When middle-school math teacher Peter O'Neil accepts a job at an international school in New Delhi, he expects his weekends to look like the rest of the faculty's: shopping, the gym, dinners with other expats, all inside the comfortable bubble foreigners tend to build around themselves abroad.

A chance encounter in a quieter corner of Delhi rearranges that plan. He meets the five Kasana cousins, young men in their early twenties from a Gujjar farming community, with almost no English between them. Across a language gap, a wide gulf in income, and a culture neither side fully understands, the six become traveling companions.

"I'd told them we were having rice. They huddled, conferred in Hindi, and asked where they could buy flour. Twenty minutes later they were rolling chapati in my kitchen with the side of a beer bottle and laying each round on the gas flame, an assembly line of four men producing a tower of buttered bread for a meal I was supposed to be hosting."

That kind of moment is the book. Chai & Chapati is the record of one teacher's attempt to know a country from the inside, told by someone who understood early that he was the one being shown around, not the one doing the showing.

This is the original 2016 travelogue, narrated by the author in his own voice. He later revised and expanded it into a full memoir, roughly fifty percent longer, published under the subtitle Two Years in India, and the Friendships That Carried Me and available now in print, ebook, and audiobook, alongside his companion memoir of Cameroon, A Place Set for Me.