Darjeeling (13 page)

For the Company, the move on the Terai and Dooars proved both timely and propitious. With the tea industry in the Darjeeling hills and Assam growing quickly, it was already looking to expand. In 1860, the first experimental gardens were opened in the Terai, and in 1862—the year Campbell retired to London after twenty-two years in Darjeeling and thirty-five in Company service (without increase of pay or allowances)
⁴⁵
—James White planted out Champta Tea Estate.
⁴⁶
By 1872 the Terai had fourteen estates, and in 1874 more than two dozen.

Today, the Dooars and Terai together produce around 225 million kilograms (nearly 500 million pounds) of tea a year, about a quarter of India’s total, and some twenty-five times more than Darjeeling. Full, creamy, and good liquoring, the tea is generally mellower than those from Assam, a hint sweeter, but also thinner in the cup, with a flavor that one Delhi tea merchant calls “ropy.” The orthodox tea is dark, stylish, and twisty, while the CTC—most of the production—is grainy and hard. Dooars-Terai have a logo designed by the Tea Board of India, which shows the head of one of the area’s elephants in a brownish-orange circle. Rarely does the tea retail abroad on its own, but rather is sought after for blending.

Having the Terai under British control directly benefited the Darjeeling tea industry. Work began on the wider, more gently sloped Hill Cart Road between Darjeeling and the plains and greater India. Its completion in 1866 was a turning point in the development of the town and its tea industry. That year, thirty-nine gardens in Darjeeling produced 433,000 pounds of tea.
⁴⁷
By 1874 the number of tea gardens had ballooned to 113, and production had multiplied nearly ten times to nearly 4 million pounds.
⁴⁸

Once the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway opened in 1881, cutting travel time and transport costs significantly, and allowing heavy steam- and coal-driven machinery for processing tea to be pulled up the hill, Darjeeling tea found its final footing. In 1885 production past 9 million pounds.
⁴⁹

That was a fraction compared to Assam standards, or even those in the Dooars and Terai. But then Darjeeling was never about quantity. It has always been about quality.

*
 Quite literally. In 1860–61, Cherrapunji set a world record of 1,042 inches of rainfall in twelve months, a record that still stands. In July 1861 alone, the monsoon dumped 366 inches—over thirty feet!—of rain.

*
 Although Lloyd’s grave in the European cemetery was declared to be of national importance under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958, little public attention has been paid it. On June 6, 2011, the front page of the
Calcutta Telegraph
read, “Darjeeling discovers Lloyd after 146 yrs—Individuals for the first time pay homage to the man who ‘found’ the hill town.” Even that was a muted affair. The grave has a five-foot-high obelisk marker. Its blue-tinted whitewashing is fading and streaked with mold. Flowers never appear at its base.

*
 Asked by Darwin in 1843 to work on his newly collected plant specimens from the
Beagle
voyage, Hooker went on to read and comment on Darwin’s ideas on evolution that would form
On the Origin of Species
. Over a friendship that spanned forty years, the two exchanged fourteen hundred letters.

Why
did
the China leaves thrive in Darjeeling? Why does the tea grown in these hills have such flavor—such
unique
flavor? And why can’t other mountainous areas replicate it? “You plant the bush in Darjeeling and you get Darjeeling tea,” one garden manager said. “You plant the same bush in south India and you get south-Indian tea.”

To start, the steep, terraced terrain around Darjeeling is a perfect blend of climate, altitude, and the right soil. The weather combines sunshine—no more than five or six hours a day, and only for about 180 days a year—and humid mountain mists and clouds that protect the shoots and leaves from too much direct sunlight. The tea bush needs sun, but not all day long. Even more, it craves rain. At least fifty to sixty inches of rainfall per year is essential for good growth. Darjeeling receives an annual average of 126 and up to 160 inches. Abundant rain, but not swampiness. The steepness of the slopes offers excellent natural drainage.

The slightly acidic soil is rich and loamy with organic material from the surrounding forests, gritty, and generally contains the right proportion of clay. To demonstrate the ideal soil on Glenburn Tea Estate, Sanjay Sharma compressed in his fist a handful of fine, light-chocolate-colored earth from a pile near neat rows of young saplings. He held his arm straight out at shoulder height. “It should explode into dust, not little balls,” he said. “If you get those balls, then too much clay, too heavy, and won’t drain, yeah? If it won’t hold together, there is too much sand.” He opened his hand. The clod fell and exploded into pure dust. He smiled and bent down to brush off his polished leather Timberland boots.

In the cool, high elevation and thin air, the buds grow slowly, allowing flavors to develop and concentrate. The aromas of high-grown teas—as opposed to mid-grown or low-grown—tend to be more expansive and the flavors more intense.

The yield, though, is significantly less than that in warmer climes. A tea bush in Darjeeling will produce only up to three and a half ounces of finished tea per year, enough for about forty cups. Overall, Darjeeling’s gardens produce around four hundred kilograms (nine hundred pounds) per hectare, just a third as the average in India. Such disparity comes from other reasons, too. The China variety of bushes in Darjeeling have smaller, slower-growing leaves than Assam bushes, the most common type planted across the country. The season is shorter, too. In Darjeeling the tea bushes go into hibernation for three or four months in the winter, while in Assam, the humid, low-lying conditions offer almost year-round harvesting.

