by Jeff Koehler
CHAPTER 19
Back down the Hill
Tea estate factories close during the Hindu festival of Diwali, the five-day “festival of lights” that takes place in autumn. Over the following few weeks, the remaining tea is picked off the trees and processed, packed into tin-rimmed wooden boxes or flat, hand-stenciled paper sacks, and loaded into the back of snub-nosed trucks and Mahindra Pik-Ups for the plains.
Along Hill Cart Road, the narrow-gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway runs alongside and, in places, right on the roadway itself. Shops sit so close that shiny foil packets of chaat can be plucked off the shelves by passengers, or oranges that have just arrived from orchards in the Mirik Valley. Between the scattered roadside villages, overhanging trees tunnel the road in a lattice of branches. Rays of light, as though filtered through the high, broken windows of a deserted mill, whiten the road in spots. All around, on the steep hillsides, the smooth sprawl of tea is offset by thatches of impenetrable scrub, deep forest, and sheer drops. Small groups of half-hidden pluckers move imperceptibly on the distant hillsides.
At Kurseong, the serpentine traffic turns onto the Rohini Road, curling around a series of switchbacks like a cycling peloton. The view stretches down to the flat, brown plains with a slivery flash of river in the distance. Small groups of skinny men with scarves pulled around their mouths stand beside pots of burning tar: road crews repairing damage from the recent monsoon. Fist-size stones outline eaten-away patches of asphalt. Vehicles shunt around the tight corners, slowing to a stop in places to yield to trucks laboring up the narrow road. Ears pop from the change of pressure. Autumnal shadows angle across the tarmac. At the corners where streams pass under the road, trucks with large, open tanks have returned to siphon water to sell to villagers. A troop of monkeys sit across a web of branches like ornaments.
Eventually the road descends through tiered terraces of rice paddies. Sun catches the golden stalks, bending under the weight of the ripe, purple-tipped grains just a few weeks from being harvested. A pair of water buffalo with shiny backs, silvery as sealskins in the sun, amble along a narrow path. Triangular traffic signs bordered in red warn of elephants crossing the road. The plains. The air has lost its sharpness. Dust seems to gather and hang, giving a buttery hue to the light. Below a bridge over the Balasan River, a dozen women from a settlement of stonebreakers spread their colorful, laundered saris across the rocky riverbed to dry. At the T-junction near Siliguri, the traffic forms a tailback, then stutters ahead.
In Siliguri the tea gets transferred to railcars or hefty, highly decorated lorries—colorful vehicles adorned with painted frescoes of gods and mythical landscapes, and the ubiquitous HORN PLEASE across the tailgate, to which drivers happily respond—destined for Kolkata warehouses before going to buyers or the auction house.
The end of the year. The daily struggle of getting tea in, processed, and out to customers begins to fade—at least for a few months. Questions bubble to the forefront about the future, about Darjeeling’s precarious future.
Even if it can counter, or at least adapt to, the changes in weather, endure Gorkhaland’s frequently disruptive statehood aspirations, and stem the exodus of workers—that is, navigate environmental, political, and social change—and continue to make exquisite teas, will Darjeeling keep its place among the finest artisanal goods on the globe? Even if more Indians begin to drink Darjeeling’s tea, can it sustain relevancy in India, or its collective cultural heritage? For global consumers, how can Darjeeling’s gardens break from their hilltop isolation and share with an audience beyond a coterie of aficionados what makes their tea so unique—not only in flavor, but history, methods, and culture? How can they demonstrate the importance of its continuing?
Most growers seem content to produce fine teas, but not necessarily to offer the language with them that will seduce buyers. Planters are rarely successful in sharing their deep passion for the leaf or in offering a unique drinking experience to accompany their exquisitely handcrafted products. They have not been able to share what makes their teas so special—so utterly unique, with such a compelling story—that people should spend a significant amount more for Darjeeling tea than just about anything else on the shelf of a tea shop. That remains, more often than not, trapped up in the hills.
