Two leaves and a bud. That’s the tea grower’s mantra. Two leaves and a bud.
Those are the all-important parts of the tea plant that pluckers are after. Eight hours a day, they make their way up and down the long and hilly rows of waist-high tea plants, snapping off that little snippet of greenery at the very top of the plant. Every plant – and there are hundreds of millions of them here - must be plucked every 7-8 days. Do it too early and the bud is underdeveloped and the tea is bitter. Wait too long and the tenderness that gives tea it singularly crisp taste is gone.
Raising tea is incredibly labor-intensive. Expensive, too. In Sri Lanka alone, there are 800,000-900,000 pluckers. Decades ago, pluckers’ salaries accounted for 30 percent of the cost of manufacturing tea. Today, that figure is about 80 percent.
Growers have tried to come up with machines to do the job. But no one has yet found one that has the judgment and dexterity of the human plucker. Machines are just too tough on the plants. They shave off the top. Some African countries use them. But the plants there are of a lesser quality. This is Sri Lanka, after all, home of the legendary and much sought-after Ceylon tea. Machines simply won’t do.
I went to Sri Lanka to learn how to make the perfect cup of tea.
Hard to say if I succeeded.
I mean, I had some pretty fabulous tea while I was there. And I learned an enormous amount about how to grow and process the stuff. But the fact is, I could make a pretty damned good cup of tea before I went to Sri Lanka. And while I can probably make a slightly better one now, what I really learned is that I have only scratched the surface of all there is to know about tea.
Tea wears so many different faces. It can be green, yellow, reddish-brown, black and probably several other colors I’m unaware of. You can make it out of nearly anything; flowers, roots, leaves, buds. You name it, and if you dry it and steep it in water that’s just off the boil, you’ll end up with something that qualifies as tea.
Tea can be robust. It can be restorative. It can be soothing. It can be as aggressive as espresso. It can be as delicate as a spring blossom. It can be filled with caffeine or entirely devoid of it.
Man, this was hopeless. There’s no way I was going to develop a comprehensive understanding of tea in just three days.
Fortunately, I did pick up a few things.
Only a small part of it actually has to do with tea, though. Much of it has to do with the wonderful family I stayed with.
First, let me tell you how I met them. When I decided I’d go to Sri Lanka, I contacted the makers of Dilmah Tea. It’s a brand I first encountered in Australia a few years ago. It’s not available in the States, so now I order it via the Internet. I’ve come to understand that Dilmah is a big company. But there has always been something very personal about buying tea from them.
Every order arrives with a handwritten thank-you note. And on one occasion, when I inquired about what Dilmah mugs looked like, a guy emailed me to say that he’d take digital photos and send them to me. Two days later, he did just that. Remarkable.
So when it came time to cobble together an itinerary for this trip, I thought why not pop in on those nice people at Dilmah?
I sent off an email and a few days later, I got a reply from Dilhan Fernando. He and his brother would love to have me as their guest. (A bit of trivia here. Dilmah’s founder, Merrill J. Fernando, got the company’s name by combining the names of his sons, Dilhan and Malik.)
Besides hosting me in Colombo and showing me their facility there, they arranged for me to stay in the home of the manager of the Great Western Tea Estate, one of the mountain plantations from which they buy their tea.
Finally, after four hours of riding through the jungles of central Sri Lanka, I was about to arrive at the Great Western Tea Estate. It’s one of the legends of Ceylonese tea-growing. Some of the estate’s tea plants have been producing for close to 100 years. I expected to meet a grizzled, middle-aged farm professional, a guy only a couple of notches up the evolutionary ladder from the tough-as-nails plantation owners who ran these farms in the days before Sri Lankan independence.
Surprise.
Nishantha Abeysinghe is just 36. And to tell the truth, he could pass for several years younger. Quick to smile, quick to laugh, he’s the kind of guy you like the moment you meet him. And while he can talk yield-per-hectare with the best of them, he is a man who appreciates this land’s extraordinary beauty as much as he does its profitability.
Don’t get me wrong. He has his eye securely on the bottom line. There’s a reason that a guy this young is running such a big operation. (The estate covers 1650 hectares.) But he knows that tea production is more than a manufacturing process. It’s a collaborative work of art involving hundreds and hundreds of people.
We walked through the factory together. There are gauges and clocks and scales everywhere. But moving tea from the plant to the cup involves more than managing machines. You have to cradle the leaves in your hands, roll them between your fingers, hold them to your nose to make sure the pungent scent of the slightly fermented leaf is just right. There are mechanical indicators that can measure the moistness of the leaves, but none that is quite so exacting as a professional who has an intimacy and understanding of his leaves.
