Darjeeling

by Bharti Kirchner

  Aloka, grateful for his insight, thanked him and proceeded to consider his advice. After she hung up, she retreated to the kitchen to seek solace in its pampering atmosphere. A fruity fragrance from a half-eaten peach on the table left over from a hurried breakfast clung to the air. The room had once been redolent with the homey smell of milk, sugar, and ghee from Indian pastries bought at the “Little India” section of Lexington Avenue. Now, from her recently acquired health-conscious perspective, they seemed too fatty and cloying. Her eyes caught a crinkled white paper sack on the counter. She opened it and teased a half dozen crescent-shaped cookies called Pleasure Domes out onto a plate. She had purchased them fresh this morning from a patisserie on Fifty-fourth Street. With their powdery, sugar-dusted tops and faint vanilla scent, they were her current weakness. Right now they held scant appeal, serving only as a reminder of a friend’s birthday bash tonight.

  Drifting back to the study, Aloka went to stand by the window just in time to see the mail carrier leaving the building. Grateful for the distraction, she picked up her key, traipsed down to the first floor, and opened her mailbox. A tinny sound reverberated in the air as if in protest at this intrusion. The minute she saw the reassuring blue envelope postmarked Darjeeling, the only mail of the day, she snatched up her prize and tore it open even as she trudged back up the stairs.

  The script was tiny, shaky, and unmistakably Grandma Nina’s. A true matriarch, Grandma had dominated the Gupta lineage for three generations, making her presence felt even overseas through letters that arrived in innocuously flimsy blue envelopes.

  Aloka extracted a creamy delicate sheet whose rustling folds brought to mind fragments of her girlhood. Mother had died when Aloka was twelve. Father and especially Grandma had raised her and Sujata. At bedtime Grandma would tuck her in, drawing a blanket up to her chin and touching her forehead in a blessing so that she would be cozy and secure for the night.

  In my last letter I had mentioned how women in the village of Sonagunj were trying to get elected to their community council. As you well know I am all for them. It was our ancient poet Kalidasa who once said, “Look for a land where women are in good spirits, for that is a prosperous country.”

  Now listen to this latest ploy by conniving male chauvinist politicians.

  Only “obedient” wives are allowed to run for election, so men can continue to rule through them behind the scenes.

  Can you believe it?

  Aloka smiled. Grandma’s letters always began with a commentary on some aspect of social or political life—she had been nicknamed All India Radio by her neighbors. Though she believed word of mouth was the best way to disseminate information, Grandma began her day by scouring the pages of the Statesman, an English-language daily flown in from Calcutta, while sipping a cup of Darjeeling tea. Her maidservant would have long since learned that the color of the tea must be “rose blush with a hint of white,” from just the right amount of hot milk. After finishing the “flavory” cup, Grandma would begin her letter-writing ritual.

  My dear child, although it has been nearly eight years, I have never asked you to return, even for a brieƒ visit, remembering full well the tragic circumstances of your departure. Yet, I feel compelled to ask you now. As you are no doubt aware, November 16th is my eighty-first birthday. I would very much like to celebrate reaching that special age with you, Pranab, and Sujata.

  Grandma commemorating her birthday? Why now? She hadn’t bothered to do so on her sixtieth, regarded a special age in India. The adult Guptas, especially the womenfolk, had never wanted any fuss made on their birthdays, insisting that such frivolous attention should be lavished only on children. But no, Aloka now realized, this invitation could be different. Nine was a sacred number in ancient India and a symbol of good fortune. Of course Grandma would need to celebrate, having lived to the most auspicious year of nine-times-nine.

  At this age, the sun appears a little paler each day. I no longer hear all the sounds in the house. The hours are never too full.

  Refusal was clearly out of the question. Aloka’s gaze darted to the calendar on the wall: lonely days imprisoned in little square boxes and never enough of them. It was already October 1, which left only six weeks to apply for a visa, book a flight, purchase gifts, and, just as importantly, prepare mentally. But could she?

