a book about the oldest and best surprise there is: that you can be received, wholly and without condition, by people whose lives look nothing like your own. Includes recipes for masala chai and chapati, and a reading-group guide.