by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
I pulled out my map, we huddled over it. “Theirs was the two-story house, right here. I was told it had become a tea house, a chaiovnia, after the revolution.”
“Milaya,” Efim said, dear one, “there has never been a two-story house in this village, but let me see this. There was a tea shop at that corner. Let’s walk over there.”
We wandered around with the map. I realized that my uncle’s little boy mind had enlarged his father’s home beyond anything in this village, but we found the house, even the ambar.
The town hadn’t grown since my family left, and the remaining skeleton matched the sketch. The neighboring village of Amochaev became the collective farm, and the young people had been moved there, Efim explained. Most of the homes in Kulikov were abandoned, the church was torn down, and there was no need for a school any more.
“We’re just left with dust and memories,” he reflected. “And we don’t let the memories go back too far.”
Stalin’s collectivization campaign, which destroyed the final private ownership of land by peasants and wiped out all kulaks as enemies of the people, took on a more vivid form than it ever had in my history classes in Russian School in San Francisco.
I shot a few pictures and walked around, trying to imagine who I might have been, who my father might have been. The gap was too wide; we simply wouldn’t have existed.
I approached the house, the forlorn and crumbling single story white isba that would eventually disappoint Uncle Shura. I circled the faded wood fence that surrounded it, checked the gate. It was all shut tight.
“Who owns this now?” I asked.
“No one owns anything, here, golden one, zolotko,” Efim said, inadvertently using my father’s childhood nickname for me. “No one has lived there in a long time. Everything belongs to the state, we aren’t allowed to go inside or touch anything.” I could tell this gentle man would be uncomfortable if I opened the gate and walked up to embrace the house, as I envisioned doing.
So I didn’t. They had been beaten into submission by a system that spread fear and terror as a way of life. In an abandoned backwater miles from anywhere, that authority still controlled their actions, from their fear of strangers to blind obedience to power. My father, forced to flee a Communist dictatorship yet again as an adult, carried some of those scars. I, on the contrary, had grown up in a country that took my family in with little more than the clothes on our backs and allowed me to become a woman unafraid of challenges, knowing how to aim high and break barriers.
I had become someone who might prove valuable even back here, in Russia, and I was given permission to do the unimaginable, rummage around alone in places far beyond the few zones open to tourists.
Now I was at the heart of so many memories: my grandmother’s, my uncle’s, mine. This rough wooden fence with its missing slats, leaning precariously, was no barrier to me. It would be so easy to open that gate, or climb over it. To dig a hole at the back door stoop. To search for my treasure, my grandmother’s silver. I had no idea what it really was, just that it was something I had wanted my whole life.
But taking liberties unimaginable to these scarred people would rob them of their dignity.
And so, I just stood there for a long time, quietly memorizing the scene. The dirt lanes. The few old-fashioned Russian houses—the isbas, unchanged since Czarist times. The abandoned train station. Finally I had to move on, and we returned to Marusia’s house. I drank her tea, ate her apples. I told them about her son Oleg, who had not been back since the train stopped running several years earlier. They asked me nothing about America; it was far beyond the range of their imagination. They accepted a few trinkets and, in parting, each one kissed me three times in the familial old Russian way.
As for me, I left Russia with a small bag of dirt and dust, a memento for my father and uncle of this place that once held all we were. I brought it back to our new homeland.
Tania Amochaev is a writer, photographer, and traveler. Born in what was once Yugoslavia, she fled that country with her family and lived as a young child in a refugee camp in Trieste before emigrating to America. Her parents were also political refugees as infants, her father from Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution, her mother from Istria, now Croatia, which was given to Mussolini as a spoil of World War I.
BILL GIEBLER
The Tea in Me
Transformation can be a long process.
PACKING
It looks like a dance floor, a thirty-foot-square section of smooth wood among the rough planks that make up most of the flooring, all surrounded by giant locomotive-like drying machines. I’ve been waiting at the cool, dark packing station just inside the front door of the tea factory, and alternately in the warm April Sunday morning sun just outside, for my packing shift. Packing represents the final step handled here at the factory, completing my education in the processing of my favorite tea.
At 4,600 feet above sea level in the Himalayan foothills of India’s Darjeeling region, I’m at the 150-year-old Makaibari tea factory perched on a slope just below the town of Kurseong. I’m just over a week into my physical travels across northern India, but a dozen weeks into the personal journey that began with giving notice on a twenty-year career, and planning my solo wander across a land that has existed in my mind as a magical and challenging destination, no more or less real than Narnia or Brigadoon.
After an hour of waiting, four large full tins of finished tea from the sorting room—carried two ladies at a time—are dumped on the shiny floor, filling the air with the rich, dark vegetal scent of black tea leaves. A man, barefoot, wearing gray dress pants, a white t-shirt and, amusingly, a Starbucks baseball cap, shovels and sweeps the tea into a single well-blended mountain of the finest grade Makaibari Estate, First Flush Darjeeling Tea. We wait, he and I, for the inspector to ensure the quality of the grade, and then begin filling twenty-kilo foil-lined brown paper bags, one scoop at a time into the chute engineered into an upper corner of each bag. Easy at first, it becomes very difficult once the bag is over half full and has to be repeatedly shaken and shifted—the entire bag lifted and dropped—in order for the tea to settle and make room for more. We’ve been joined by a woman, swiftly scooping tea and maneuvering the large bags with an urgency and confidence that compensates for her diminutive size and arms that are, at their widest, the size of my wrists.
