Darjeeling Read Free

tedious, highly skilled, and lowly paid manual labor continue to exist with the rising role of education and technology? The aspirations of many workers in Darjeeling making less than $2 a day have awoken, inspired, no doubt, by dreams of software firms and Bangalore call centers (or even, more realistically, of being a Mumbai security guard or Delhi housemaid). In just a handful of years, worker absenteeism has shot up from negligible to as high as 40 percent on some estates. Simply put, few want to pluck tea anymore.
    Especially when it takes a staggering twenty-two thousand selectively hand-picked shoots—just the tender first two leaves and a still-curled bud—to produce a single kilo of Darjeeling tea.
    And that kilo of tea can sell for more than many months of wages.
    This is far from the industry’s only pressing challenge, though. Can Darjeeling’s tea gardens, part of India’s living heritage, survive the area’s separatist unrest, which is pushing violently for independent statehoodwith protests that shut down the hills for weeks at a time? Or the unprecedented pressure on its fragile ecosystem and changes in climate? The monsoons have become stronger and less predictable and are often bookended by severe droughts. Temperatures have risen. Hail the size of baseballs can pile up three feet deep in a single storm. Soil erosion is a severe issue, and landsides a yearly problem, sweeping away fields, roads, and bridges, even small villages and swaths of tea estates. Even stable land is problematic. The soil is depleted, many tea bushes are old and dying, with little replanting in the last decades. Recent harvests have yielded only half of what they once did. “Counterfeit” Darjeeling tea, produced elsewhere and mislabeled, has flooded the market.
    So this is the story of how Darjeeling came to produce the highest-quality tea leaves anywhere in the world, and how it spiraled into decline by the beginning of the twenty-first century. It’s also about the radical measures being taken to counter the multitude of challenges and save India’s most exclusive and iconic brew. The most revolutionary among them is not based on technological advances or automation but ancient practices grounded in three-thousand-year-old Hindu scriptures.
    Tea is more than merely a drink—it’s a soother and an energizer, a marker of time and a measure of it, present at the most quotidian moments of daily life and at the most special. It seeps into life, and sustains it.
    And at its source, the world’s most celebrated tea is more than just any crop—it’s the history and politics of India and Britain, the legacy of colonialism, the rise of global commerce and worker aspirations, the perils of climate change, and much, much more, writ large, and brewed into one glorious cup of amber liquid.
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    *  For general values, Rs 55 equals US$1—the average of the last decade or so. Historic exchange rates are also used. Prices are accurate into 2014.

First Flush
(late February to mid-April)
    Brass bells wound with garlands of orange marigolds hang from the entrance arch for the faithful to ring as they enter the tree-filled temple complex atop Observatory Hill. Clean chimes reverberate in the quiet, chilly dawn from Darjeeling’s highest spot. Printed prayer flags in bold, solid colors—red, green, yellow, white, blue—strung on hemp ropes between poles, pillars, and tree trunks stir in the spring breeze. A troop of pale-faced monkeys, whose connection to the holiness of temples means that they are left unmolested, roam and maraud, stealing shoes that have been removed by the faithful while they kneel, pray, and light incense and small clay lamps filled with ghee (clarified butter) to one of a pantheon of gods as morning sunlight gradually slides up the surrounding slopes.
    The short, early spring rains have passed, and gleamings of verdant freshness are in the Darjeeling hills. Giant ferns blanket the mountainsides. Pink magnolias