Teatime for the Firefly. Shona Patel

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      In the 1940s, an era of the fading Raj, tea plantations in India remained the last stronghold of the British Empire. Owned by Sterling companies, they produced the finest teas on earth. Assam tea was grown exclusively for export and shipped from the plantations directly to London to be sold at the Mincing Lane tea auction for exorbitant prices. From there it was distributed to the rest of Europe and the world.

      I stopped my reading to think. People in India drank a lot of tea, too. It seemed pretty ordinary stuff. So where did our tea come from? Here we were right in the middle of Assam, so surely it was Assam tea?

      I got up from the sofa and went to the kitchen. I took down the container of loose tea and poked around the contents with my finger. It looked like fine granules, almost a powder. It smelled like tea. Nothing exceptional.

      I decided to make myself a cup. I filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove. I leaned against the counter to continue reading in the dim light of the kitchen as I waited for the water to boil.

      The next section was an eye-opener. Little wonder why we poor Indians never got a whiff of quality Assam tea. All the fine tea grown in the plantations, 100 percent, was shipped overseas. What was sold in the Indian market was the lowest grade, or what was commonly known as tea dust.

      I closed the book, marking my page with a teaspoon. As I poured the tea through a strainer, I noticed it had a nice strong color and good aroma, but my newfound knowledge now told me I was drinking bottom-of-the-barrel quality. I would never have known that.

      I carried my tea back to the veranda. The rain had stopped. The cat, all stealth and muscle, was creeping along the garden wall, stalking a sparrow, which was busy fluffing its feathers. The sun peeked through the parting clouds, and raindrops hung from the jasmine trellis like translucent pearls.

      I returned to the sofa and stirred my tea as I read on.

      The tea-growing belt in Assam was cradled in the fertile, silt-rich valley between two mighty rivers—the Surma and the Bhramaputra. The picturesque Khasi and Jaintia hills cut a green swath in between. This region was remote and largely unexplored. Tea plantations were located in far-flung areas, across bridgeless rivers, beyond the boundaries of any trodden path and in the middle of dense, malaria-infested rain forests surrounded by wild game and hostile head-hunting Naga tribes.

      In 1823 an intrepid Scottish adventurer who went by the name of Robert Bruce tramped through the leech-infested jungles along the Assam-Burmese border, encountering unexpected mishaps and every manner of blight and misery along the way. He had barely recovered from a potentially lethal snakebite when he found himself spending a night up a tree, bone-rattled by a rogue elephant he had unwittingly enraged by misfiring his gun. As if that wasn’t enough, he was constantly being stalked by the hostile head-hunting Nagas, who lurked in the brush with their black-painted faces and poison-tipped spears.

      Robert Bruce was beginning to regret this whole mission. He was harried and at the end of his tether when he spied a thin curl of blue smoke spiraling over the treetops. He approached warily, gun drawn, and came across a tribal settlement deep in the forest.

      He’d feared his intrusion would provoke hostility, and was surprised to find the gnomelike natives were a cheerful and friendly lot. They were the Burmese Singpo tribe, undoubtedly the sweetest, most benign people on earth! The Singpos welcomed him and escorted him with the beating of tom-toms to their moonfaced, lotus-eyed chief, who went by the grand name of Bessagaum Ningrual.

      Bruce was seated on an elevated platform, fanned by palm fronds and offered a swig of steaming brew from a bamboo cup. Not wanting to offend his host, he took a few hesitant sips of this strange concoction. To his amazement, he felt immediately relaxed and all his cares and woes floated away. After downing the last drop, Bruce was so invigorated that he wanted to scale a tree and shout at the sky. What was this strange drink? He was told it was Cha, a beverage made by steeping the tender leaves of an unknown plant in boiling water. The plant grew wild in the forest, and when he was taken to see it, he found it was the size of a poplar tree and had deep green serrated leaves and pale waxy flowers.

      Robert Bruce could not get over the remarkable rejuvenating properties of Cha. As he bade farewell to his friendly hosts, he carried the seeds of the plant in his pocket and turned them over to the Botanical Society in Calcutta for research and development. The plant was subsequently named the Camellia assamica. Research showed that when this plant was pruned tight like a privet hedge it flushed with a profusion of tender leaf tips. These tips, handpicked and processed, yielded the finest tea in the world.

      I was familiar with the camellia bush. It was a common flowering plant in Assam. Till then I had no idea it was the same plant that yielded Assam tea. In fact, we had a camellia bush growing right by the garden wall. I wondered if the leaves smelled anything like tea.

      Outside in the garden, the air was fresh and moist after the rains. The cat had nabbed the bird. It licked its paws and rubbed its whiskers and looked at me with baleful yellow eyes. All that remained of the poor sparrow were a few feathers and a bit of bloodied wing.

      The camellia bush in our garden was heavy with pink blossoms. The flower was larger than a primrose and similar in shape, and just as delicate and pretty. I picked a leaf and crushed it between my fingers. Strange, it hardly had any tea smell at all.

      A beautiful mottled green-and-gold snail inched up the mossy garden wall. It moved ponderously, pausing to sense its way with large striped feelers. Not like our impetuous friend, Manik Deb, I thought, who plunges into the unknown and goes crashing off into the jungles. A little snail-like caution might have done him good. I was beginning to agree with the townsfolk: he did sound like a lunatic.

      I returned to the veranda and picked up the book again.

      It seemed the discovery of Assam tea in India could not have come at a more crucial time. Tea drinking was the rage in Victorian England, and the demand for fine teas had spread like fire all across Europe. The fad was started by the fashionable Duchess of Bedford in England, who experienced what she described as a “sinking feeling” in the late afternoons. It was she who popularized the tradition of high tea as an afternoon pick-me-up, and tea parties developed into a dainty ritual and became a fashionable pastime among the ladies of the court.

      The only tea available in England back then was imported from China. As demands for the beverage skyrocketed all over Europe, the Chinese raised their prices and arm-twisted the British, holding them hostage. To counter this, the British resorted to subterfuge. They stole Chinese tea seedlings and smuggled them across the border through Burma into India and tried to secretly grow Chinese tea in Assam. Although the climate and topography in Assam was almost identical to China, the plant did poorly and the experiment failed.

      It was about this very time when Robert Bruce stumbled upon the Camellia assamica after being befriended by the Singpo Chief, Bessagaum Ningrual. One can only surmise how elated the British must have been with this momentous discovery. To find the best tea growing wild and free in their own colonial backyard! Better still, the indigenous Camellia assamica was far superior to the Chinese variety. Growing tea in India opened up immense lucrative possibilities for the colonial empire and promised to augment the royal coffers significantly.

      But sobriety soon set in. Discovering the plant was one thing; setting up an organized tea industry in Assam was another.

      Assam could be brutal and unforgiving. The climate was a curse, the food unpalatable and the natives baffling. Assam received an astounding one hundred inches of rain per annum. Roads got washed away and bridges rotted to their demise. The most grueling part of tea-plantation life was the isolation and loneliness. The only way to keep the young men СКАЧАТЬ