“She filled two in the time it took you to fill one,” the foreman teases after watching my slow struggle with the process, “and then finished yours off for you.” It’s not true! I started two different bags, handing one off to each of them for the challenging final touches. It is true, though, that each of them has done twice the work I have. He smiles, “She says you should only get half pay.”
Packing is the only part of the process that—as far as I’ve witnessed—employs both genders. The gender roles are strong, each stage of the process (plucking, withering, rolling, firing, sorting) is handled either by men or by women, never both. The process begins and ends with women, and the distinction can be drawn along the lines of precision. If the work is delicate enough that human hands are involved, they must be women’s hands. The gross handling of larger actions (and larger machines) is done by men.
In any case, here I am, one man interested in experiencing each step of tea processing as my own process unfolds, far from home.
PROCESSING
Tea is both art and science. It is the careful, methodical refinement of a bulk raw material that is pure potentiality. If handled correctly, it can become a brilliant and universally captivating expression of this potential. It is a delicate and many staged process, however. When it’s harvested, how—and how quickly—it’s processed, the precision of brewing, etc., all affect the degree to which the essence is optimally revealed.
I see this clearly from my position here on the tea estate, surrounded by dramatic hills carpeted with hundreds of acres of what many consider the world’s finest tea. The drama of the place comes from the geography, the
grade. Simply put: it is steep. These are young mountains, the Himalayas, and that must explain their boldness. These foothills burst out of the plains below with such urgency that a flat surface is nearly impossible to find. On a clear night I can easily see Siliguri, a plains city only twenty-two miles down Pankhabari road, yet more than four thousand feet below me. The roads attempt to follow the ever-ascending ridges, and this is where the towns are. The tea villages and fields are in the startling, swooping valleys.
That’s where I’ve spent these last several days, above nearly vertical fields of the robust little shrub, camellia sinensis, in a village homestay just down the road from the factory, the oldest one in the region, still processing tea today the same way they have for more than a century.
“Makaibari” is stenciled in white paint—each letter three feet tall—on the green corrugated tin roof of the rugged old building. Truly unchanged for well over one hundred years, even the machinery inside is pre-1900. The factory opened in 1859, not coincidentally the same year tea production began in the region. Mechanization came in the next few decades, and that’s about it. The rest has happened day in and day out with very few changes over the next dozen decades. The place is run by the vital and eccentric Swaraj Kumar Banerjee, the “Rajah of Darjeeling Tea,” a man in his early sixties, graying hair around his sharp, handsome Bengali face, and often a somewhat devious smile like a child with a secret. Known simply as “Rajah” Banerjee, he is the fourth generation Banerjee to run the estate, and the man responsible for bringing organic agriculture to India’s tea lands, indeed changing the way things are done outside the factory in the fields.
Rajah and I were crouched in the dirt outside of his office one afternoon as he counted types of uncultivated flora growing between the bushes. “. . . three, four, five . . .” Then turning to me, “You have a brother? Same genetic make-up, same cultural upbringing . . . right?” I agreed on all counts. “Tell me, placed in a room together, facing, talking, how long would it take before you had a disagreement?”
“Two hours?” I considered.
“I bet it’s more like fifteen minutes, but O.K.” He resumed plucking fronds and flowers, all in reach from his squatting position between bush and building, all voluntary growth, “. . . six, seven, eight . . .” He stopped at fifteen. “This,” he declared, handing me the bouqueted cluster of flora, “is what happens naturally.” He was referring to the stability of a complex ecosystem vs. the fragility of genetic homogeneity, like brothers or chemical-dependent monocrops. “This is what creates sustainability: diversity!”
Diversity is subtext, however, as are the words mulch and dung and compost. To distill Banerjee’s ever ready lecture to a single word it would be: soil. “Healthy soil is healthy mankind,” is his mantra. The result is better tea, healthier workers, and a product that just might be reproducible for another 150 years, and then another after that.
Days later in his home, in a smoke-filled living room with two enormous taxidermied tigers and two very alive German Shepherds, I sipped sparkling wine with Banerjee and his wife, and their daughter-in-law and six-year-old grandson visiting from Bangalore. “My father was one of the greatest hunters in India,” he proclaimed as I inspected the very large, catatonic, dusty creatures. “He took down eighty-six such beasts in his day.”
I was glad to hear this placed him among the best of hunters, the notion that this might be an average performance made my stomach turn. “I think he might be singlehandedly responsible for putting these on the endangered species list,” I said.
