I have traveled Asia, loving tea. I would go a thousand miles to find the next good cup and the next good friends to share it with.
Currently, India is one of my favorite cups--Darjeeling tea, especially. One of my favorite places to have tea is the Windamere Hotel, in West Bengal.
This, from my journal last time I was there:
It was a long morning rummaging for books in the bazaar and I have had it with Indian tailors. Dragging myself up the paved drive to the Windamere, I mumble impatiently to the chowkidhar and drop into a painted chair on the patio. It's not hot, but I'm sweating.
Then, silently, swiftly and with a kind of elegance that I will never achieve, a tall, white-coated Indian man brings a tray with silver tea service. Without a sound, he lowers a porcelain cup and saucer to the table. The cup is painted with violets and trimmed in gold.
He does not ask, "Would you like tea, Memsahib?" He just knows. Like God, he reads my mind or maybe I look even worse than I feel.
He knows, and he's right--tea is the Great Repairer All Things Broken. He pours exactly one cup (not too little, not too full) of FTGFOP First Flush Pussimbing. The tea falls in a musical arc and is pale against the white of the china. He spills not a drop on the saucer.
He adds scalded cream. It makes a tiny vortex into which every bad thing that ever happened, or ever could, is drowned. He looks me in the eye, but only briefly, and asks from beneath a magnificent black mustache, "Sugar, Madame?" I say, "Yes." But he knows. By the time I have replied, he has deftly lifted a single glittering cube from the bowl and it falls, making the smallest display on the surface of the tea. He stirs with a delicate, monogrammed spoon, which coincidentally, I suppose, bears my initial.
He places a napkin nearby and disappears, gliding--not walking--away. I am in love.
I am in love with India, and with tea and with all the dark, somber men who hover and please. I am in love with the crumbled empire of the raj, tattered now, and with the breeze that wafts up from the valley below. I am in love with the courtyard of paved stones and the columns that hold up the breezeway that protects us from late monsoon storms.
I am in love with leisure and with taking time. I am in love with the arrogant young men who type bad manuscripts here--but I prefer the dusty old cranks whom I recognize by the brands of their fountain pens and the brims of their hats. I am in love with unheated rooms with bad English beds and oriental rugs worn thin before I was born. I am in love with the pale Hemidactylus Garnoti, tiny geckos that cling to the walls.
I am in love with lunch, which is two full meals. The first is Indian--well polished silver dishes with polite mounds of steamed Basmati rice and small followings of curried whatever is fresh. Then there is English food, which I do not love, for those whose stomachs cannot fathom one more chili.
I am in love with the spry Tibetan woman who owns this place. She is 94 and was the sprightly and politically unpopular bride of a British tradesman who knew the love of his life when he saw her.
She comes to each meal, properly attired in dresses and hats and gloves and heels, modestly bejewelled and always surrounded by friends. She uses a cane. She is graceful, but firm.
The wind up phonograph plays the same music it played in 1920, I feel sure. The records are handled with gloves. We should dance. Maybe later we will.
After lunch, I think I will never be able to eat again-- I am so full--and everyone at the table agrees: We are done for this life. We leave for walks and our various adventures. Some people nap.
But mid-afternoon, high tea calls and we come. We gather in the drawing rooms and a small, dark man brings a coal bucket and lights a fire. Two smiling women (they are Nepalese, not Indian) in maids' uniforms bring trays of sandwiches and sweets. The tea is self-serve, laid out on the mahogany buffet. The furniture is worn and rickety and the room is slightly cold till the conversation gets going.
We talk, each trying to outdo the other with our stories. A couple is biking from one day north, winding down through teak forests to the awful destination of Silliguri. The gentleman had a flat today and was delayed.
A pale young beauty in a lavender silk skirt and peach coloured stockings is leaving on the toy train tomorrow. Two young men inquire where they might get tickets. The elder here slump back on faded settees with the comfortable demeanor of age. They talk of books, and plays and pensions. They argue over marmalade brands. They have been here before.
Conversation dies out as the coal fire dies down and we all amble off to our rooms. The girl in the lavender skirt has offered to show a photographer something in her suitcase. He's accepted.
I gather my satchel and shawl and the book passed along by an Italian fellow who says he's from Denmark. We stop at the hat rack to get his pack and agree to meet for tea in the morning.
I love India. I say prayers for the small, dark hands that gather the tea at Pussimbing. I get my flashlight and saunter down the valley behind Observatory Hill, where I will sit till the sun sets. Small fires will line the paths back up, and connecting the dots, I'll return.
Established in the 19th century as a cozy boarding house for bachelor English and Scottish tea planters, the Windamere on Observatory Hill in Darjeeling was converted into a hotel just before the Second World War.
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