Free Darjeeling by Jeff Koehler Page A

themselves. He wants each tea estate to produce the best-quality tea it can, but also to help the gardens “get in line with the market.” No one is more intimately attuned to what Darjeeling’s gardens are producing and what buyers are demanding. He sits in a prime position to gauge the desires, changes, trends, and needs of the market and translate those to the planters.
    Assessing Darjeeling tea is the most “intricate,” according to Choudhury. The vast differences in quality from garden to garden, and even from week to week at the same garden, creates huge discrepancies in prices. “This makes it trickier,” he said, than other styles of Indian teas that lack such a flavor and price spread.
    That June morning, one lot that had been dispatched on May 30 sold for Rs 545 while an identical grade and type from the same garden produced the following week, when better weather had kicked in and the season had moved more solidly into second flush, sold for Rs 1,050. “One week can make all the difference in Darjeeling,” the female J. Thomas assistant whispered after Choudhury slapped the gavel down on the sale.
    Darjeeling tea is traded based on its quality rather than on a futures exchange like coffee, and on its daily—as opposed to seasonal or yearly—harvest. “It has a valuation structure based on quality,” said Steven Smith, the legendary American tea pioneer who founded (and sold) both Stash Tea and Tazo and now has his own high-end, eponymous brand of tea, in his office-cum-workshop in Portland, Oregon. It’s about the taste in the cup sampled from each invoice. Steven Smith Teamaker offers a small, well-curated selection of the world’s finest teas, and Smith samples around two hundred Darjeeling options a year—preselected by his associates inIndia from thousands of teas—in selecting tea to fill the roomy loose-leaf sachets of his boutique brand.
    Choudhury gives each tea that sells in his auctions the price he thinks it is worth or that he wants to get for it. At the end, he is a salesman, Darjeeling’s biggest. He wants the prices to be high. To be sure, the company earns a percentage on each sale. (J. Thomas is “a feature in the formula,” he explained, “that the Tea Board of India is in charge of and negotiates.”) But as a champion of Darjeeling tea, he wants the market to accurately reflect Darjeeling tea’s value.

    With unwavering punctuality, when the digital clock on the back wall reads one P.M. , Choudhury breaks for lunch. Most of the buyers head down to the food stalls along Mukherjee Road and around the old law courts that offer everything from simple dosas (crispy filled South Indian savory crepes made from a fermented batter of rice flour and ground dal) to full thalis (a selection of small dishes with rice and bread and a dollop of pickle or chutney).
    The J. Thomas staff, meanwhile, heads upstairs to the Tiffin Room. “Just like they used to,” said one junior member. And he meant it. The lunch menu remains mostly English, with chicken cutlets, beefsteaks, and, that June day, shepherd’s pie. Friday is Indian food. One of the two tables is for the dozen senior members, and the smaller one is for junior members. The room is not large and the staff must eat in turns. Stiffly poised black-and-white portraits of past J. Thomas leaders line the walls, confident men with tightly buttoned collars, narrow ties, and, on a few, regimental mustaches.
    A seldom-used boardroom off the Tiffin Room guards another Raj-era tradition at J. Thomas. Into the shiny gloss of a Burmese teak dining table, each outgoing director since 1870 has carved his initials. Ashok Batra recently etched A.B. 1972–2013 cleanly into the polished wood with a penknife at the end of his four decades with the company. While his father retired as vice admiral of the Indian navy and his four uncles were also military men, Batra joined J. Thomas fresh out of college in Pune. “Tea is a gentleman’s industry and I