Darjeeling (31 page)

“It’s a very delicate cup with a hint of astringency and mildly green and zesty,” he explained. The liquor is superlight, pale, almost silvery
white in the cup, and carries subtle, clean flavors with a crisp, short finish and a touch of dryness. “If it’s oxidized, it’d go flat. Every cup needs a little astringency to stimulate the palate.”

His exceptional handicraft was awarded first place in the white-tea category at the 2013 North American Tea Championship in Las Vegas, a significant achievement from Darjeeling, which is very much a new kid on the white-tea arena. The 2013 harvest of Silver Needle was selling from Glenburn direct for $460—at the summer’s exchange rate, not far under Rs 30,000—per kilo.

While expensive, it is so exclusive and labor-intensive to produce that even Glenburn’s most productive pluckers can gather only enough Silver Needle for about
ten
cups in an entire working day.

The synonym in Darjeeling for these specialty teas is
fancy teas
, which can have something of a fey ring to it. They are upstarts, somehow apart from the classic Darjeeling flushes. But they have become important members of the Darjeeling tea family. A poster in the tasting room of Rohini shows a dozen of the specialty teas that Rohini and its higher-elevation sister garden Gopaldhara offer. Across the bottom it reads, “Join the table—It’s absolutely Darjeeling.”

*
 These stand for Ambari Vegetative 2, Bannockburn 157, and Phoobsering 312, after the estates where the stock originated, but are always referred to in shorthand.

A cup of tea might be made from leaves, but the flavors begin in the earth. One of the most encouraging signs of change in Darjeeling is the improving health of the soil. Gardens have taken aggressive measures to reverse decades of harmful agricultural techniques and have restored more traditional, natural tea-farming methods lost during the postindependence surge in chemical inputs.

Makaibari has been one of the estates at the forefront of soil-level change. It’s the most famous garden in the hills, producing the most famous Darjeeling tea in the world, due largely to the passions of one man, Rajah Banerjee. Farming tea is part of his makeup, his lineage. Makaibari has been run, almost since its unconventional, mid-nineteenth century establishment, by the Banerjee family. His ancestors also managed some of Darjeeling’s other best-known gardens.

Yet Rajah’s entry into the family business was anything but assured. In the mid–1960s, he went to England to study mechanical engineering at Imperial College London. After four years he returned for a holiday on Makaibari. He was keen to get back as soon as possible to his urban life in Europe. But, as he frequently repeats, “Man proposes and God disposes.”

His father bought him a gun and a retired thoroughbred named Invitation and told him, Ride and hunt, son, enjoy your holidays. On the afternoon of August 21, 1970, as he cantered along the steep pitches and precarious bridle paths of pluckers’ trails that weave throughout the estate, a wild boar bolted in front of the horse. The startled horse reared up and threw Rajah. That moment changed everything for the young heir.

“In the split second that I fell, I perceived a brilliant band of white light, connecting me to the trees in the forests around me,” he wrote in his book on Makaibari. He fell slowly to earth in a suspended moment that he considers an out-of-body experience because he wasn’t unconscious. “The woods sang out melancholically in an incredible concerto, ‘Save us! Save us!’”
¹
Elsewhere he recalled, “I was in a timeless, spaceless zone. A tunnel of light with an incredible intensity and clarity.”
²

“It took me about ten years to be able to talk about it,” Rajah said in the spacious, rambling hilltop home (humbly referred to as a bungalow) that has been home to generations of Banerjees. He wore a sweat suit with a silver tips T-shirt pulled over the zippered jacket top. “Now I can talk about it rationally. They would have found me certifiably crazy.”

He
knew he wasn’t mad that August day forty-five years ago. Although he didn’t fully understand the experience yet, Rajah knew instantly that he had to spend the rest of his life on Makaibari. At dinner that night he told his parents that he was staying and would become a tea planter. He didn’t explain what had made him suddenly change his mind. They were puzzled, but happily accepted his decision.