I remember feeling the same way when I visited a commercial bread bakery in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1989. The man who ran the place had an almost mystical relationship with the breads that his staff made. Bread-baking wasn’t just a matter of output or recipes. To him, it was akin to alchemy.
It’s the same way with Nishantha. He loves this tea. When I left their house, he gave me a small parcel of it that had been made while I was there. The dollar value was modest. But coming from Nishantha and his family, it was quite precious.
Nishantha is married to Aditha, a novelist and former lecturer in the Kelaniya University English Department. She is a small, quiet woman. When I first met her, in fact, she spoke so little that I thought she just didn’t have much facility with English. Then., I read her writing. So much for that first perception of her. It was a newspaper story about Nishantha. And the writing was poetic and informative and wonderfully descriptive – the sort of things you read too seldom in newspapers.
But what was most intriguing to me about Aditha is what I can only describe as her impishness. It’s not so much the way she acts, but that she always has a look on her face like she is up to something. Nothing bad, mind you. It's just that you're sure she has something fascinating going on in her mind. And I always wanted to know what it was.
Because it was a long weekend – a Full Moon holiday fell on Monday – much of Aditha’s family had come up from Colombo for the weekend. And they turned out to be a marvelous group; generous, inquisitive and slightly eccentric. Here’s the rest of the cast of characters:
- Daya Dissanayake, Aditha’s father, a novelist/businessman visiting from Colombo. He’s come for the long Full Moon holiday weekend. You can read his first novel online at www.saadhu.com.
- Raditha Dissanayake, Daya’s son (and Aditha’s brother), a computer wiz from Colombo. Without him I would never have figured out how to connect to the Internet.
- Madhavi Boralessa, Raditha’s wife.
- Radinka Dissanayake, Madhavi and Raditha’s child; playful, adorable and deservedly the center of attention.
I loved our conversations. They were always intelligent and probing and challenging. We talked about novels. We talked about politics – like virtually everyone I’ve met on this trip, they don’t understand how we reelected George Bush. We talked about families. We talked about the history of Sri Lanka.
History is Daya’s special passion. He never said it, but I think he feels the rest of the world doesn’t understand Sri Lanka the way it should. And he’s probably right. This is an ancient country, a country with a dazzling and varied history. And yet, I fear that the only thing most of us in the west know about it is that it was one of the countries hardest hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. Most people probably couldn’t even tell you where it is. Sad.
Nishantha made sure I saw how the estate worked. This isn’t just a place where people come to work. They live here, too. More than 1100 workers and their families. So there’s a school and a community center and a dispensary. It’s like a small town. And Nishantha is the mayor.
Not everything about my visit was comfortable.
Being raised in the United States, I have an egalitarian streak. So I’m a little uneasy about the idea of servants and staff.
I had a car with a driver here. When we stopped at Kitulgala, a gracious old hotel/restaurant near which they made much of “Bridge on the River Kwai,” my driver – Upali - disappeared. He was having tea, too. But he wouldn’t dream of sitting with me. It just isn’t done. He sat in a special area for drivers. So there I was, sitting and drinking tea on my own in the main dining room while Upali sat alone and drinking his tea 50 meters away. It was just too strange.
Similarly, at Nishantha’s They have a butler, an appu, as he is called. At whatever time I would choose each morning, there would be a rap on my door and a second later, appu would come marching in, flip on the light and leave me a tray with a pot of tea and a cup. The first morning, it was a total shock. Thank god I was clothed. In my everyone-is-equal sort of way, I tried to be chummy with him. He smiled at me, but it was an indulgent smile, the sort of smile he might give someone who is quite mad. Once again, what I was suggesting just wasn’t done.
Another big hurdle I overcame was eating with my hands.
Back in Mali, Sam and his family ate with their hands. But I was a little shy about it. It was messy and I wasn’t sure how I would clean up. And besides, they kept bringing me a spoon, so I used it.
But by Sri Lanka, I was ready. They had finger bowls, so that took care of the messy part. But also, I felt at ease here. I felt comfortable. I could make a mistake and no one would think the worse of me. I felt like I was with family.
Posted by David Lyman on February 17, 2005 at 02:12 AM | Permalink
Thank you for your article. My wife is in tea club and your information was priceless.
PS You are getting behind-- pictures-also great of the tea plantation were posted two weeks ago.
Keep up the fine commentry.
Posted by: Carl Spamer | Feb 17, 2005 5:19:43 PM
