The reputations of auctioneers and tea brokers haven’t always been as pristine. From the beginning, their scruples have not infrequently been called into question. The first written use of the word tea-broker in English can be found in a news item in Edmund Burke’s The Annual Register: or A View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1770: “Coyde, a tea-broker, charged with forging a warrant for the delivery of three chests of tea at the India House, was brought to be examined before a Court of Directors at the India House.”9 Perhaps it was included in Burke’s Register not so much for the crime—minor news compared to the paragraph above it that reports on forty thousand people crowding Rome’s Piazza del Popolo to see the execution of two murderers—but because, while the court debated Coyde’s case, the tea broker escaped from the three police constables guarding him. Few things help make a crime newsworthy more than an escaped villain. Unscrupulous, but also wily.
That the first use of “tea-broker” appeared in this context would surprise no one who deals in Darjeeling tea today.
Darjeeling’s tea is unduplicable. But—as with any limited, luxury product—that doesn’t mean others don’t try. With its cachet, high prices, and declining output, mislabeling is rampant and blending commonplace. Some has been done legally—Germany can use 51 percent Darjeeling tea in a blend and still call it Darjeeling—and some not. Such problems are not exactly new. Blenders have been passing off teas from Sri Lanka, and then Kenya, as Darjeeling since the 1960s, and now teas from Nepal are surreptitiously being brought across the Indian border and sold as Darjeeling on the domestic market.10 As well, green leaf from Nepal is getting processed in Darjeeling factories and being mixed in, say numerous sources in Darjeeling. “Everyone knows where it is going,” said a tea merchant in Darjeeling. “No one says a word.”
Industry officials estimate that some 40 million kilograms of “Darjeeling tea” are sold on the market each year. That is over four times the amount that the area actually produces.
* This is shorthand for Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh but still often called by its original name, Dalhousie Square.
Monsoon Flush
(July through September)
Monsoon: from the Arabic mawsim, “season,” itself from wasama, “to mark.” A punctuation in the subcontinent’s year, its most important natural feature, its most anticipated change. The country receives 75 percent of its annual rainfall in just four months. In May, as India’s heat burns across the plains, warming the land faster than the oceans that surround it, the southwest monsoon winds begin to gather, circling the Bay of Bengal. They pass over the southern tip of India sometime around the first of June, and then sweep heavy clouds northeast along the coastline, pushing straight over the Terai toward the Darjeeling hills to meet the impassable barrier of the Himalayas and drench the foothills with the remainder of their moisture.
By mid-June, after weeks of building-and-bursting thunderheads and short, lashing storms that strip and scatter the heart-shaped leaves from pipal trees, the rains around Darjeeling become sustained and pound in steady patterns on the tin roofs. Lightning flickers. Electricity cuts out. Fog and mist, rising up from the humid valleys, trim visibility to mere feet. Overhanging eves on shops and verandas drip, and the edges of paper curl like shells in the dampness. The city empties of tourists, the pace slows. Couples in knee-high gum boots and oversize rain slickers huddle under shared umbrellas as they hurry down Laden-la Road to one of the family-run Tibetan places in the lower bazaar to have lunch, a bowl of thukpa (noodles) or a plate of momos (steamed stuffed dumplings) dipped in tongue-withering chili sauce.
In the long grasses and humid forests, leeches lurk. They work their way undetected between rolled pant cuffs and thick socks to latch onto the soft skin somewhere around the ankle. (They also drop from branches and grasp ahold on the back of the neck.) They bloat unnoticed with blood and then fall, while their anticoagulant keeps the small, round lesions bleeding for another hour or two, unnoticed, until later, sitting on a dry verandah sipping a cup of tea, a subconscious brush of the leg with the fingers comes away wet with blood.
The sky and mountains disappear behind a sheen of white for months on end, and the rain is both heavy and steady. While Darjeeling has received on average thirty inches of rainfall during the month of July, recently it has been closer to forty inches or more. Retaining walls collapse, the topsoil dissolves, and the dozen rivers that course down the valleys’ slopes—the Teesta, which divides Darjeeling from Sikkim, the Great Rangeet and the Rungdun, the Balason, the Kaljani, and the Torsha—run swift and murky. Landslides are a danger. Dirt roads on the estates get washed out. Getting in to the Club or a branch of the State Bank of India from a garden, along the steep, twisting, and narrow paved roads, is difficult, even impossible.
But how the tea gardens glisten in a spectrum of greens! Lime. Jade. Teal. Mossy. Olive. Toady. Drops of rain dangle from the leaves like Christmas pendants. In the drizzle on Jungpana, an isolated garden reached only by hundreds of slippery steps, men trim the weeds between tea bushes wearing large strips of plastic in the style of hooded capes. Pluckers wrap similar sheets around their midsections and knot them high above their waists like industrial butchers. They wedge the handle of an umbrella between neck and shoulder and keep plucking with both hands.
After absorbing the moisture for a few weeks, the tea bushes begin to flush out great quantities of leaves—larger, coarser ones than those of the other harvests. But also with less flavor. “Because it jumped!” H. R. Chaudhary, Namring’s long-serving manager, said by way of explanation. “The slower you grow, the more the flavor. Same for mango, banana, for anything.” Down lower on Rohini, at the base of the hills, B. B. Singh said in a soft voice, “Slow growing, good flavors. Fast growing, no flavors.”
How are you? “Flushed out!” Sanjay Sharma on Glenburn called out in reply on a rainy day. “The trees are flushing like crazy.”
Factories struggle to keep up with the amount of green leaf coming in. Half the year’s harvest in a single flush. But the dampness also makes withering and fermenting harder to manage and producing fine, delicate teas, appreciated for their nuance, difficult.
Rain teas: quantity over quality.
During this wet harvest, the nature of the tea liquor changes, becomes stronger, and turns the deep reddish brown of a Spanish cedar cigar box. Even ruddier.
And prices drop. The leaves picked during the monsoon yield the majority of the blends and are sold non-estate-specific. It’s blenders’ season in the J. Thomas & Co. auction room.
One ducks through the open door of Nathmulls, in the center of Darjeeling, from a sudden squall and finds—as always—Girish Sarda standing patiently behind the counter. Nathmulls sells 150 different Darjeeling teas. Not a single one is monsoon flush. In front of Girish sit three dozen large, old-fashioned candy jars. They have wooden lids, rounded as mushroom caps, with the grains running across the tops like the oversize whorl of a thumbprint, and hold prize black teas from the first and second flushes plus one or two from the previous autumn.
But now, on one end of the long glass counter in Nathmulls, some jars contain fine green teas. More estates are using this flush to make a style of tea not traditionally associated with the region. Being unfermented, they carry the natural vegetal notes of the season rising up from the saturated soiclass="underline" brothy and grassy, at times even kelpy, with hints of artichokes and silky spinach.