Chapter 19: The Campaign

The Doosri Chai campaign shoots on a Thursday in July, in a rented studio in Andheri that smells of fresh paint and the particular anxiety of production days — the anxiety that advertising people carry the way other professionals carry briefcases: constantly, invisibly, with the awareness that everything can go wrong and probably will.

Meghna, the director, arrives at six in the morning with a crew of twelve and a calmness that contradicts her age (twenty-nine) and her medium (film, which is expensive and unforgiving and requires: precision). She's brought three cameras — actual film cameras, the kind that make a sound when they roll, the mechanical click-whir that digital cameras don't produce and that film people love because the sound says: this is real, this is physical, this is: light hitting silver.

"We're shooting five women," Meghna tells me. "Five kitchens. Five stories. Each woman makes chai her way. We don't script the making — we let them make it and we film what happens."

"That's the concept."

"That's the concept. And the concept is: brilliant, because real women making real chai is more compelling than any actress performing the idea of making chai. Performance is: imitation. Reality is: truth."

The five women are: not actresses. They're real women who Zoya found through an open casting call that went viral on Instagram (Zoya's Instagram strategy being: a masterclass in the algorithm, the algorithm that determines what thirty million people see and that Zoya navigates with the instinct of someone who was born into the digital age the way previous generations were born into: monarchy).

Woman One: Kamla, sixty-seven, retired schoolteacher from Dadar, who makes chai in a steel vessel that she's been using for forty years — the vessel dented and darkened by decades of boiling, the vessel that is: an artifact of a marriage that produced three children and survived one husband's death and that has outlasted: everything except the need for morning chai.

Woman Two: Fatima, thirty-five, single mother from Byculla, who makes chai with ginger so strong it makes your eyes water — "my mother's recipe, which she learned from her mother, which came from Lucknow, which is: a chai city pretending to be a kebab city."

Woman Three: Sunita, fifty-two, recently divorced (like me — when she told her story at the casting, I had to leave the room because the recognition was: too precise), who makes chai for one now and who said, during casting: "The hardest part of divorce is not the loneliness. It's learning the correct amount of water for one cup. I kept making two. For months. Two cups. Because my hands remembered: him."

Woman Four: Priya, twenty-four, Zoya's age, the generation that drinks cold brew and matcha and who said she wanted to be in the campaign because "my nani makes the best chai in the world and I've never told her that, and this ad is: my way of telling her."

Woman Five: Lakshmi, forty-one, entrepreneur who runs a tiffin service from her apartment in Malad and who makes chai between orders — "the chai is: my break, my meditation, my five minutes of not being: a business."

The shoot begins. Meghna films each woman in a set designed to look like her actual kitchen — the set designers having visited each woman's home and recreated the details (Kamla's steel vessel, Fatima's ginger grater, Sunita's single cup, Priya's nani's photograph on the wall, Lakshmi's tiffin boxes stacked beside the stove). The attention to detail is: obsessive, and the obsession is: the difference between advertising that works and advertising that: wallpapers.

I watch from behind the monitor — the monitor where the director's feed plays, where I can see what the camera sees, which is: hands. Hands making chai. Hands that are: different ages, different colours, different levels of weathering, but that perform the same movements — pour, stir, wait, pour again. The universal choreography of chai-making that every Indian kitchen has performed and that no one has: filmed with this much attention.

The sound. Meghna insisted on recording the sound of chai-making separately — a dedicated sound engineer with a boom mic capturing: the hiss of water hitting a hot vessel. The bubble of milk approaching boil. The pour — the thin, steady stream of chai from vessel to cup, the stream that every chaiwala in India performs with a height that aerates the chai and that home-makers perform with a height that doesn't splash.

"That sound," Meghna says, reviewing playback. "The pour. That's the sound of: India waking up."

I'm sitting in a folding chair watching five women make chai and I'm crying. Not the pigeon-pose crying of Chapter 5 — not the grief-cry. The recognition-cry. The cry that happens when you see your own story reflected in other women's stories and the reflection is: not a mirror but a: multiplication. I am: Sunita, making two cups by muscle memory. I am: Kamla, holding a vessel that has outlasted a marriage. I am: Priya, who hasn't told her nani. I am: all of them, and they are: all of me.

"Mar." Zoya's hand on my shoulder. "You okay?"

"I'm —" I wipe my eyes. "I'm watching the campaign I wrote become: real. And it's better than I wrote it. It's better because they're real."

"That's what you said in the manifesto. 'The second cup is always the one she makes for herself.' These women are: making their own cups. On camera. For three million people to see."

"Three million?"

"That's the projected reach. Prerna's media plan. Three million women will see this campaign and think: that's me."

Three million women. Making chai. Starting over. Being: kadak.

The campaign launches two weeks later. A Thursday again — Prerna's superstition, Thursday launches, because "Thursday is Guruvar and the guru knows: timing."

The film goes live on Instagram, YouTube, and a homepage takeover on several news sites that Prerna has negotiated with the aggression of a woman who believes that good work deserves: prime placement. I watch the numbers from my desk at Spark & Co — the desk that now has the brass Saraswati that Chetan gave me, positioned next to my monitor where I can see her every time I look up.

Hour one: forty thousand views. The comments begin — the comments that social media produces, which are: a war zone of sincerity and trolling. But the sincere comments outnumber the trolling three to one, and the sincere comments say things like:

"Rote rote dekh liya." Watched it crying.

"Yeh meri maa ki kahaani hai." This is my mother's story.

"Pehli se zyada kadak — this is my new WhatsApp status."

Hour six: three hundred thousand views. The campaign is trending. Not because of paid promotion (though there is paid promotion) but because: women are sharing it. Sharing with the specific energy that women bring to content that makes them feel: seen. The sharing that says: this is me, and I need you to know this is me.

By the end of the week: 2.7 million views. The client — Doosri Chai's founder, a woman named Meenakshi who started the company after her own divorce and who makes chai with the conviction of a person who believes that tea leaves can: heal — calls Prerna.

"Whatever you're paying Madhuri," Meenakshi says (speakerphone; the whole office can hear), "double it."

The office erupts. The eruption that happens in advertising agencies when a campaign works — the eruption that is: part celebration, part relief, part the specific joy of people who make things for a living seeing the things they make: matter.

Zoya hugs me. The hug of a twenty-six-year-old who has just watched a fifty-year-old woman produce the most successful campaign of their agency's year. The hug that says: you showed me that age is: not a limitation but a: depth. That the twenty-seven years you spent making chai and being a wife and losing yourself and finding yourself — those years produced the insight that produced the campaign that produced: 2.7 million views.

I call Chetan.

"It worked," I say.

"Of course it worked."

"2.7 million views."

"2.7 million people who were seen. That's not a campaign. That's: a conversation."

"A conversation about chai."

"A conversation about women. Chai is just the: medium."

I hang up. I sit at my desk. The Saraswati gleams. The office hums. Zoya is already writing copy for the next phase of the campaign — "Phase 2: The Women Respond" — user-generated content where real women send in their chai stories.

I look at the Saraswati. The goddess of knowledge. The goddess who sits on a lotus and holds a veena and who represents: the arts, the learning, the words. The goddess who Chetan gave me because Chetan saw what I was before I remembered it myself.

I am: a copywriter. I am: a senior copywriter at Spark & Co. I am: the woman who wrote "Pehli se zyada kadak." I am: Madhuri Srivastava, and I am — after twenty-seven years of being someone else — myself.