Authors: Jeff Koehler
On a late-June day, just two weeks shy of the ten-year anniversary of Makaibari’s world record being set in the same room, J. Thomas held Sale No. 26, offering early second flush teas from the 2013 harvest. Buyers began arriving at eight thirty or so, darting into the building from the morning monsoon squall that was splattering fat, pregnant drops.
The ten-story Nilhat House is a fine example of early–1960s functionalism, a niched and reticular brilliant white building, trimmed with bold, accentuated colorfulness in Himalayan sky blue. It sits a couple of blocks off the central square named BBD Bagh
*
along Mukherjee Road—originally Mission Row, purportedly the oldest street in the city—just a few buildings down from the Old Mission Church, a splendid 1770 building with a small, enclosed garden whose unharvested fruit trees conceal large, noisy birds.
Mukherjee Road is narrow and tree-shaded, for much of the day its sidewalks crowded as a subway platform. Stretching along both sides of the street are hundreds of semipermanent food stalls that offer everything from scalding-hot chai in unfired-clay cups to fried
aloo bonda
(potato balls). As tea buyers made their way to the auction house that morning, stalls were already preparing for the lunch crowd by peeling potatoes, slicing eye-watering mounds of onions, and getting blackened kettles of stews and dals simmering. Across from Nilhat House, an elderly man squatted on the street and ground copious amounts of coriander seeds with a long, cylindrical pestle on a coarse slab of stone the shape of a tombstone. Another slapped chapatis between his palms. Wide, woven baskets displaying mangoes and nested clusters of still-green bananas sat between them.
Shaking out their umbrellas, the buyers followed the wide, curving stairwell, lined with a wall of small tiles in vibrant shades of California blue, to the auction room on the second floor. With six gently tiered rows, each with a dozen or so seats and an aisle running up the middle, it has the feel of a college lecture hall. A square of wood attached to the armrest unfolds into a small table.
Buyers greeted each other as the seats gradually filled. Some made last calls on their BlackBerrys or stepped outside into the foyer for a cigarette. They all carried the day’s auction catalog, some fifty or so pages thick. Its closely printed sheets showed the lot number, garden, grade, date packaged and dispatched, number of kilos and of packages in each lot, and the valuation of the tea up for auction. Each lot had been available to taste beforehand, and buyers had put tick marks beside the ones they hoped to get—teas that fit their own purchasing levels and desired flavor profiles. A handful of women stood out among the mostly male crowd.
Just moments before nine a.m., three J. Thomas men entered the room. They shook a few hands as they came through the door and nodded to acquaintances, but didn’t dawdle on their way to the front, where a long desk sat on a dais. A gentleman in his sixties took a seat at one end, a man in his twenties sat at the other, and in the middle, a step higher and with a slightly raised lectern before him, was a man in age between the other two wearing a striped dress shirt, silk tie, and angular glasses that gave his face a somewhat severe look. This was the auctioneer, Anindyo Choudhury, the most influential man in Darjeeling tea.
Going under his hammer that day were 794 lots from fifty-some gardens, a mix of low-, medium-, and high-end—or priced—teas. They
had largely been produced a month or so beforehand as the harvest moved from the shoulder
banji
period into prime second flush.
Choudhury’s copy of the catalog sat open before him. His right hand held a pencil to jot the final sales amount and his left a wooden gavel. No microphone, no laptop. At the back of the room, above the heads of the buyers, is a clock—the same plain, efficient digital type that hangs in schoolrooms, cinema lobbies, and rental-car agencies—which Choudhury watched closely. When the red numbers flashed 9:00, he began.
He gave the lot number, name of the garden, grade of tea, and a line about quality if superior. For most lots, he moved up in Rs 5 or 10 increments, but on some of the higher-fetching teas that fall for thousands, he would skip 100 at a time. For tea that had been valued in the catalog at Rs 1,000, say, he opened at Rs 700 to 750.
“Tata five hundred,” he called out during the bidding on an early lot, acknowledging the Tata Global buyer’s nod. Rs 505 got a nod from another buyer, and Tata agreed to 510. “Five-ten Tata,” Choudhury said. “Five-fifteen? Any takers at five-fifteen? Any takers at five-fifteen?” He paused only a beat and then said, “Knocking to Tata at five-ten,” smacking down the gavel. The two men flanking him both noted the buyer and agreed price. (A young woman from J. Thomas sitting among the buyers did likewise.) Choudhury penciled a quick note in his catalog and within a breath moved on to the next lot.
And on down the list, page after page, in a clipped, slightly impatient pace. Far from the chanting singsong of a southern-American auctioneer filling a room with a steady river of musical phrasing, or offering praise or eulogies to the tea on offer, his style is professional, perfunctory, even a bit dry. He only pauses to sharpen his pencil.
