Darjeeling (21 page)

Today officially called the Darjeeling Club, it has 470 members. In the late 1990s, it opened admission to professions other than planters. Joining is very expensive, although it is currently not taking new members. Yet few come these days. “Just two or three,” said a receptionist on an April evening that had cooled enough to require coal fires to be lit in the guest rooms and a heater turned on at the feet of the receptionist. And before? “Three hundred,” he said flatly.

At the base of Nehru Road, across from the Planters’ Club, is Keventer’s, a popular, decades-old, inexpensive café with a roof terrace shaped like a ship’s bow. On Sundays it fills with junior boys from Darjeeling’s elite schools ordering cheese-toast sandwiches and bottled Maaza mango sodas.

During the nineteenth century, Darjeeling became famous for its English-style boarding schools modeled on Eton, Rugby, and Harrow. St. Paul’s School was the first. It started in 1823 in Calcutta and opened a branch in Darjeeling in 1864 as the highest school in the world. Located on the outskirts of town, the beefy buildings with peaked, red roofs and a massive quad comprise one of the area’s top institutions, along with St. Joseph’s at North Point, Mount Hermon, and Loreto Convent (where Mother Teresa spent ten years doing her novitiate). They draw students from beyond the hills and also India itself, with scores from Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Thailand (including royalty). The town’s numerous students stroll around in V-neck sweater-vests, slate-gray trousers or long skirts, striped ties, and crested blazers.

Even when there is no chance of rain, and Darjeeling is suffering from drought, the boys of St. Paul’s still carry their ubiquitous black umbrellas. Asked why they had them on a sunny day when it hadn’t rained in weeks, one tall boy with a fuzz of hair just appearing on his lip said, “Tradition, sir!”

“What if you get caught without an umbrella?”

“We wouldn’t be able to come into town, sir.”

“How often can you come into town?”

“Once a month, sir.”

“Really?”

“Tradition, sir.”

*
They still do today. Traveling from the manager’s bungalow on the Bannockburn Tea Estate to the one on the neighboring Ging Tea Estate takes close to an hour by jeep. This is rather standard.

If there is a hint of what V. S. Naipaul called mimicry on the Indian side in the school crests and clubs with hunting trophies, dress codes, and the same elitist rules that once excluded them, there is nostalgia on the Anglo side. It’s located in the heritage hill station hotels with snuggeries displaying steam-train memorabilia, the solid, gray-stone buildings with wisteria, and the evocative smell of coal smoke in the evening air. In Darjeeling, no one traffics better in nostalgia than the city’s most exclusive hotel, the Windamere.

Established in the 1880s as a cozy boardinghouse for bachelor English and Scottish tea planters, it was converted into a hotel by the father of the current owner, who bought the property in 1939. Strung across the narrow back of a hummock, with stunning views dropping straight down on both sides and a royal guest list, the old-fashioned, self-contained Victorian cottages, annexes, and planters’ suites are the only buildings on Observatory Hill. Rooms have spacious closets (one had to dress for dinner) and a second, smaller room (to change perhaps, or for an attending footman). Full meal plans are obligatory, menu cards typed out daily on an old machine, and waiters breeze among tables wearing white gloves even to serve breakfast. The porridge is memorable, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding are served on Sundays, and desserts lean toward British public-school staples—which is to say Raj standards—such as bread-and-butter pudding with plump golden raisins, sponge cakes, and jam roly-poly, all smothered in hot custard. When evenings are cool, which is most of the year, coal fires are lit in the rooms while guests are down at dinner, offering heat along with soothing sounds of embers shifting in the grate
as they burn down during the night. A hot-water bottle wrapped in flannel is surreptitiously tucked into the sheets, too.

“This place isn’t just a throwback to the early 20th century,” wrote the Canadian journalist Muhammad Lila. “It
is
the early 20th century.”
¹

The tug of nostalgia pulls the firmest at afternoon tea, which, every day at precisely four p.m., is offered fireside in Daisy’s Music Room.