Rajah’s well-honed stories, studded with bits of original wisdom, retold for visitors who arrive almost daily from around the globe, come across not so much fresh and spontaneous as original and sincere. In particular, hearing his anecdote of being thrown from the horse, almost verbatim to how he has recorded it elsewhere, remains, like a Greek drama whose story is known but masterfully handled onstage, a riveting experience. Fittingly, details of the fall lend it the essence of a fable, including the animal that startled the horse and set the event into motion. In the Indian tradition, one of Lord Vishnu’s reincarnations was as Varaha, a boar whose rooting around in the earth and turning over soil showed him how to till and plow, teaching man cultivation. Today the Indian wild boar (
Sus scrofa cristatus; suar
in Hindi,
varaha
in Sanskrit) remains a sacred animal associated with agriculture
³
and also fertility, due to its digging deep in the earth to allow for the growth of shoots.
⁴

Rajah is a master raconteur. He loves to talk, to educate, to be listened to.
Pontificate
might be the best word. (He keeps to the first person, although there would be little surprise if he switched, from time to time, to the third.) He is brilliant and aggrandizing, curious, arrogant but generous, preachy but unique, with flair, charm, and rare magnetism. Had he not taken up tea planting, he could have become one of those legendary teachers, the kind at boarding school who inspire student
rebellions and at university that pack lecture halls and have, year after year, a loyal following of not just the curious or needy but also the most brilliant. Instead, he remains in his rural, isolated tea garden tending to its daily needs. “The world comes to you. Look: you came,” he said. Rajah’s vocabulary is rich, colorful, and precise, laid out not so much the way a jeweler displays his fanciest wares, but the way a butcher wields his tools to work, in order to provoke and persuade. Or maybe the way a jester handles his props: puns and intricate allusions come quickly. His sense of humor is ripe and, not infrequently, cutting. Guests are challenged and interrogated. (“Come on! What do you taste? You’re a
gourmand. You
should know this!”) Ideas, offered with a brawny, combative intellectual persuasiveness, are original, iconoclastic, and often bewildering. Too frequently, guests are muted and can only nod into their cups of tea. While he speaks in polished paragraphs and dislikes being interrupted, he is genuinely interested and inquisitive, with little patience for trivialities. The effort to reach Makaibari is too great, and his time too limited. Guests should listen but respond, clearly and specifically; they should be clever and preferably confident—or come with a skin as thick as that of buffaloes, whose heads are hung on the wall of the sitting room and outside his office.

Once deciding to stay on Makaibari, he wanted to do more than simply maintain the long-running traditions of the estate as handed down by his ancestors. To respond to the plea from the forest, the farm needed to evolve into a place more in sync with nature’s rhythms.

By balancing the five internal senses together with external forces, you have harmony. “If you are in harmony, and you are a farmer, then you have healthy soil,” Rajah said in the quiet house. He slurped his tea. From the first flush, it had been recently fired, locking in the fresh greenness of the young buds, the aroma of the hills. The liquor shone whisky gold in the cup. “I decided then to dedicate myself to healthy soil.”

So began what he calls the greatest voyage of his life. He would not only make some of the finest vintages of Darjeeling tea ever produced, set a world record at auction—“I don’t care about records,” he says, but rarely fails to mention this one—and get some of the highest prices for tea anywhere, but also unravel the three critical questions that he believes assail us all, questions we hope remain dormant: Where do we come from? What are we doing here? Where are we going?

“I was seeking the flavor in the balance sheet of life,” he said, repeating one of his favorite phrases.

•        •        •

Rajah’s father, Pasupati Nath (P. N.) Banerjee, possessed a deep passion for hunting—and a notoriously accurate shot. Both are evident in the airy sitting room of the Makaibari bungalow. Surrounding a photograph of P. N. standing erect in his Sam Browne belt and wide-brimmed hat is a dusty menagerie of stuffed trophies: tigers squatting nonchalantly on their haunches with yawning, fang-filled mouths; a matching pair of stuffed leopards and the skin of a third stretching across a wall; a heavy rack of deer antlers. The opaque, amber-colored eyes of an enormous buffalo head mounted on the wall gaze out over the room.

