Lord of the Manor

After wrapping up Durga Puja in Kolkata, our next planned more was an excursion to north West Bengal with Dave and Susan as well as their friends Sarah and Rakesh. We had met Sarah and Rakesh before because they are the ones who put up Nisha for a month in their nice flat when she was here for a month after the wedding 4 years ago.

A little background. Rakesh works for in the office of a tea company in Kolkata. However, his previous position in the company was the manager of one of the tea estates in Assam. Before then he had been manager or assistant manager at any number of the company's eight estates in North Bengal and Assam. Last time we were in Kolkata he had captivated us with stories of capturing tigers and the enormity of the estates as well as inviting all of us up to an estate if we ever had the time. So, our itinerary on this trip was to fly up, spend some time at an estate, then swing up to Sikkim for a few days and head back.

So, we have an uneventful flight to Bagdogra, the airport of Siliguri, which is the dusty transportation junction of north West Bengal. From there we head out in a couple of SUVs for the 3 hour drive out to the estate. By the time we arrive it is after dark, so all we see are tea plants in the dark as we drive the 2km from the gate to the Bungalow where we will be staying. When we arrive at the Bungalow, Rakesh swings open the rusty gate and we enter into the driveway of this massive two story concrete and tin roof building. The paint is stained on the outside, but by the massive verandas and screened porches you can tell that this is a grand house.

We are met by the three man staff of the house and led inside. Like many leftovers from the British era in India this house mixed mostly 1950's (and earlier) fixtures and furniture with the care and cleanliness of a full time staff being dedicated to it. Our bedroom and bathroom on the second floor was as big as most Indian houses, with a 3m wide veranda out front. There was even an old ping-pong table set up in front of our door. Fitting with this colonial environment we were served tea and a dinner of nice continental food, along with a few sips of country rice wine before heading to sleep. Despite the five air-raid sirens that go off between 5AM and 6AM to wake the workers, we sleep in the cool quiet air until nine.

The next day we headed out in the SUVs to take a tour of the estate. The scale of this operation is incredible. The estate is separated into 46 sections and totals 1,400 hectares (3,500 acres). 6,621 people (the current manager knew the exact count instantly) live on the estate, with over 1,800 of them being permanent employees. The estate has its own school, hospital and multiple churches. We drive 1km and are still in the sections right near our bungalow.

As a crop, tea is basically like a giant hedge. It is a bush, which they plant in rows covering the entire section. The bushes are all spread out with a trimmed flat top around 75cm off the ground, the reason they all have this flat "table" as they call it, is because of how tea is harvested. When the tea bush has grown shoots about 6cm high from the table an army of pickers comes and picks the shoot off the top with their fingers. They remove the part of the stem with the top three leaves on it and discard any stem below. This results when they are done with the table being re-established. So when you look around the table of the tea bushes goes on for miles over the rolling hills. The interesting thing about tea as a crop is that it is harvest time 9 months out of the year. During this time the bushes need to be plucked once a week, thus the army of workers.

When we arrive at the area where the picking is going on we arrive just in time for the "weighment". The pickers all work by carrying a small bag with them as they pick and then depositing the tea in the small bag in a larger sack as the day goes on. Both of these bags are carried on the back by a strap over the forehead, traditional Indian style. Once around lunch and once at the end of the day each pickers bag is emptied into a large truck which is taken to the factory. When the truck pulls up an army of pickers scurries out of the garden, all laden with huge sacks of tea. As each bag is emptied it is weighed on a scale and the "Sadar", or supervisor, makes out a slip of paper that is handed to the picker. The pickers are required to pick 25kg of leaves in order to make their daily wage, then are compensated per kilogram above that. Considering after half a day the bags were all weighing about 30kgs, and one strapping young guy had a 54kg bag, it seemed to be a good day for the pickers.

Also when we were in this area we saw the trap that they had set up for the leopard that was thought to be living in the area. Evidently female leopards will often hide in the garden to have cubs since in the jungle they are likely to be eaten by the males. The problem is that the pickers cannot see the leopard as the pick, so there had been some incidents of mauling in the area. The trap was a cage type, with a smaller cage attached to put a goat into as bait. There was no goat in it at the time as it is only loaded at night. This is the best that they can do right now as it is against the law to shoot a leopard.