The Windamere’s tradition began seventy-five years ago by copying the British fashion and has carried on with little change since. A server wearing a frilly lace pinafore and white gloves pours out tea from a silver pot and offers platters of macaroons, Bundt cake with candied cherries, and scones to slice open and generously spread butter and clotted cream across their soft crumb face. Arranged in orderly layers on silver platters are petit triangular sandwiches that have been filled with cucumber, boiled egg, or cheese and had their crusts shaved off with a long, serrated knife.

The music room is not overly large, and with the curtains drawn and a fire blazing, it becomes intimate and cozy. Stacked on the piano among candelabra are heavy, black-boarded photo albums of past Windamere celebrations. Lovingly separated by sheets of onionskin are treasured images of New Year’s Eve bonfires, dances, and dinners with Christmas crackers and shiny party hats. On the wall, frames encase regimental ware, portraits of long-dead royalty, and notes from famous guests. A card from Jan Morris contains this handwritten ode:

As the glow of Kanchenjunga

Faded with the passing of each year—

When the whistle of the Toy Train

Dies at last upon my ear—

In my heart I still shall cherish

Dear old Windamere.

The British tradition of afternoon tea originated with Anna Maria, the seventh Duchess of Bedford (a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria), in the early nineteenth century as she began having a little pick-me-up between the then-standard two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. At first private
affairs, afternoon teas moved to the drawing rooms of the fashionable set—ladies only; the men had their clubs and pubs—and soon after to teahouses and hotel dining rooms. In some ways, this was a beginning of women’s emancipation. Starting in 1865, the year the luxurious Langham Hotel on London’s Regent Street opened and began offering afternoon tea in their dazzling Palm Court, ladies had a place to go out together in public without risking society’s moralizing gossip.

As with many British fashions, afternoon tea became popular on the subcontinent, too. In Victorian India, tea was drunk as in Britain, with milk and sugar, though that sweetener might have been jaggery,
²
a dark brown sugar made by evaporating the sap of palm trees. Some Brits enjoyed tea Mughal style, with spices, and
The Raj at the Table
offers a rather baroque recipe that includes palm starch (sago), almonds, cardamom, rosewater or dried rosebuds, milk, sugar, and “just sufficient tea leaf.”
³

In gardens of hill stations during the summer social season, and in the sunny winter down on the plains, tea was served along with sweets—tiffin cake, dholi buns, Bombay golden cake, and gymkhana cake, which included plums and currants. Baking in British India was not without its challenges, even for experienced cooks. High-quality flour was hard to come by and butter difficult to keep fresh. Yeast was perhaps the trickiest ingredient to obtain, so cooks often prepared homemade versions from cookbooks “using ingredients as diverse as potatoes, hops, bananas, barley, toddy (palm sap) and a fruit flower known as
mowha
.”
⁴
Even if a cook could whisk up all of the ingredients, ovens were primitive and formed a final obstacle to pulling off a decent cake.

Beforehand, the lady would most likely have checked her well-thumbed copy of
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook
. The fourth edition, published in 1898 at the height of the Raj, contained forty-three chapters that instructed on every element of housekeeping and colonial life on the subcontinent, from getting a piano to the Himalayas for the summer to throwing a perfect garden party. “Cakes and bonbons suitable for tennis parties are legion, and, as a rule the one thing to be observed in selecting them is to avoid stickiness or surprises,” advised coauthors Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner. “It is not pleasant to find the first bite of a firm looking cake result in a dribble of liqueur or cream down your best dress.”
⁵

For afternoon tea, the two ladies recommended serving warm slices of Ferozepore cake, named for the ancient town in the Punjab that under the British housed one of the largest military garrisons on the subcontinent.
To the standard quartet of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, the recipe adds almonds and pistachios steeped in cream and, to tart it up, lime, which they exotically called “green citron.”