“The Indian grower is not interested in a beautiful aroma and how to poetically describe it—which is what a wine taster does. What he’s interested in is the size of the leaf and the strength of the liquor, whether the infusion is coppery or greenish or reddish, whether the liquor is clear or cloudy,” a Mirik Valley–based packager and importer of high-end teas from India grumbled in an interview with a trade journal. “The Indian tea industry is selling a product, a commodity—tea could be anything. What they need to be focused on is selling a dream, an idea, a hope.”1
For that, Darjeeling should be looking not at the wine but the coffee industry, because that is precisely what European- and American-style coffee culture in India is doing so successfully right now. Costa Coffee, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Barista Lavazza, and the ubiquitous Café Coffee Day—generally reduced to the initials CCD—with more than sixteen hundred branches across India, are having a huge cultural impact. A CCD outlet even sits smack on Darjeeling’s most iconic spot, the Chowrasta.
In Delhi’s trendy Hauz Khas Village, establishments all sport foreign names: Amour, Amici Café, Maison des Desserts, and Café Out of the Box (OTB), plus the curiously named bar-café He Said, She Said (open “since Adam ’n’ Eve” and graced with a motto based on Las Vegas’s: “What Happens in There Stays in There”). Amici prepares cappuccinos, ristrettos, lattes, macchiatos, mochas, affogatos, americanos, and its Rs 99 espressos with illy coffee beans using, the menu proudly notes, a Cimbali machine (“an Italian masterpiece”).
In Khan Market, a two-square-block enclave of shops in Delhi with the highest retail rent in India, chain cafés such as CCD and OTB are offset by lovely one-offs such as Café Turtle, reached by climbing up through the well-stocked Full Circle Bookstore and then a final flight of stairs. In Mumbai, Bangalore, Thiruvananthapuram, Ajmer, Jammu, Hyderabad, and Guwahati, the coffee culture is taking hold.
The coffee goliath Starbucks recently established a partnership with Tata Global Beverages, a unit of India’s largest business group, to open an untold number of branches in India—at the press conference announcing the joint venture, a Tata executive speculated as many as three thousand.2 The inaugural location launched in Mumbai in October 2012, and the first Starbucks opened on the inner circle of New Delhi’s Connaught Place the following February. With thirty-five hundred square feet of space spread over two floors and a staff of forty,3 the Delhi branch is neither a small coffee cart, nor another carbon copy of those bland, interchangeable Starbucks branches found from Spokane to Barcelona and Tokyo. Rather, it’s a unique outlet with brutalist-style exposed-concrete interior walls, handwoven jute ropes that hang in a loose webbing below the ceiling, and stools made from hefty lengths of logs right out of a backwoods campsite. In another enviable touch, baristas prepare drinks with coffee beans nationally sourced from the hills of South India. Single-origin Indian estate blends are now among the offerings.
“Best coffee? No way,” the Guardian quoted one skeptic on social media in Mumbai just after the opening. “It’s all about feeling foreign and upper class.”4 “People come for the ambience,” a young, energetic cashier clad in a baseball cap and still-stiff apron said on a busy spring morning in the Connaught Place branch. Jazz music covered the muffled chatter of customers engulfed by the vast space. “And the coffee, too,” she added as something of an afterthought. “The Java Chip Frappuccino is our most popular.”
And expensive. A venti (large) costs around Rs 210 with tax, or a bit under $4. Even the smallest-size, basic, black, filter coffee costs about Rs 110 ($2)—more than a Darjeeling tea plucker’s daily take-home. That’s steep for most living in Delhi, where the average monthly per capita income is around $250, the highest i
n India and more than three times the national average. A cup of chai on the street costs just Rs 5; when drunk inside a simple café, it’s perhaps double that.
“It’s a fashion,” said Girish Sarda at Nathmulls in Darjeeling of the country’s current coffee culture, “with style value”—a way to go out and meet friends with a bit of flair. “It is the hip-hop generation swayed by ads,” Sandeep Mukherjee at the DTA puts it, “swayed by the swankiness.”