  If you decide to come, as you surely must, please don’t forget to send me your itinerary. I’ll dispatch a servant to meet you and Pranab at Bagdogra Airport. Give my love to that dear boy.

  With much bhalobasa,

  Your affectionate Thakurma

  Aloka refolded the page with a heavy sigh: The two references to Pranab in the letter hadn’t escaped her attention. Grandma had always maintained a cordial relationship with Pranab and at one point even saved his life. How could Aloka arrive without him?

  She could see it now, Grandma sitting in a chair on the front lawn all day, straining her eyes to follow each vehicle as it screeched on the road. Grandma’s mind would be whirling with images of them jumping out of the car, slamming the door, and rushing to greet her. She would see them bend down to touch her feet in the Bengali greeting of respect for the elders and they would receive her murmured blessing before saying a word. Grandma would rise and embrace each with equal affection. “Aloka! Pranab!” she would call out, tears of joy coursing down her creased cheeks.

  Arriving alone would devastate Grandma. After a few minutes she would silently blame both Aloka and Pranab for the failed union, and Aloka, being there alone, would bear her disapproval alone. Eyes downcast, Grandma would grimace, as if she had bitten into a young green mango without the customary salt, perhaps reminding herself, with the benefit of hindsight, how she had mistrusted Pranab.

  Aloka brushed her fingers across the letter. In the Gupta family, three generations had dwelled under one roof with intimacy, the inevitable clash of personalities woven into the tapestry of communal life. She heard Grandma complaining, “I don’t understand, Aloka. I just don’t understand. In our household marriage is for a lifetime.”

  Suppose Aloka told everything. Still, she wouldn’t be able to satisfy Grandma. Like the sacred River Ganga with its one hundred active mouths, Grandma would mutter a hundred questions, each requiring a detailed explanation.

  And Sujata, who had once had an affair with Pranab? The clumsy girl had even taken up embroidery so she could secretly gift Pranab a handkerchief with his initials stitched on it. Years later Aloka had discovered that handkerchief among Pranab’s clothing and experienced all over again the jealous rage that had overcome her on the night her father had informed her of the illicit love. The passing years had diminished the intensity of her animosity toward Sujata, but the episode continued to fester like a scabbed-over wound.

  How much did Sujata remember of that period? She was still single. Did she ever wake up in the darkest hour of the night, perspiring, trapped in a fantasy about Pranab?

  It was Sujata’s reaction that Aloka feared the most; Sujata, who would sit silently, wearing a smug expression. Eyes focused on the mountain peaks, she would act as if she hadn’t heard a word.

  Aloka stowed Grandma’s letter in the decorative straw basket that housed all correspondence from home and copies of her own letters, then went over to the window. In the deepening gloom, multistory office complexes twinkled like a backlit honeycomb. Street lamps cast a pitiless glare on the hurrying figures below. The tumult of the traffic in the background remained undiminished. Evening could never quite subdue the Empire City. Whereas Darjeeling succumbed to the darkness like an obedient child, this gritty giant trod it underfoot.

  During the day Aloka reveled in New York, but after dark it seemed ruled by a malevolent force. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately, often waking up with a shiver in the middle of the night.

  Her boss’s remark about his kinsmen in India returned to her: “They’re the ones who’ve made me who 1 am.” Those words sunk in now. The Guptas had made her the woman she was today, one confid
ent enough of herself to offer advice to others.

  She forged her decision: She would return to the mountain home of her youth for Grandma’s birthday, to renew connections with her family.

  Back at her desk, buoyed by a feeling of joyous anticipation, Aloka drew the letter caddy toward her and picked up a fine pen. She wrote a short, pleasant note to Grandma, accepting the invitation. As always, she chose her words carefully, paying close attention to the impact they made both in sound and meaning. But this time she also made a special effort to convey an overall impression of warmth and lightness. It took her some tries to get it right. She omitted any mention of Pranab. Nevertheless, he managed to insinuate himself into her mind as if to remind her that she couldn’t edit him out of her life quite so easily. Even as she put the pen away and started to get dressed to attend her friend’s birthday party, she couldn’t help but daydream. Pranab. Haunted eyes, face drawn with pain. Where was he this evening? What was he doing? Was he also reminiscing about their life together?

