Pruned tea bushes and rain make up the plantation world in the dooars.
Long ago, I remember laughing at the plight of the trucker in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Wherever he went, it poured. He was actually the rain god, but didn’t know it, so all he could do was get bugged that the clouds just never seemed to let him be.
I felt a bit like him when we were driving from Siliguri to Matelli, a tea estate in Jalpaiguri. We passed Chalsa, waterlogged and slushy.
A mild drizzle greeted us in Malbazaar. Samsing was, not unexpectedly, enjoying a refreshing shower when we passed it. But it was when we reached our destination, not tired but just water-weary, Matelli, that we understood what a cloudburst truly meant. As we scurried for cover, making a rather inglorious entrance into the stately burra bungalow where we were to stay, I began to wonder whether there was something about me that was attracting the clouds.
It turned out, this part of the Dooars is known for rains — light or heavy, drizzling or mizzling — almost all year round. “It normally rains here in the evening and night — you’ll find it warm and sunny in the morning tomorrow,” promised our bearer. The bungalow, old and creaky with a magnificent teak stairwell, beckoned within and we retreated into the deep verandah, tiled in the old chess board style. Bearers, clad in spotless whites, plied us with wonderful food and drink as we luxuriated in the tea way of life.
It would have been a criminal waste of an impossibly beautiful dawn to not set off for a walk the next day. The Dooars are relatively plain, and the hillocks covered with pruned tea bushes undulated so gently that the overall effect was of artful topiary. Old bridges over rain swollen streams provided the only visual relief from the manicured perfection of the tea bushes. The pluckers were starting work, chattering in a dialect not unlike Hindi — turned out that most were migrants from Jharkhand and Bihar. As I watched them pluck, I realised that unlike in the Darjeeling tea gardens, where pluckers pick two leaves and a bud together, in the Dooars they plucked new leaves in no particular order.
“In CTC (crushing, tearing and curling) tea production, leaves are first crushed into a single amorphous mass,” said Vijay Rewal, our host in Matelli, adding for good measure, “... how you pick them is unimportant.” Inside the factory, the first thing I noticed was the wonderfully leafy smell of tea emanating from the crushed leaves. They were drying in large rooms with ancient looking fans, then moving to curling barrels, and finally on to drying mats. By then, the leaf mixture was beginning to take on the familiar granular look of CTC tea. “While CTC tastes heavier on the palate than Darjeeling tea, it’s what most north Indians drink,” said Rewal. Did it have the same health benefits as Darjeeling tea, I asked. “To each his own, but I’d rather savour my cuppa than drink it as a medicine to be endured!” said he prosaically.
Come afternoon, and it began to rain again. How on earth did tea manage to grow in the Dooars, I wondered. “Doesn’t it need a very well drained soil,” I asked, “and how do you avoid water logging?” In reply, Rewal showed us a network of drainage ditches between the bushes. “The ditches ensure that water does not stagnate anywhere and serve as walking paths between the dense bushes,” he explained. A lot of plantation work, we realised, required lateral thinking and coming up with solutions, as opposed to any bookish training. Rewal agreed: “When I started out as a graduate from St Stephens in Delhi, I trained on the job,” said he, adding, “we had to rough it out initially. But there’s no other way I could live now…” I could see why. His verandah was larger than a self-respecting Delhi home, his garden had a largish stream flowing through it and the greenhouse was a horticulturist’s delight. There was even a lake on its periphery, and Rewal was planning on getting a boat to punt around in it.
The river Murti and the jungles of Gorumara were nearby, and we decided to head that way with a picnic breakfast the next morning. Through stinking mounds left all around, wild elephants had made their presence felt. Sadly, they’re now a shadow of the populations that once roamed these dense and wet forests. “Wild elephants and panthers are now little more than pests, destroying fields and carrying off livestock, and, in some cases, even human beings,” said Rewal. Gorumara is also one of the very few surviving homes of the one-horned rhino. Sadly, for the rhino, it was his grassy pasture that the Scots and the Englishmen converted into tea gardens in the early 1900s in the Dooars. If loss of its habitat hasn’t been insult enough, rhinos have been sought after by poachers for their horn, which is believed to have miraculous therapeutic qualities. No wonder the animal is a rare sight today. I sat easy on stones surrounded by the gushing waters of the Murti and wondered what it would be like to see a large rhino amble out for its little bath. Predictably, it never did.
I sat there surrounded by verdant greenery and clear flowing water, thinking how ironical it was that this was a result of the long-term destruction of the natural flora and fauna of that area. An elephant called in the distance, and suddenly my mood lightened. Tea hadn’t fully succeeded in taming the wild yet.