It’s not about the drink, but the moment, the experience with the drink. CCD, Starbucks, and others are offering the dream that accompanies the beverage. The bottom of the Starbucks receipt reads, “To inspire and nurture the human spirit … One person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time!” Even if that’s vague and esoteric, clearly coffee’s role goes beyond that of a simple beverage. The slogan running across the front of every Café Coffee Day branch sums it up more directly: “A lot can happen over coffee.” CCD’s longer advertisement offers a grander vision of the image they are fostering:
You could do it to start a movement,
To make a friend, or to enjoy your coffee.
You could do it with a friend,
A stranger, or your professor.
You could do it for love, for peace,
Or for your bum.
No matter who you are, or what you do,
Great things happen when you just
Sit down,
Because a lot can happen over coffee.
Yet no one in India so far, points out Nathmulls’s Sarda, is preparing coffee at home—at least not quality coffee. If they do, then it’s usually just a spoonful of Nescafé stirred into hot milk or water.
At the moment in India, Starbucks-style café culture dedicated to tea is almost nonexistent. Rare exceptions are Cha Bars located in various Oxford Bookstores, the iconic chain established in 1919 on Kolkata’s Park Street. The first tea bar opened in 2000 and then expanded to other branches. Around the same time Starbucks arrived in New Delhi, the bookshop’s Connaught Place store moved to a new location with a contemporary-edged, overwhelmingly white, and well-lit Cha Bar. It offers more than 150 varieties of tea, including a dozen Darjeeling options. The most popular choice, though, is the classic dhaba (roadside eatery) masala chai served in small, thick glasses. The drink has a zestiness with the flavor of spice dominating that of the tea. The back of the throat gets an even sharper snap from Truck Driver’s 100 Mile Ki Chai, with plenty of black pepper in the masala blend.
The Cha Bar’s menu quotes a verse from Bengal’s most famous poet (and Nobel Prize winner), Rabindranath Tagore, that could be the call for such lush and lusty drinks: “Come oh come ye tea-thirsty restless ones, the kettle boils, bubbles and sings, musically.”
As one heads out of the hills among the loads of autumn teas to catch an afternoon flight from Bagdogra, the final views in the wing mirror of the high slopes are, simply, breathtaking. Coffee in India might have the moment, but Darjeeling tea has romance—not in the colonial vestiges of how a tea estate is structured, but in the green hills, in Darjeeling and its backdrop of majestic, icy Himalayan peaks, in the pure mountain air and vintage Raj-era bungalows with peaked tin roofs and latticed eaves.
The romance is also in the teas themselves: struggling artisans in the truest sense, individually producing teas using methods and tools that have changed little in a century, against odds so improbably stacked against them that the very survival of their industry is in peril.
That romance comes into the cup at home, too. It begins in the process, the ritual and routine of preparing. First, take the opposite experience—making a sweet, milky masala chai with brisk CTC tea from Assam: fussing with the spices to find a balance between the lingering cool of cloves, the peppery bite of ginger, the warmth of cinnamon, and the hot masculinity of cardamom pods crushed like bubble wrap between thumb and forefinger, stirring until tiny bubbles wheel up the sides of the pot, then dashing the tea between a pair of glasses to blend. The bouncy hecticness of the Indian street is present in masala chai.
Darjeeling tea is different. Soft-spoken rather than brash. Simplicity over baroque flamboyance. Contemplative more than energetic, with little sense of urgency or heavy-handedness. The same is true when preparing it. Putting the kettle to boil. Springing the lid open on a tin of Darjeeling tea—that immediate aroma: the grassy floralness of a spring tea, the mellower, spiced notes of an autumn one—and spooning some dry leaves into the pot, or plucking a tea bag from a metal tin whose original logo has begun to flake. Watching as tight bubbles form on the bottom of the kettle and drift unsteadily to the surface, then pouring the hot water over the leaves. The reaction is immediate, the interaction with the leaves. “No other drink is so engaging,” said Steven Smith in Portland about a pinch of second flush Darjeeling leaves beginning to come alive in the cup. The leaves breathe and stretch in the pot as sand streams through the wasp’s waist of an hourglass timer marking the minutes, the muscatel flavors bloom, and the color of the liquor turns to shimmering brass or copper. And then, finally, pouring through the strainer into a favorite teacup to sip.