  Her face flushed. Damn the man! He had stolen the hour from her and left her craving again, just as he had the first time she met him in Darjeeling.

  three

  1990

  As Aloka set off on one of her frequent visits to the family tea garden, she could not have anticipated that an unexpected encounter was about to alter the course of her life. As she picked her way along a narrow trail winding across the side of a precipitous Himalayan foothill carpeted with shiny deep green tea bushes, she heard the tinkle of prayer wheels that someone had spun off in the distance, stopped, and looked proudly over the two-hundred-hectare tea estate that the Guptas had owned for generations. As the oldest child in the family, it would all be hers one day, even though her interest in the farming and marketing aspects of tea was nonexistent. She frowned as it occurred to her that if her younger sister Sujata were standing here, she would be able to identify exactly which fields were dedicated to new tea bushes and which ones currently produced tea leaves for consumption. No matter. When her time came to keep the estate running, Aloka would depend on her father’s dedicated staff. Tea, after all, was their life’s work.

  It was just about quitting time when she reached the tea-processing factory, a long two-story building set into the hillside. At the far corner a tallish young man emerged from her father’s office and headed away from her toward the gate. Her father regarded him as an up-and-coming employee.

  In one fluid motion he slid through the half-open iron gate, pivoted, and closed it with a somber metallic click. The sunlight through the grillwork limned his refined oval face and deep eyes. He must have noticed her, for he halted and folded his hands at chest level in a namaskar greeting.

  It was only natural that he would pause and show respect to her. After all, she was the owner’s daughter, “tea memsahib.” As a rule, the employees bowed obsequiously and scurried away, leaving her feeling isolated, but this fellow was still standing there relaxed, next to a bank of nasturtiums, claiming his due space beneath the purple haze of the hills. She stepped forward.

  “We haven’t met formally,” he announced in Bengali. “I am Pranab Mullick. It’s an unexpected pleasure to see you here.”

  “Thank you. I am Aloka Gupta. My father has mentioned you many times. How do you like your new responsibilities?”

  Even though she said it politely, she realized this was an inappropriate question. After all, this man, newly promoted to a coveted management position, worked for her father. How else could he answer except by saying, Bhalo lagche—I like it well enough?

  “Bhalo lagche,” Pranab replied. “But my mother is disappointed. She wanted me to be a professor of Sanskrit.”

  “So, why didn’t you?”

  “It’s the language of the gods. At this point, I’d rather be an ordinary mortal for whom a good cup of tea is the best bonus of the day.”

  “I’d studied Sanskrit in high school. It’s a difficult language, but the sounds resonated in me. Even ordinary words have big concepts behind them. You could describe everyday sights in a beautiful way.”

  “If we were speaking Sanskrit, I’d have said the soft lavender sari you’re wearing is a swath of the sky.”

  She fingered her newly purchased Tangail cotton sari, suddenly aware that he had crossed a boundary and become personal. She was single, thirty years old, with marriage proposals in the offing. Marrying late for career reasons had been in vogue, but she had a family reputation to uphold. Her family, after all, was bonedy. Blue-blooded. Grandma Nina laughingly called them the “Second Gupta Dynasty,” the first being that of Chandra Gupta, who had ruled eastern India in the early years of the fourth century A.D. And even if the luster had faded a bit, the latter-day Guptas had provided her with an excellent education and instilled in her the proper social graces. She turned to go.

  “May I have the pleasure of walking you home, Miss Gupta? I was going in the same direction.”

  She hesitated. Would her father approve of her mingling alone with his subordinate? And what if some tea worker spied them together? Wouldn’t they gossip? But then she prided herself for being a modern, college-educated woman who taught in the prestigious girl’s school, Loreto. She found herself nodding her assent, pleasantly. “Sure. That would be nice.”