To be sure, if the hostess had consulted Mmes. Steel and Gardiner for her menu, she would have been firmly discouraged from serving anything beyond cakes and scones to accompany the tea. “In England, the fashion of having various kinds of sandwiches at afternoon tea has of late gained ground but as it means a necessary disregard of dinner, it is not to be encouraged by any one who sets up for being a gourmet.”
⁶

The Mesdames did, however, yield—even if slightly—to fashion and offered a handful “of the latest” sandwiches, albeit “given in the proper place,” at the end of the book. (The penultimate chapter, added only “by request,” contains eight “native dishes” that the authors warned “are inordinately greasy and sweet.”)
⁷
The limited selection included an eternal standby, egg sandwiches. But little else. “Almost anything can be made into sandwiches, so it is unnecessary to give more recipes,” the book drily noted.
⁸

Lovely sandwiches can be found at afternoon tea in the Elgin Hotel. Built as the summer palace of the maharaja of Cooch Behar, the Elgin has a snug interior bedecked with etchings and lithographs, period teak furniture from Burma, oak floor paneling, plush red sofas with ample throw pillows, and fireplaces that crackle in the winter. In the well-lit drawing room that runs across the ground-floor front of the stout, white building, the Elgin’s waiters—clad not in frilly lace but turbaned, regimental uniforms—serve afternoon tea on the heavy, polished wood side tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Among the monogrammed cups and saucers and silverware covered in a gossamer of spidery patina, waiters set down a stacked tea tray (known in Edwardian days as a curate), with three hoops to hold plates of delicacies and a loop handle on top to carry it.

While the Windamere might prepare moister scones and clotted cream that can suspend a spoon upright, the Elgin serves just-fried
pakoras
(fritters) made of onions, vegetables, or boiled eggs to accompany their selection of sweets and savories, and, along with a long list of fine, single-estate Darjeeling teas—including Margaret’s Hope, Balasun, and Puttabong (Tukvar)—a sublime masala chai that’s aromatic and perfectly spiced.

“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea,” begins Henry James’s masterpiece
The Portrait of a Lady
.
⁹
Sitting by the
fire in Daisy’s Music Room on a drizzly day, or by the large windows of the front lounge at the Elgin with tea and
pakoras
when the mists clear for a moment to shed a quick glimpse of the ethereal Kanchenjunga hovering just above Darjeeling, it is hard to disagree.

For British in India, though, liquor, as much as tea, defined the Raj experience, especially in the popular imagination. “Of course drink is what keeps the machine going. We should all go mad and kill one another in a week if it weren’t for that,” proclaimed Flory the timber merchant in Orwell’s
Burmese Days
. “Booze as the cement of empire.”
¹⁰
A battery of servants took care of most tasks, and the British often had little to do in the evening but whine about the heat and drink. Measuring out pegs of whisky and generously diluting them down with soda or water became a ritual. So did enjoying a gin cocktail to be served out on the verandah for a sundowner. Or earlier on weekends. “The hour or two before Sunday
tiffin
[lunch],” wrote Jennifer Brennan in her Anglo-Indian cookbook-cum-memoir, “was the time for several pristine gimlets or pink gins.”
¹¹

The gimlet was synonymous with British India. Four parts dry gin to one part Rose’s lime juice shaken with ice and strained into a cocktail glass. Limy sweet and refreshing in the heat, they go down easy. The Windamere still shakes the stiffest in town in a pickling ratio of six to one. At the Elgin, the barman adds a squeeze of fresh lime. Little else has changed.

But tea planters considered pink gin their drink. Just two ingredients that play off one another: gin, preferably Plymouth gin, which is a touch sweet, and Angostura bitters. The latter was developed in 1824 as a medicinal elixir to cure soldiers’ stomach ailments by a German doctor, Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, a Prussian army veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who fled to South America, where he was appointed surgeon general of Simón Bolívar’s liberation forces. Originally called Amargo Aromatico (Spanish for “aromatic bitter”), the wily blend of spices, herbs, roots, and berries eventually took the name of the Venezuelan town where Siegert lived. It helped assuage seasickness in sailors and rouse the appetite of those living in unfamiliar, tummy-troubling lands. The gin was meant to disguise the unpalatable, acrid taste of the saucy, brown concoction, but in reality the bitters help cover the searing taste of cheap, local gin.