Spread along the four ridges of the estate are seven villages, tight clusters of brick houses painted in blues or greens or reds with tin roofs. “Living in these villages are 1,558 people,” Rajah said in the first days of July, adding, with a smile, “The last one was born ten days ago.” He takes pride in knowing each by name.
Over half of Makaibari’s land is under a cover of forest where wild things thrive. Above the canopy of green tea bushes rise the soft calls of birds. The trees and skies bustle with a plethora of large and small birds, colorful and drab. Most impressive are the great pied hornbills, black-and-white, vulture-size birds with five-foot wingspans and heavy, yellow-orange, concave-topped casques. They eat small rodents and reptiles but prefer feeding on fruit trees. Wild figs are a favorite; they can devour 150 in a single meal. Their loud barking call, at times more of a retch, reverberates across Makaibari.
Inside the estate’s forests are troops of rhesus and Assamese macaque monkeys, cobras, boar, barking deer, wild goats, and large cats. “There is just one tiger—but plenty of leopards,” said a resident in the village closest to the factory. The animals, with their distinctive black spots and black-tipped ears, hunt around the tea estate villages on occasion, he said, skulking at night after a pye-dog, goat, or even cow.
But no creature on Makaibari makes a bigger stir than a bug that sits easily in the palm of a hand. In 1991, a strange green insect that looked exactly like a tea leaf appeared on Makaibari. Rajah Banerjee christened it Tea Deva—“God of Tea”—after the class of deities from the Vedas. Entomologists identified it as a member of the Phillidae family, an insect highly adept at mimicry. Sometimes called a walking leaf, it can impersonate leaves, sticks, and branches.
The insect is rare enough that an extremely generous bounty of Rs 5,000 ($90) goes to anyone who finds one. For a plucker, that’s equivalent to fifty-five days of wages. “The one who has luck will get that bug,” a field supervisor said during a sunny first flush day, as she watched over a dozen pluckers working a section below Lower Makaibari. As the women moved through the bushes, rapidly gathering shoots and tossing them into their baskets, they kept an eye out for a moving leaf. Each year, pluckers find a couple of Tea Devas.
Why Banerjee is so keen on finding them, and willing to pay so much, is a matter for debate. “To show to foreigners,” answered one of the pluckers in the group. She was in her fifties, with red rubber boots, a golden stud in her nose, and a folded towel on her head where the thick strap of her basket rested.
It’s part of the legend of the farm. Or, as some cynics say, one of its gimmicks. The manager of another Darjeeling estate, when asked if he had seen any Tea Devas on his farm, wryly remarked, “I thought Rajah Banerjee had a monopoly on those.”
“If the farm is purely organic, then the tea bug will come,” said the plucking supervisor. “It proves the organicness of the leaf.”
Rajah Banerjee goes further. In his book he wrote, “As Rudolf Steiner—the father of biodynamic agriculture—has stated, if all agriculture practices are truly holistic, then the principal crop will be reflected in mimicry.”15
The notion is perfect for the legend and near-mythical status of Makaibari. Perhaps too perfect. Malcolm Gardner, biodynamic research expert at the Rudolf Steiner Library of the Anthroposophical Society in America and editor and cotranslator of Steiner’s agriculture lectures, exclaimed when asked, “In my thirty years of studying everything related to Steiner’s agriculture, I have never come across this quote or anything close to it.”
Many in the West remain dubious about biodynamic farming despite its recent popularity. (It is practiced across the world in various sectors, perhaps most famously in the United States in viticulture.) Evidence for the results for biodynamic farming tends to be more anecdotal than scientific. As anecdotes go, Makaibari is biodynamic farming’s greatest success story. Even if the Tea Deva doesn’t convince Rajah Banerjee’s skeptics, the price tag on his world-record-setting Silver Tips Imperial and the discerning clients it attracts should.
Silver Tips Imperial sits at the top of Makaibari’s selection of vintages. The delicate tea has a satiny floralness that’s soothingly subtle. “This is the dynamic one,” Rajah said one spring morning, sipping a cup of it in the Makaibari tasting room. By that he meant the energized one, the one produced by forces of nature not completely understood by science.
Made with silvery, unfurled buds, it has—unlike Glenburn’s Silver Needle—a degree of fermentation and a extremely light roll. It is not a white tea, Rajah insists, even if some retailers market it as such. “It is exceptional handiwork,” he said. Beyond that, he is recalcitrant. He has spent thirty years perfecting it and remains evasive on manufacturing specifics. “Don’t ask any questions about Silver Tips Imperial and you won’t get any lies,” he said. “Isn’t that right?” he called out to his wife across the sitting room of the bungalow one evening, then turned with a wide, tight-lipped grin that bunched up his cheeks around his eyes and brought to a halt any further discussion on producing the illustrious tea.
Another difference from Glenburn’s Silver Needle is that the leaves of Makaibari’s Silver Tips Imperial are energized by cosmic forces and plucked around the full moon. According to Demeter, “The moon and planets influence the growth of roots, leaves, flowers and fruit, just like moon phases have an influence on sea tides.”16 The highest tides of the month are when the moon is the fullest. A tea plant is made up largely of water—the green leaves contain around 78 percent moisture—so it’s hardly unthinkable that the moon could have an influence.
During this period, the elements of the earth are drawn upward by cosmic forces, explained Makaibari’s production manager, Sanjoy Mukherjee, a young man with a wispy mustache and a broad smile. “The taste and aroma levels are very high.” Holding a Nike baseball hat in his hand and waiting to begin the morning batch tasting, he added, “This is the magic of the universe.” (The opposite happens with the new moon, when the water is falling to the roots. Then, he advised, harvest potatoes and carrots.)
Production of Silver Tips Imperial is limited: only 120 kilograms (265 pounds) in 2013, according to Mukherjee. The first of five pluckings took place at the end of March, just as the first flush had got under way. It had a special resonance, as it was Holi, the Hindu spring festival of colors.
“It is a fusion of external forces … spirit-soul … which can never die,” Rajah said in the tasting room, trying to explain its uniqueness. “It is a reflection of past, present, and future in one teacup.”
But it costs dearly to sample a tea that at bedtime can, according to Rajah, “cull one to celestial slumber.” While Makaibari significantly bettered its 2003 auction benchmark, selling Silver Tips Imperial a few years later in a tea expo in Beijing for Rs 54,000 a kilo17 (then about $1,315), even such princely sums pale next to what Banerjee gets for his best vintages through private sales. The highly respected English-language Indian newsmagazine Outlook reported in 2005 that the British royal family was paying Rs 200,000 (about $4,500) per kilo for Silver Tips Imperial, and the sultan of Brunei even more, some Rs 250,000 (about $5,700) for that same amount.18
Commoners can get the celestial leaves, too. Craft House shops in Delhi sell twenty-five-gram (about three-quarter-ounce) packets for Rs 2,600 (about $50). That amount weighs less than thirteen playing cards—a single suit in a deck—and will brew just ten cups of tea. But at Rs 104,000 ($1,900) per kilo, it’s significantly less than the queen and sultan pay.
Makaibari is not the only biodynamic estate in Darjeeling.