Very early on the morning of February 23, we pulled ourselves out of
our sleeper berths. There was some more sweet railroad milk tea
before our stop. We climbed down around first light. SMC's driver
picked us up in a 4-wheel drive vehicle, and we were off for the tea
estates.

But it wasn't Darjeeling; it was Dooars. This tea-growing region,
east of the Darjeeling gardens and lower in altitude, was only a vague
name to me, probably because you don't see Dooars tea sold in the
West, at least not under its own name. The vast bulk of Dooars tea
goes into the domestic - Indian - CTC market. Actually, it was high
time to lose my haughtiness about CTC, but more on that later.

We drove to the Soongachi tea estate, whose manager's bungalow would
be our home for two days. (An Indian tea estate's manager's bungalow,
from my limited experience, is nothing like the small house suggested
by the word "bungalow" in American parlance. The Soongachi bungalow
is a huge old house with its own lovely ornamental garden, including a
flowering vine climbing over the roof, in the middle of the tea
fields.) The terrain of the fields is somewhat rugged, but not
terribly hilly, going down to the Mal (sp?) river in the distance.
Far away across the river are some serious hills.

The two days in Dooars were an intensive course for my wife and me in
how tea is grown and manufactured. We followed SMC around as he
checked on various parts of the tea fields, inspecting the results of
pruning; the transplanting of new plants to fill in where a bush had
died; the replacement of whole areas of bushes past their prime; the
tall shade trees that limit the intense sunlight reaching the tea
bushes; clearing big stones from the soil and other construction
projects; the struggle against a couple of different pests that affect
different parts of the bushes. At all times, SMC explained what he
was looking for and how it fit into the whole process.

In the fields, essentially all the work is done by hand with simple,
non-powered hand tools. This doesn't mean it's sloppy, though.
Pruning is done to exacting standards of accuracy, so that a bush,
during any harvest in the course of its life, will support as broad
and dense as possible a "table" - as flat as that word suggests - of
tender, and easily pluckable, leaves. To this end, the bush gets cut
back periodically to force it to ramify and increase its yield at next
plucking, but the big, heavy leaves of the "maintenance foliage" below
the "table", whose photosynthesis supports the growth of the leaves
that will be harvested, have to be protected.

Plucking is done by women, who, it is believed, are more careful and
dexterous than men.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html
BRO wisdom: DON'T GOSSIP LET HIM DRIVE