Bags or Loose Leaves

I am a tea drinker. I always have been. I have never had a home, permanent or temporary, without a tea pot in it. I am not a tea bag tea drinker. Although occasionally I will have a fancy thing in a silk packet that feels ridiculous, and of course there are many times when I pull out a builders tea bag from Yorkshire or somewhere less familiar and show it the boiling water. I’m not that much of a purist. But I am a woman of the tea caddy. The small spoon that delves into those dried leaves, taking only the right amount for that one, first, brilliant and reassuring cup of tea in a morning. .. I buy my tea from a tea importer and I mix them. One flavour for my morning. One for my afternoon pot.

And now here I am six and a half thousand feet in the Nilgiris Hills surrounded by tea bushes as far as the eye can see.

I learn that there are the two tea areas in India. Here in the south and the hills of the north where Darjeeling and it’s cohorts come from. The tea is picked by women. Men would just want to get it done. According to the dictate they either use their fingers to tease off the very top leaf to make the white or the use a pair of shears to slice off the top branches to get the leaves that will make the stronger, darker brew.

The women live in small huts, near the plantations. They are not tall. Weathered faces and hands. They work so very hard.

The plantations are owned by families ( rich), businesses ( richer). They are paid by the weight of the leaves they pick.So they don’t stop. They wear these bags on their backs as they go row by row in the cool early morning, through the warm day. There are stalls on the side of the road where you can dress up in a bright sari, hang one of these bags on your head and have your photo taken. There was a movement started some 20 years ago, brought in by a woman called Supreya Sahu, after she saw cows swallowing plastic bags as they attempted to eat from the garbage. It stopped any single use plastic being brought into the Niligris Mountain park. Young volunteers check every vehicle for offending water bottles and plastic bags as you drive in. There are a few international tourists but there are many, many local tourists. This place, Coonoor and the town one further thousand meters up in the mountains called Ooty, is the place where people come for a special weekend, a popular destination for their honeymoon.

Ooty was once a hill station, laid out in 1848 by the East India Company. there is almost nothing left to show of that world, beyond the reason for it; which is the cooler temperatures and the verdant flowers. There is an army encampment, a Polo Field and a Botanical Garden. There is a chocolate shop and a train line that started chuffing it’s way up and down the 100 feet from Coonoor in 1908. It was until recently a steam train. But all things must change.

Ooty itself is overflowing with Indian chaos. People everywhere. Motorcycles. Everyone honking and driving, walking, weaving, zooming in any direction they wish.

There may not be any plastic allowed, but there are a lot of young men having a riotous time and drinking bottles of beer which they throw into the plantation fields where the women working endlessly can end up with lacerated feet. It’s beautiful. It’s astonishing. It’s chaotic. it’s India.