J. Thomas & Co. is the oldest and largest existing tea auctioneer and broker in the world. (The London tea auction ceased in 1998, after more than three hundred years.) The first public sale of tea in India took place in their Calcutta office on December 27, 1861, a consignment of 250 chests from the East Indian Tea Company and another hundred from the Bengal Tea Company. Originally named Thomas Marten & Company, the company began not as brokers of tea but of shellac, jute, and, foremost, indigo. “The color seeped from the packed chests [of indigo] and stained the length of Mission Row a deep abiding blue,” wrote a historian of the company.
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The current building’s name—from
nil
(indigo) and
hat
(market)—reflects its legacy in dye, as does its colorful trim. For a century the company was controlled by the British. The first Indian chairman was appointed in 1962; the last member of the Thomas family, the fifth generation, left a year later; the company’s final Brit departed in 1972.
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Today, J. Thomas handles about one-third of all tea auctioned in India—almost 500 million pounds (200 million kilograms) a year. It conducts auctions not just at its main Kolkata center but also in other tea producing areas: Guwahati (Assam), Siliguri (the Dooars and Terai), Cochin (Kerala), Coonoor (in the Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu), and Coimbatore (a couple hours farther south in the same state). They also keep correspondents at the other main tea auction houses in Asia and Africa—Colombo (for Sri Lanka teas), Chittagong (for Bangladesh), Jakarta (for Indonesia), Mombasa (for Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Malawi, and others), and Limbe (for Central Africa).
Over the last few years, tea auctions in India have become computerized, with buyers sitting silently in a room in front of identical laptops clicking their mouse to make bids or done anonymously online, where buyers do not even know who they are bidding against. That is, all except for the Darjeeling tea auction at J. Thomas’s Kolkata branch. The tradition simply remains too entrenched to halt. Anindyo Choudhury is the only tea auctioneer left using the open outcry system.
Choudhury came to tea, like many in the industry, randomly, almost on a whim. “It was an unknown field, mostly word of mouth, family connections,” he explained in his office. “When I finished university”—the University of Delhi, one of India’s highest-ranked institutions—“someone said, ‘You want to try tea?’” Choudhury smiled at the thought, at the simple suggestion that led to his life’s work.
He spent a year with Tata Tea and then joined J. Thomas. After working in their Siliguri office, he moved to the headquarters in Kolkata. For the last few years, he has been in charge of Darjeeling tea for the company.
As auctioneer, though, he does more than simply call out lots and take bids. Choudhury spends just one day a week in the auction room. He passes more time in the tasting room, where he personally tastes each lot going up for sale and sets its value. That means that he tastes around 60 percent of all tea produced in the district. Every week, in a day and a half, he tastes a thousand different Darjeeling teas. The renowned wine critic Robert M. Parker tastes ten thousand bottles a year.
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Choudhury does that many second flush teas alone.
Located on the fifth floor of Nilhat House, the long, narrow tasting room is at least twenty-five generous paces in length, with windows running along one wall and four parallel and unbroken rows of tasting benches cleaving it into strips. Choudhury pulls on a snug blue apron fronted with a deep V-neck that shows off tie and collar and works quickly down the long rows of tasting pots, cups, and teas. An assistant pushing a wheeled podium and a massive ledger follows behind, jotting down his remarks and initial values. Choudhury tastes not only each of those coming up for sale, but also retastes certain ones from the previous auction to see why they sold higher, or lower, than his valuation.
“I am tasting with the manufacturing process in mind. What was right about the tea, what was not,” he said. J. Thomas furnishes gardens with reports on what they send to auction, and Choudhury travels frequently to Darjeeling to taste at the gardens 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 in
India 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 learnt so much from it that I’ve no hesitation to say what I’m today is due to tea,” he said upon retirement in a newspaper interview.
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Hanging in these back rooms are a number of framed certificates commemorating records reached in its auction rooms. They illustrate the
price difference between orthodox teas and CTC ones produced in the same area. One commemorates the Assam orthodox record being set at Rs 6,999 a kilo in August 2012 (then worth $127.25) by the Duflating Tea Estate. That same month, at the Halmari Tea Estate, the Assam CTC record was also reached: Rs 390 ($7.09), a paltry 5 percent of the orthodox tea’s amount. Halmari alone produces more than 2 million pounds, about 1 million kilograms, of tea annually, 95 percent of it CTC.
The money, as the junior J. Thomas member pointed out when looking over the certificates, is in volume.
At two
P.M.
Choudhury and his team are back in the auction hall trying to sell the remaining few hundred lots by three thirty or four p.m. Afternoons are more challenging; energy among the buyers can lag, and Choudhury presses hard to keep the auction moving at a steady pace.