It was towards the end of May that I received a request from Teabox. Would I be willing to get out of sultry Kolkata, 38 degrees in the shade and its 90 percent humidity, and visit some tea gardens in the Darjeeling hills where its 21 under the midday sun?
I was too weak-willed to decline. It was that part of the year, see? Merry month of May and all that… So, soon thereafter, I found myself garden-hopping over seven days and bumpy terrain in the Darjeeling hills, with friend-philosopher-photographer Uday in tow, getting acquainted with all things tea.
A week later, back in the hot seat in Calcutta, I quizzed myself: Was there a common thread that ran across the gardens I visited, apart from the fact they all grew some of the world’s best teas and experienced temperatures in the lower 20s? Was it the colonial bungalow, the fine china in the dining room, or the “pucca sahib” manager, though without the pith helmet of yore?
I may be wrong, and this was my first brush with a clutch of gardens at one go, but I found that not everything was what I had imagined would be. Not all estates had pretty cottages with old-world charm daubed all over, not all estate dining rooms were a porcelain treasure trove, and certainly not all managers were a walking ode to the Raj lifestyle.
First Inklings
What I did notice, however, was quite startling – each and every garden I visited exuded an acute sense of responsibility towards Nature and the mystical mountains. Honestly, I was not expecting it. I had never imagined that a grown-up not an entomologist could fret over ladybirds missing from action in a tea garden.
Or that garbage vats, somewhat crudely made of sawed-off bamboo, would be standing by a desolate estate road, a receptacle for empty cigarette packets and mineral water bottles. Little signs like these started stacking up.
But I am getting ahead of my story… let me begin at the beginning. My trip began in Kurseong, a town at almost 5,000-feet altitude, and I had to climb another 1,300 feet up a flight of stone steps cut into the hillside to reach Jungpana Tea Estate. So much for the car that I was assigned, I sighed.
Even as I willed myself up some 600-odd steps, my eyes were riveted to the ground. There could be leeches, and I was one suspicious city person. But then I became even more petrified, when somewhere by the winding stone steps, I came across a signboard that carried the menacing image of a viper.
My heart was in my mouth. The sign also said something in Nepali, but I had no idea what it was and I could not care less. “There are damn snakes around,” I thought wildly and shot anxious looks at the luxuriant undergrowth all around, half expecting the reptiles to come slithering towards me with bare fangs.
Shantanu Kejriwal, Jungpana’s owner who lives in a Delhi farmhouse but climbs those 600 steps without breaking into a sweat, later told me that far from being a snake alert, the sign was an advisory asking people to co-exist with Nature that is, not cut trees or disturb the natural surroundings. It was a commendable gesture, but nonetheless an unsettling crash course in Nature-appreciation for me.
More surprises
I received further lessons the next day at the nearby Giddapahar Tea Estate from its owner Sudhangshu Shaw, a truly gracious man who, in his pressed denims, bathroom slippers and a milch cow tethered behind his nondescript cottage, seemed as far removed from a British planter in a sola topee as Ma Teresa was from a boxing ring.
Shaw personally drove us around his estate, and spent much of his time hunched over tea bushes or running his hands lovingly over the leaves. He was searching for ladybirds, and seemed crestfallen on not finding any. “They are usually here at this time,” he murmured, clearly a defeated soul.
Expanding on the subject, Shaw said ladybirds were pests that fed on the leaves, but the explanation confounded me. Why was he then disappointed over not finding them? The last time I had pictured a somewhat similar scenario was when I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where Tom Sawyer was a fictitious kid enchanted equally by a live ladybird or a dead cat.
But I soon realised the bugs that are so disastrous for his bushes were also Shaws pride they were proof that he did not use any pesticide to grow some of the best Darjeeling teas in his relatively small 240-acre garden, his crop from the second flush being particularly coveted.
Shaw was also proud of certain particularly uninteresting clumps of grass he fingered gingerly; that grass has a name – Guatemala – and helps generate nitrogen in the soil. Shaw grows them in rows by the roadside or between the tea bushes. “No chemicals,” he educated us.
I later read up an academic paper on the subject by Sandip Santra, an assistant professor at Kurseong College; apparently soil management – and practices like mulching or natural creation of humus – are catching up in the Darjeeling plantations. Giddapahar is one such garden.
Hunting Ban
Our lessons continued as we left Kurseong behind us, and proceeded towards other gardens peppered across Darjeeling Mim and Avongrove first, and Namring and Runglee Rungliot later. The journey to Mim was one of the most mystical; probably it seemed so because it was off the tourist beat.
The road was desolate, and the 7 km of serpentine turns through the thick fog and tall pines seemed devoid of people. The silence, accentuated by the crickets chirping, was eerie. Cars would come careering around the bends only to zip by, and silence would reign again. The few people trudging through the swirling mists were like phantoms.
Soon, a new signboard caught our attention. “No Hunting”, it proclaimed in English. I grimly chewed on the implications we had run from the snakes only to land in a den of man-eaters.
Sanjeev Gurung, our host for the night at Mim, later said the signboard was to discourage mainly deer hunting. “Local villagers sometimes kill them for the meat,” he told us over a delicious meal of chicken curry and rice.
Gurung, 27, a guitar-strumming Assistant Manager at the Mim estate who has hour-long chats over phone with his fiancee when not listening to ’60s rock, said there were also bears and leopards around but that he was yet to see one. “A deer once hit my car and chipped the paint, that’s all I’ve seen. No leopards so far, but my boss has seen several.”
We saw more signboards banning tree-felling and hunting the next morning at several places at Mim, and later at Avongrove. As the trip progressed, similar boards greeted us at Namring and Runglee Rungliot.
We also saw something we had never seen before – garbage vats made of bamboos grown by workers. Not all the waste went into the vats; there were plenty of empty sachets of tobacco products scattered immediately outside. But at least the litter was not on the pretty mountain roads.
At Mim, we found a concrete bin next to a workers colony; the material seemed incongruous, but the location selected to send the message was clever.
Partho Prasad, the affable golfer-manager at Runglee Rungliot, talked of the rich wildlife in his area – partridges, wild boars and porcupines, which he said “people do kill” to eat. He also recalled a deer invading the flower patch at his bungalow. “It walked right in, and started eating my roses. And then simply walked off…. I just kept looking at it.”
Runglee was my last pit stop, and like that deer before me, I knew when it was time to leave. Plus, also like that deer, I was full. But in case anyone wonders, there was no porcupine served at Prasad’s lunch table. Like that deer, I had been fed veggies.
Photograph by Uday Bhattacharya. The featured image is of Sudhangshu Shaw of Giddapahar Tea Estate, searching for ladybirds among his tea plants.
