Darjeeling Tea

I like Tea. I don’t love it but I do like it. I like the little ceramic cups  and the teapot  they serve you in Asian restaurants before your meal. I like a cup of hot green tea with my mother after a heavy meal. I just have to have a cup of tea after my Sunday Nana nap, just before evening church service just so I can fresh up for the sermon.

But really, I’m not much of a tea drinker. In fact, there was a time, I really disliked tea, despite the fact that my Mum could conjure up some mean Chai. I didn’t like the taste; I didn’t like the brown colour; I didn’t like the black wet powdery residue it left on the insides of the cup or on your tongue or in the tea strainer.

But that was before my first cup of Darjeeling tea. I guess you’ll have to need a really really good cuppa before you start appreciating tea in general. So here’s the story behind my first good cup of tea.

It was the month of June, 2005, a few months before we left India for New Zealand. We knew those months were to be our last few months in our home-country and we wanted to make the most of it. Now my family and the family of my uncle (my father’s brother) had often talked about making a trip to North India together. We’d spent nearly all our lives in the warm South Indian Plateau and wanted to see something new. We decided that it was finally time for these plans to come to fruition.

But India is a vast huge place, where do we go? Should we see Delhi, in the heart of the country and Agra the location of the Taj Mahal? Or should we see the Thar Desert in Rajasthan. Or should we go to Shimla and get our first glimpse of snow.

Finally we hit upon a plan that everybody liked: We’ll go to the North East of India. We’ll take a train till the New Jalpaiguri Railway Station and immediately take the four-plus hour car trip to Gangtok in the little state of Sikkim. Then we’ll visit the beautiful Himalayan town of Darjeeling and see the tea gardens and the rare view of Mount Kanchenjunga. Then, finally, we’ll take a small pit stop at Kolkata, where my mother had spent her childhood, before returning home to Chennai.

This plan was especially charming to me: I had just finished my important Tenth Standard exams and part of my English syllabus was this beautiful travelogue about Darjeeling by Indian writer R.K Narayan. After reading that lovely piece of writing, I had longed to experience Darjeeling for myself. The enthusiasm was shared by the whole family with the exception of my boy cousin who had studied the same piece of writing at school but hadn’t appreciated it due to a serious lack of imagination(:P).

June came and our trip began. Mum took out all the woollies which we’ve had for years but never really needed before. My uncle’s family arrived at our place from their home city, Madurai. They spent the night with us at our house. The next day we loaded our luggage into two taxis and headed to Chennai’s Central Station. Once there, the nine of us, Uncle, Aunty, Dad, Mum, Older Girl-cousin, Me, Boy-cousin, Little Brother, Little sister (in age order, in case you didn’t guess) boarded the train to New Jalpaiguri.

Two weeks of baggage

We had a wonderful two day train ride in our cosy Air Conditioned compartment simply spending time with each other. We ate our own delicious home-cooked food (cooked by my Aunty) part of the way and ordered train food for the rest.

Boy-cousin educating himself on current events

We read Readers Digests and fought for the window seat.

While the train was static we enjoyed the sights, sounds and smells (at least the good smells) of the railway station. While the train was in motion, we enjoyed the moving countryside, the paddyfields, people in the rural towns, cars on bridges, crowded roads, the bright lights of the city at night and the lone light bulb shining through the window of some unseeable house in the dark nothingness. People, if you’ve never been to India before and get a chance to make the journey, please, please make sure you take at least one overnight train trip. It’s the ultimate Indian experience. 

Then some 40 hours after we started, we reached our stop at the New Jalpaiguri station, It was around 1:00 AM in the morning…or night whichever way you want to look at it. It looked like night to us, anyhow. There is the panic and urgency adults may feel when they’re in an unknown place and need to transport five adolescents and two weeks of clothes and necessities out of a train and on to the platform. Once that had been overcome, and the train had left, the natural question was, “What do we do next?” It was too dark to attempt the mountainous car trip to Gangtok and so the logical thing to do would be to find a taxi to convey us to a hotel to spend the night. But, you know, things don’t usually go as planned. Not in my family anyway.

After a conversation with the railway station people, in which Mum who knew a bit of Hindi played translator, we discovered that we were stuck where we were. No taxi would be taking us anywhere until the sun is out and about. This was not good news. We were tired, we were cold; and we needed our beauty sleep.

So we laid down our luggage and spread some newspapers on the floor. Those who were tired enough could sleep on them. This was not very appealing to us. There were cockroaches and rats around and who knows who’d spit on the ground or worse. And did I mention it was cold?

Just as we were settling down, the lights went off. Great. We were left in the dark. The cold dark.


I thought it couldn’t get any worse. Stupid me.

Girl-cousin making sure our luggage don't get wet

It began to rain. Heavy windy rainy. And part of the platform roof was broken. We had to get up and move our bags and baggage closer to the wall so they wouldn’t get wet. We were left in the dark railway station in the cold rain, with cockroaches, rats, strangers who couldn’t speak Tamil or English and that stray dog which looked like it needed a flea treatment. Add an annoyed Boy-cousin who kept staring daggers at Mum and me as if we’d conspired with nature to make his life miserable.

Brother makes the best of a bad situation

I tried to sleep on the ground but I couldn’t. I was worried. What if our trip was nothing like we thought it would be? What if all our plans go awry? What if we were angry and miserable for the rest of the two weeks. I got up from the floor and sat on a bench. The plastic seat was cold. The rain had stopped by now and it was simply quiet. I sat there feeling tired and unhappy and eventually fell asleep. After what seemed like five minutes, I awoke suddenly. I was still very very cold but the dawn was breaking. It was finally morning. Papa and Uncle were talking to some people and then came around with tea (Finally we’ve reached the main subject. The Tea).

“It’s Darjeeling Tea,” said Aunty. I've never liked tea much, but I was cold and my throat was hurting. I took the warm white disposable plastic cup in my hands. I took a sip of the drink.

Patrick Jane, in an episode of the Mentalist (Red Carpet Treatment, fourth episode of Season 3 to be exact) described Tea as ‘a hug in a cup’. That’s exactly what it felt like. The hot cup of tea, sweet and milky warmed my blood and gave strength and energy to my bones. The soreness of my throat was gone and I was awake. My blood sugar was up and I felt happy. The mood change was evident among my family. Everyone was up and ready for what the day might bring. Of course, it was just normal tea. Still the cold and tiredness had made it seem ten times better.

Drinking Tea

A sight for sore eyes

Within a couple of hours, we had hired a car, loaded our luggage and were on our way to Sikkim. In spite of our misadventure, the rest of the trip was great. Even Boy-cousin loved it. He won’t admit it, though. The adventure was everything we thought it would be. And more.

Enjoying ourselves in Darjeeling 3days later