The area’s sharply pitched geography means that Darjeeling estates vary greatly in elevation from top to bottom. Lingia Tea Estate reaches from twenty-eight hundred to six thousand feet and yet covers a mere 220 hectares (544 acres). Tukvar is twice as large but stretches from fifteen hundred to sixty-five hundred feet. With such range, each garden contains a number of microclimates. They reach from tropical to temperate and even alpine forest, with hillsides that catch more of the sun’s rays as well as shadier, moister ones. The tea in the higher sections has more delicate flavors, but lower yields. Ripening periods also differ. When bushes on the upper reaches of an estate are just moving into the first flush, the ones at the bottom might already be starting to produce second flush teas. According to Hrishikesh “Rishi” Saria, who owns and manages Gopaldhara and Rohini tea estates with his father, harvesting on the lower-elevation Rohini starts one month earlier than on Gopaldhara, whose fields run from fifty-five hundred to seven thousand feet, and ends one month later.

Another geographical component contributes to Darjeeling tea’s unique taste. “In the south of India we have the right conditions and more sunshine,” said New Delhi tea merchant Vikram Mittal in his cluttered Sunder Nagar shop. But Darjeeling is in proximity to the snow-covered Himalayas. “It gives a ‘crisping effect’ to flavor,” he said. The cold, dry air that blows across the icy peaks wicks away the excess moisture, reduces the relative humidity, and concentrates the flavor compounds. North-facing gardens benefit most, especially in autumn.

•        •        •

But terroir is only the first part of the flavor equation. The remainder resides in the way the tea leaves are cultivated, selectively plucked, and then turned into made tea. Walking among workers in a garden’s steep rows of tea bushes (grasping branches for support, to the amusement of the pluckers), visiting its small, on-site “factory” (more like a barn-size, well-lit workshop) that is the hub of every estate, or tasting the day’s finished batches of tea, one point is immediately clear: the hands-on (and nose-in) element remains fundamental to Darjeeling’s final, distinctive, and celebrated flavors.

“Darjeeling tea is special for the most important thing, the human element,” said Sujoy Sengupta. Easygoing, wearing a short-sleeved shirt in his Kolkata office during the summer heat (while many of his colleagues wore ties), he spent a dozen years on some of Darjeeling’s finest gardens before moving to the headquarters of the Chamong group.

“Plucking can only be done by hand,” he said, as machines are unable to selectively chose the right shoots that Darjeeling tea requires. “Judging fermentation can only be done by nose.” The process is tactile and intuitive. It’s about feeling the leaves as they change in texture, about smelling them. And about making often spontaneous judgment calls. “You cannot just put the leaves in huge machines and expect to make excellent Darjeeling tea,” he insisted. “The human touch is in every step.”

That begins early in cultivation. Saplings are planted out in the field, usually in April or May. A tea bush will grow into an ungainly tree and needs to be shaped into a low, flat table if it is to be plucked. After reaching about three or four feet tall, it will start getting regular pruning. This tedious and laborious work is fundamental. Such cutting encourages lateral branching, and the young trees are trained to spread and create a solid frame and high density of plucking points. When properly shaped, new shoots will appear above the level surface of the table, which pluckers can easily reach, rather than at the center of the bush. Pruning also stimulates regular flushing of the bush.

Pluckers, who are always women, do not take all of a tea bush’s leaves. The coarse leaves do not make quality teas. The women look for the tender, newer shoots that are smaller, a lighter, brighter green, and have a softer feel. They select only the first two leaves and a terminal bud at a time, a pluck called
dwi paat suiro
in Nepali. It is done by taking the stem between thumb and forefinger and twisting for a clean snap of the top shoot with the hand and wrist, rather than by breaking with the fingernail or clipping with sheers or any kind of blade. This is the classic
Darjeeling “fine-pluck.” It requires ten thousand of these to produce a single pound of finished Darjeeling tea.

Plucking this apical part of a tea shoot stimulates growth of dormant leaves and buds. In seven days or so, new shoots appear above the plucking table as the fresh leaves and buds unfold, and the bush is picked again. This is called a plucking round. Seven days is the Darjeeling standard. Beyond that and the leaves’ quality for made tea decreases.

Older tea sections on an estate have a single hedge layout with around eight thousand plants per hectare, but new plantings normally use a double-hedge formation containing up to eighteen thousand bushes per hectare, with upper reaches and steeper slopes closer to twelve thousand. In this style, saplings are placed two feet apart in parallel rows of tea bushes along the contours, with a four-foot gap for pluckers to move, and then two more parallel rows of bushes spaced two feet apart. Planted intermittently among the tea are shade trees. These lower the temperature and raise the humidity around them, create windbreaks, and also help replace the nitrogen in the soil. These are tall, high-branching species that won’t interfere with plucking and have small leaves that won’t cover the hedges when they fall.

Making their way between rows of tight, interlocked bushes, the women pluck with both hands and, when they cannot hold any more, toss the leaves into the conical basket on their backs. The woven bamboo basket measures about eighteen inches deep, eighteen inches across the top, and tapers down to a flat bottom just eight inches wide. Depending on personal preference, they use either a loosely woven one called
tokri
in Nepali or one with a tighter weave called
doko
. The baskets are suspended not by shoulder straps like a backpack but by a thick strap of bright cloth that stretches across the top of the forehead. During the day, pluckers dump their baskets twice: once before lunch and once at the end of the day. Apart from weighing progressively more, the leaves start to chemically change once plucked and need to be processed as soon as possible.

The precariously steep terrain that adds to the unfeasibility of mechanized harvesting also makes the meticulous plucking required even more difficult. The average worker produces just 396 pounds of finished tea a year, less than a quarter of the 1,644 pounds than her Assam counterpart manages.
¹
(It takes five pounds of freshly plucked leaves for one pound of finished Darjeeling tea.)

Small villages are spread throughout the slopes of a garden, and women, working in groups of a dozen to twenty, generally pluck sections nearest their homes. Work starts at seven thirty
A.M.
There is an hour
break for lunch. They walk back to their houses to prepare a quick meal or sit in a shady spot along the road and eat from a nested tiffin lunch box. Afternoon plucking lasts until four
P.M.
or so.