Darjeeling (18 page)

“I want to keep buyers around at the end,” he said of his strategy in preparing the order of sales. It’s neither alphabetical nor organized by value. “I start with traditionally good producing gardens, spread out the quality in pockets, mix it up.” The key is the beginning, as the first five or so pages of the catalog—about a hundred or so lots—set the “market mood.” Choudhury wields complete power in the order, another element of his far-reaching influence.

While most gardens sell via private channels as well as at auction, some sell only through private means. These include those of the Ambootia group and the Chamong group, which counts Chamong, Marybong, Lingia, Tumsong, and Bannockburn in their Darjeeling fold of highly respected estates. According to Sujoy Sengupta, a marketing manager and key taster at the group, part of the issue for opting out of the auction was being “under the umbrella” of generalizations: good, medium, or bad. Chamong didn’t want their gardens to be characterized within these narrow categories. “Such simple terms don’t reflect our crop.”

Some who trade within the auction system quietly say that the gardens who only sell to private buyers don’t have confidence in their tea’s quality. Chamong, though, likely knew they could sell their product for higher prices outside the system. Especially when dealing with high-end retailers such as Harrods, Whittard of Chelsea, Twinings, and Fortnum & Mason, even Nathmulls in Darjeeling, direct deals can make a garden more money.

Tea merchant Vikram Mittal in New Delhi offered another reason for direct sales: Many private buyers simply don’t have access to the
Kolkata auction system. He said, “They can pay a little bit more—and would rather get it directly from the garden.” The immediacy and intimacy is appealing. “At auction there is a wall between garden and buyer—the broker.”

Direct purchasing can also avoid one of the biggest disadvantages to the auction, the time lag, said Mittal, who buys using both methods. He puts that difference at about four weeks, the time it takes for samples to be drawn and sent to the broker, tasted, graded, valued, listed, shown, sampled, auctioned, and then dispatched to the buyer. (Choudhury estimates that about eight kilograms, or eighteen pounds, is lost in every lot from samples, a notable amount from the garden’s point of view.)

The urgency in getting first flush teas into shops means many gardens and buyers prefer the direct method for spring teas. “Buying time is short,” said Choudhury. “The crop is small. The season is short.” Yet, he added, “there is a huge buying requirement.” The excitement of its being the year’s first teas adds a touch of frenzy. The second flush is longer and larger and has a bigger showing in auction.

While Ambootia’s and Chamong’s estates might have opted out of the auction, the majority of Darjeeling’s gardens have not. Between 60 and 65 percent of them still send teas to J. Thomas, including top producers (and price getters) Jungpana, Castleton, and Thurbo.

The auction room has a frisson and buzz. It’s riskier, to be sure. After selecting tea to bid on from the catalog, a buyer might get it for less that hoped for, or more. Or, maybe not at all. Gamesmanship, strategy, and tradition are all on display.

On the afternoon following the auction, in his office at the end of a fourth-floor corridor, the Kolkata-born Choudhury was much more relaxed than he had been behind the dais with gavel in hand. Cordial and clubby in a congenial way, he has a willing laugh. He appears trim and erect in an athletic rather than military manner—the comparison is not arbitrary; he studied at an Army Public School in Delhi before going to university—like someone who plays squash (aggressively and against a younger colleague) a couple times a week.

He was reviewing the catalog from the previous day’s auction. Held together by a thin, brown thread, the stack of printed sheets was heavily marked up with pencil in a quick, loose hand. His office was sparsely
decorated, the walls largely empty, as if he had initially hesitated on what to hang and then just got used to it. A window looks over the company parking lot. Leaves, blown down in a brief but fierce midday downpour, stuck to the roofs of cars like postage stamps.

Choudhury had already tasted the upcoming lots and given them provisional values. Now that he had the current pulse of the market, he could assign them their final numbers. Reporting on that just-completed sale, the
Economic Times
—India’s most widely read business newspaper (and the second most widely read one in the world after the
Wall Street Journal
)—noted that the market, which had been a touch subdued, had begun firming up. “Darjeeling teas showing an improvement in quality was readily absorbed.”
⁶
The superior crop was coming in. The teas were increasing in depth and appeal.

The stern demeanor of Choudhury’s face had softened (in part from not wearing his glasses), and he seemed more patient than he had in the auction room. He needs to keep the buyers in order, he explained with a sly smile, smoothing down his black mustache. “If I lose concentration, I may knock something down early, so they try to distract me, say something, make jokes.”

His style for cupping the gavel is more practical than original. “If you hit it too hard, the damn head is liable to go flying off,” he said with a hearty laugh. Beside, cupping it also diffuses the noise, a not insignificant point when he bangs the gavel down more than seven hundred times on auction day.

Precisely at three thirty
P.M.
—punctuality clearly an inherent, or inherited, J. Thomas trait—an elderly bearer in a white cotton uniform glided along the corridor with a cart, serving tea to each office.

Darjeeling? “No,” Choudhury said with a sheepish smile. Most Indians, he explained, don’t like such light teas. “They want some body in their cup.” There was only Assam orthodox, brisk and bold, offered with milk and sugar.

A half dozen reddish biscuits sat on the cup’s saucer. Similar to Wheat Thins but flakier and saltier, they had a generous seasoning of masala spice. After dipping one in the tea and taking a bite, it was clear the office demanded some body in their snack, too.

With his power, exceptional palate, continual tasting, and acute sense of what the market is producing, it’s hard not to see Anindyo Choudhury as
Darjeeling tea’s Robert Parker. “Tasting,” Choudhury said, “is like a skill, like having a memory on your tongue.” Parker clearly possesses the ability to not simply distinguish among the nuances of taste and aroma in wines, and express those traits in a graspable manner, but also recall them, with precision, later.

While Parker is a prominent global figure, outside the confined world of Indian tea in India, Choudhury is unknown. He has no newsletter or bestselling guides like Parker. Shop owners do not wait to see his valuations to buy or to set prices, nor has he changed, to any discernible degree, the style of teas being made in Darjeeling to fit his taste preferences.

But within the industry, Choudhury is a sought-after ally. “Everyone wants him on their team,” according to one prominent Indian tea merchant, who said Choudhury is the “most powerful” person in the business. His word alone can do wonders. “When he recommends a garden to a buyer …,” the merchant said, pausing, a little breathless at the thought. “How he can talk about a tea for five minutes—or nothing, or neglect you. By his auction ordering.”

As brokers rely on the trust of both producer and buyer, integrity is considered the guiding principle in hiring at J. Thomas, reported a piece in the
Hindu
a few years ago celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first public tea auction in India, and recruitment is “based on sound background, schooling and sportsman-like qualities.”
⁷
Sports clearly remain important. Company profiles of J. Thomas’s current top management show men who play table tennis and badminton, cricket, and tennis, and Kavi Seth—the auctioneer of the Makaibari record and now one of its top directors—is a former number-one-ranked squash player in Bengal.
⁸

But also integrity. In listening to dozens of people in the industry, Choudhury’s image seems unblemished, his reputation excellent, even if people don’t always agree with his pricing. That’s imperative. For the system to continue to function, buyers need to have confidence in his impartiality and judgment. He is more than just a middleman between garden and buyer.

While one day he will no doubt leave the auction room to a younger colleague and move from senior management to join Seth as one of the half dozen or so company directors, for the moment he remains the front man of Darjeeling’s industry, through whose fingers more than half its tea passes.

•        •        •

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: 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.