The personalities of Darjeeling are reflected in each cup. They change from garden to garden, day to day. Sanjay Sharma calls ones from Glenburn “Glenburn in a cup.” The manager of each Darjeeling estate could say the same. A unique set of conditions make it not just a Darjeeling tea but one from a particular garden. Nothing is added, no flavors, no scents, no secrets. Just natural Darjeeling. Uniquely so.
“So many factors to produce an act of nature. You can’t repeat it. It’s like a human face,” Sanjay Kapur said in his Delhi workshop. “That’s what makes the tea so dynamic—and addicting.”
Where will Darjeeling tea be in twenty years? In late autumn, the season nearly finished, Sanjay Sharma stood on a large boulder along the Rangeet River at the bottom edge of Glenburn’s property and looked out over the water that had just begun to run clear in the last few days after unusually late rains. He considered the question, turning around to face a field of young tea shrubs. They had been brought up in the nursery from Glenburn’s own seeds and planted out as saplings only in spring.
“I’m an optimist,” he finally said, looking over the healthy plants. “You have to be. You look at the mud, put a hole in it, plant something …” He let the sentence fade. A tight smile spread slowly across his face as he turned back to the river that he could soon start fishing.
“The level of passion would surprise you,” Anindyo Choudhury said of planters, owners, and managers in Darjeeling. “Despite the hardships they are going through now, they remain passionate.”
The Darjeeling tea industry continues to move ahead, slowly. Healthier soil, new plantings, fine vintages, excellent green and white teas, higher prices, a wider public. Movement, as required, as the twelfth-century Indian saint Basavanna intoned to Shiva a thousand years ago:
Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but the moving ever shall stay.5
It is moving ahead, though not in step with the highest technology with which India has lately become famous, or chemical-driven concoctions, or genetically modified superstock. But it is staying true to its hands-and-nose approach to making crafted teas using century-old machines and honed skills—new varieties and styles, perhaps, but using ancestral methods passed down from tea planter to tea planter, crafting teas that reflect both a specific place and a specific season one batch at a time in ways nearly unchanged since Darjeeling started making tea. “Darjeeling tea is not an industry,” Rajah Banerjee once said. “It is a handicraft, a very specialized art.”6
Can that handicraft survive? There is no replacement if it does not, no place to outsource its unique flavors, no hills that will yield up such delicate aromas and subtle body. Nowhere else can duplicate its set of contributing influences nor its elusive taste.
Those begin in the steep hills and fertile soil of Darjeeling and grow upward toward the cycling cosmos. Two l
eaves and a bud at a time.
Recipes
PERFECT CUPS OF TEA
Darjeeling Tea
Masala Chai
Chennai Chai
Tibetan Tea with Salt and Butter
Fresh Passion-Fruit Chai
BEGINNINGS TO A DARJEELING DAY
Aloo Dum
Puri
Masala Omelet
Porridge
TO ACCOMPANY AFTERNOON TEA
The Ritz of London’s Afternoon Tea Scones
Afternoon Tea Pound Cake
Onion Pakoras (Spicy Onion Fritters)
Timeless Cucumber Sandwiches
Glenburn’s Chicken-and-Fresh-Mint Hamper Sandwiches
Delhi Sandwiches
LOCAL FAVORITES
Tea Garden Momos
Thukpa
Chili Oil (Tsu-La-Tsu)
Spiced Chicken Cutlet
TEA SPECIALS
Tea-Marbled Deviled Eggs
Darjeeling Tea Sorbet
PERFECT CUPS OF TEA
DARJEELING TEA
Steeping the perfect cup of Darjeeling tea is simple but exacting.
Bring a kettle of freshly drawn (or bottled) water to a boil. Rinse out a teapot and quickly discard the water. Add 1 level teaspoon—about 1/12 ounce or 2.5 grams—of pure long-leaf Darjeeling tea per cup to the teapot. Pour the water over the leaves, cover the pot, and steep for 3 to 3 ½ minutes, letting the leaves breathe and stretch. Strain into warmed teacups.