Hunting in the estate’s forests one day as a young man, not long after taking over from his father, P. N. was engulfed in a sudden seasonal rainstorm. Waiting it out at the edge of the forest, he noticed that water running off the planted sections of the garden was murky with sediment. The estate’s wealth—its nutrient-rich topsoil—was being washed away in the rain. Yet rivulets of water flowing out of the woods ran clear. Seeing how the fallen leaves from the trees offered a barrier that was preventing erosion, he realized the need for a similar solution for the tea bushes.
⁵

He began searching, and in 1945 workers started mulching. They spread loppings and cuttings from various grasses and plants on the estate like an insulating blanket across the ground between the bases of bushes.

Mulching accomplishes numerous things. It absorbs the area’s heavy rain, from the short, powerful bursts before the monsoon through the steady downpours during the rainy season itself. This prevents soil erosion as well, helping the moisture to be absorbed into the earth rather than just running off it. The mulch layer protects the soil against evaporation during the dry season and periods of drought. Underneath, the loamy earth is rich in humus and decomposition. Mulching also prevents weeds by depriving them of light and acts as a gentle buffer between soil and air, allowing earthworms to flourish and work in the topmost layer of soil, churning and better aerating the earth. And it helps build topsoil.

Something more profound was going on here, too, Rajah explained. “With the mulching, the tea became part of the woodlands.”

This was the first step in Makaibari’s organic journey. However, P. N. continued to use chemical applications. Later, Rajah worried that the spraying was killing the rich organisms that were flourishing from the mulching and even giving animals insecticide poisoning. While Rajah was keen to stop the practice, his father was still in charge of Makaibari. Workers called P. N.
burra sahib
, big boss, and Rajah
chota sahib
, little
boss. (Most of those living in Makaibari’s villages still refer to him as
chota sahib
, at least when talking
about
him. It is used on the garden not unaffectionately.)

In a hidden corner of the estate, on a steep slope of tea among a heavily wooded section that was rarely visited, even by his father, Rajah and two of Makaibari’s most senior workers secretly tended a patch of bushes. Manuring at night, it took the men nearly a month to carry organic compost from a nearby village on Makaibari and spread it around the site. Rajah was able to have the tea plucked and processed apart, and as he tells it in his book, his father frequently commented on the exceptional quality of the leaves during the batch tastings, probing the production manager for their specific source. Rajah managed to kept the secret for the whole harvest year before finally revealing his stealthy, organic undertaking.
⁶

Once party to the subterfuge and having tasted the difference, P. N. supported his son’s idea. P. N. provided cows for manure, workers learned composting techniques, and the estate began converting away from chemical applications.

But the end of using chemicals wouldn’t come until Rajah took over Makaibari. In the early 1980s, India’s tea industry struggled severely. National taxes and labor costs rose sharply, exports to the UK plummeted, and Kenyan and Sri Lankan teas offered stiff competition on the global market. Prices dropped. Profit margins dwindled. Dozens of estates in Darjeeling were abandoned; the remainder strained to survive. Rajah’s father retired to Calcutta and thrust the running of the garden onto his son. The
chota sahib
had nothing to lose and launched fully into realizing his organic vision. Rajah doesn’t see it that way, though, and bristles at the notion. “I didn’t take over anything. How can you take over change? I was merely a conduit,” he insists.

Occupying one end of the upper floor of a small, two-story building fronting the factory with its green roof and corrugated, silver siding, Rajah’s office has a worn, green-and-white-patterned carpet and pale yellow walls, a pair of frayed wicker chairs, and a large desk covered with a leather mat and stacks of papers. A long, glass-fronted bookcase runs across one end of the room. Trophies, awards, and plaques crowd its top; inside, shelves overflow with books on birds and animals, generators and income-tax law, and tomes such as Will Durant’s
The Age of Louis XIV
and
The Life of Greece
. The doors to a small terrace are always thrown open to the hum of the factory and the smell of freshly fired tea. A
shankha
, a large conch shell associated with Hinduism, sits in a corner.