He smiled, accepting the jab, but was unapologetic about the contradiction. This man with his impressive legacy in organic agriculture and fair trade business practices, this champion of biodiversity, remained very proud of his family’s legacy as well. Even those elements that depleted the local tiger population.
It’s Makaibari’s environmental record that intrigued me into coming here. That and the ad hoc homestay volunteer program. A love of tea, too, factors in. Particularly Darjeeling’s lighter body, golden-brown liquor, floral astringency, and tannic bitterness. But I come without substantial expertise on the beverage, and my work here is not directly related to tea. I’m volunteering among the villagers—many employed by the tea company, but experts, each, in a single process, not a finished product—thus I’m not substantially progressing my tea knowledge save for a few shifts on the factory floor. My expertise on the topic of timing and handling comes from an uncanny sense of fellowship as we, leaves and I, are plucked from our framework and set on course to reorganize ourselves into something new. In fact, that is precisely my work here.
The story for both of us begins after the roots and branches have been well established; after the various feats, cultural and agricultural, that brought us to this point of readiness.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND
Three months earlier at a corner table in Boulder, Colorado’s Dushanbe Tea House, I sat flanked by my sons, both of them smiling and joking and masking their competition over a shared scone and a small cup of Devonshire cream: sixteen-year-old Henry’s self-assured attack on the thing, and Simon at thirteen demonstrating a more reserved—yet frustrated—politeness. Across the table, mirroring my chai sipping, sat their mother, my ex-wife CC, her tall frame and long brown hair framed by the tall windows and long drapes—pulled back to expose the cold January morning and the half-frozen creek outside. I looked forward to these family meals; they were good opportunities to catch up, but they tended to be scattered. We often failed to drop deeper than friendliness or remain on a single topic for more than a few uninterrupted lines.
That morning a new element was added to the mix: anticipation. There in my hands was a Lonely Planet Guide to India and a yet-to-be-opened card. On the table sat the handprinted gift wrap and raffia that had just come off this belated birthday present.
Our food arrived, just as the scone battle was won, and my two handsome sons dove into their breakfasts while they quietly watched me. I opened the card, a plain, store-bought birthday card, to reveal a $5,000 check and words that tumbled my heart in a way it is so rarely touched. “This is a thank you and an exuberantly offered investment in the second half of an already incredible life . . . now it is time to go and do something for you. Something a little crazy that feeds the soul and rocks the foundation.” Here were words of gratitude and generosity in the handwriting of the woman I’d married nineteen years earlier, the woman with whom I was still raising these two remarkable boys. A woman now married to another man yet with whom I have a somewhat stilted closeness and friendship, like an honorary siblinghood—but clouded by the historical fact of deeper intimacy. Most of all, here was gratitude for a “decade and a half of doing things to ensure our security and happiness.”
These words cut beautifully into the deepest wound from our divorce where my very loyalty to my work, my commitment to career in its conventional nine-to-five, day-to-day trappings, was the source of discontent for her. She couldn’t “respect”—her word—that relationship. And even today, seven years later, the wound trembles. This was the single most painful communication in our divorce. At the time all I could hear was the ingratitude and irrationality of it. Here I was “ensuring our security,” while she had left the paying work world in what was a long ascent to finding her true work, her passion. This search was honorable, but fettered me that much more, it seemed, to my office and my paycheck.
The searing word “respect” had long since been recalled, and time had erased my defensive reaction to it. I could see the complexity of our situation with greater clarity, and this gift testified that she could too. No doubt my career loyalty was honorable, but it was also sad and compromising as it became a defining box so sturdy it began to sprout bars. I did want out but lacked the courage to make the break.
“We are gifting you with a trip to a place that defines WILD—human and otherwise,” read the card.
India was not their idea, it was recognition of my number one travel dream.
But India is not an extended weekend trip. It’s not even a trip one can do justice to within the three weeks of paid vacation granted by my work. My mind raced with excitement and gratitude—Was this level of generosity really happening?—and doubt and even irritation. For in this gift was a directive, and in that was a lack of understanding, perhaps even a subtle criticism, of the demands of my career. It’s not this simple, I thought. You can’t just say “go to India” and expect that my busy life will allow it. My head spun with the responsibilities that would make accepting this gift impossible. There was work and the money and benefits it provided. There was Melissa and the stumbling, fumbling romance we were struggling through. And there were the kids.
“We will help you as ‘ground support,’ your cheerleading squad and the ones who keep the home fires burning.” So, inherent in the gift was permission to temporarily downshift my family responsibilities. And with it, this excuse to maintain the status quo was removed. But still, I left the restaurant feeling both excited and uncertain how this would unfold and if I’d be able to pull it off.
It was three weeks later that I decided not only would this trip to India happen, it would be part of a more substantial breaking of the branch: I would quit my job of fifteen years (my career of twenty) and turn it all inside out. “I wanted my life,” as in Mary Oliver’s Dogfish, “to close, and open / like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song / where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; / I wanted / to hurry into the work of my life.”
PLUCK THIS
Tea must be harvested at the right time. That is right now, April, for the finest Darjeeling, what is called “first flush” tea.