  They walked along the narrow road that snaked up over a ridge and then down to the Gupta residence. She admired the casual ease with which Pranab negotiated the rutted surface, all the while engaging her in conversation. It occurred to her for the first time that he must have grown up in this mountainous region, too.

  A Land Rover rumbled by, scraping up a vortex of dust. While Aloka covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief, Pranab pointed out that the vehicle was carrying a load of boxed tea to the train station for shipment to an auction house in Calcutta just in time for the holiday season. He’d blended and tasted an assortment of teas from the company stock to produce liquor with the right color and briskness.

  “It’s been a long twelve hours.” Yet his face glowed as he explained how the black currant note of the last mélange was still lingering in his mouth, how much the work meant to him. “No chilis or onions in my food, and I don’t ever touch alcohol or tobacco. Nothing that would dull my palate.”

  Aloka had been taught tea tasting at an early age. She could still recite the procedure: Slurp the tea to aerate it, roll it in your mouth, gurgle, consider, and spit. The palate would register the taste instantly. She didn’t much care for the practice. Nor had she ever been particularly enamored of the beverage. At home tea was served at all hours—“the kettle boils overtime,” the servants were fond of saying—but she was content simply to drink her daily cup. Even so, she was aware that the tea bushes belonged to various jats, or pedigrees, and to assess the quality of the manufactured tea, a taster needed a keen nose, sharp taste buds, and discerning eyes, as well as knowledge of the market. Pranab must be a rare individual who possessed all these qualities.

  A tea plucker coming from the opposite direction cut through Aloka’s introspection. The woman cast a warm glance at Pranab, who halted and inquired if her husband was feeling better. She shook her head, her anguish evident in that barely perceptible movement, veiled her face with the hem of her sari, and walked on.

  Pranab’s cheeks seemed to shrink. “The workers need better medical care,” he said in a thin voice. “A health dispensary they can afford. Jyotin has had a fever for three days. But I can’t persuade him to go see a doctor. He says it’ll cost too much money.”

  “Don’t they get a weekly salary, a ration of rice, firewood, and free housing?”

  “That’s not enough. They need medical care, schools for children, and so much more.”

  Aloka was well aware that those intrepid souls woke early, battled rain, chilly weather, and precarious terrain to bring in the crop. They were the ones who made the manufacturing of the esteemed Gupta Golden Tip possible. More than sixty percent of the workers were women.

  “Especially
the women.” Pranab had picked up her thoughts. “It’s really true when they say, ‘You can feel the touch of a woman in a cup of tea.’ Whenever I drink a cup, I’m reminded of their miserable existence. They labor so long and so hard without complaint. And what do they have to show for it? Most of them will be old by the time they’re forty.”

  She felt a twinge of apprehension at the implied rebuke of her father. Her personal connection to tea ran much deeper than his, going all the way back to the late 1800s, when her ancestors had arrived on horseback. Darjeeling was only a small hamlet then, a mountain resort where the affluent came to escape the heat of the plains. When her ancestors first tasted the tea, they found it so satisfying that they resolved to buy this choice location and settle down. They announced that henceforth their aim would be “to produce the highest quality brew, fit for the gods.” The estate had prospered under the Guptas and it was currently producing a hundred thousand kilograms of premium Darjeeling tea. Grown organically at an elevation of twenty-one hundred meters, which is optimum for the highest-quality tea, Gupta Golden Tip was snapped up at tea auctions in Calcutta. Aloka’s father, Bir, who had been running the business for thirty years, had received the Tea Board of India’s coveted Award for Quality three times. Well respected by his peers, he received numerous letters of appreciation from his customers, such as this one that arrived only last week: “Thank you for giving an old man a reason to get up in the morning—a pot of your flavorful Golden Tip.” Her father not only supervised the cultivation of the crop, but also the construction of service roads on the estate and financial matters. He was a farmer, an engineer, and an accountant rolled into one. The workers addressed him as barababu, the big man.