After this we went to the tea factory where the raw leaves are turned into the final product. This has to be done quickly as the longer the tea leaves sit around unprocessed the lower the quality of the tea. First the tea leaves are unloaded from the truck and loaded into a 50cm deep layer in the drying machine. The machine is like a big wind tunnel with a mesh floor that the tea sits on. Twelve hours or so later it has lost 30% of its weight and is unloaded. The tea is then ground into little balls in a series of knife rollers (leaf tea is made in a different process) then spread in a thin layer on the floor. This is called the fermentation, and during the one hour or so the tea is on the floor it changes color from bright green to the grey we are familiar with. Next the tea is dried to completion in large furnaces. The tea is then filtered and sorted into various grades of fineness, from course to dust. The tea is tasted, much like wine, every hour by the manager for quality control. Waste is also filtered out that is sold as fertilizer or to industrial caffeine manufactures.

The factory itself looked like another British era creation with lots of exposed belts and even a coal fired furnace for the drier. The thing that was impressive here was that all the leaves need to be processed immediately after they are picked. Now was a prime growing season so this factory was working 24/7 and has processed 48,000kg of tea leaves the day before we arrived.

That evening we were invited to have dinner with the current manager of the estate at his bungalow. The manager is a Anglo-Indian man who Rakesh had known for a long time and everyone called Timmy. His bungalow was smaller then the massive estate that we were staying on, but still extremely large and surrounded by an impeccable garden. It also had a large staff that was quick with the tea and drinks when we arrived. Also at the dinner was Timmy's wife, named Yasmin, and their very western daughters who were home from boarding school, as well as the Sikh assistant manager and his family.

For a while we were just hearing some stories of what goes into running the estate. The job certainly has some appeal in its luxurious perks and colonial English feel. The downsides are also there, with having to get up in the middle of the night to fix things at the factory high on the list. The thing that was most impressive was the amount of responsibility that the manager has. Despite the fact that the laws of the country still apply, the manager in many ways serves as the lord of this manor. In fact, there is a time set aside every week where he arbitrates domestic disputes and makes ruling for which there is no appeal process. The skills required are more diverse then any job that we previously thought existed. Where else can someone be an agricultural manager, magistrate, factory manager, wild animal chaser, etc.

We would see some of this constant excitement soon as a few servants scuffled in and told us that there were wild elephants in the garden right near the fence of the bungalow. As soon as Timmy offered to drive us out to take a look, Dave, Susan, Nisha and I all put down our beers and cocktails and piled into the managers SUV. The assistant manager also piled in the back and was told to keep watch for any elephants approaching from the back of the car.

The night was misty, but with a full moon, and we stained to see out into the dark, not aided by the smoke of Timmy's often present cigarette. As we pulled onto the first jeep track I spotted a silhouette of an elephant in the distance. We stopped quickly and I shined the flashlight on him, but only Nisha was able to see him before he bounded away. At this point I thought the excitement was over, but soon we saw the behinds of numerous elephants emerging from the garden to walk down the jeep track in front of us, directly in the headlights. We stayed at least 100m away and followed this heard for a little while. The herd consisted, but our count, of three adult females and five adolescent and baby elephants.

We lost them over a little rise in the road and when we topped the rise they were no longer visible. Then, the assistant manager spoke quickly and we realized that the heard was now sick of us following them and was 100m away in the garden, heading in the opposite direction, doubling back on us. We got a good look at the train of elepahants as they strode by, doing a fair amount trumpeting and breaking a lot of branches underneath their feet. Timmy made the call that observation time was over and stepped on it before we angered the heard any further. The fog obscured the road on the direct way home, making it unsafe with all the elephants about, so we returned by navigating the maze of jeep tracks that traverse the garden, which Timmy and the assistant manager all knew like the back of their hands. We also encountered a truck and three men who Timmy told us were the "Elephant Patrol", we stopped to tell them where the elephants were and they headed off to try to disperse them with their loud firecrackers and drums.

Dinner was rather sedate after all the excitement, but the food was good and we certainly headed back to our bungalow thinking that this was a pretty exciting night. Not everywhere can elephant chasing be part of the dinner party entertainment.

The next day we headed off early in the morning to go to Gangtok, in Sikkim, for the night and then returned the day after. We were only on the estate for a quiet night before heading to the airport, but we did hear an interesting and sad thing. In the day that we were gone a female picker had been mauled by the leopard in the area where we saw the trap a few days before. She was in the hospital and expected to recover. They were looking into getting the leopard declared a "Maneater" so that the forest department could shoot it, but it would probably have to kill someone before that declaration could be made. The multiple maulings in the last several months did not suffice, certainly highlighting the unintended effects of wildlife conservation laws.

As you can tell by the length of this tale it was certainly a memorable experience, a window into a world that most Americans probably think disappeared many years ago. Sarah, Rakesh, Timmy and his wife were all great hosts and we thank them for letting us see this unique, beautiful, relaxing and sometimes tragic place.