Club Day — A World That Shaped Me

I was born in Thurbo Tea Estate in Darjeeling. The smell of first flush tea and the mist rolling in over the valley are not romantic notions for me — they are simply childhood. My father, Narendra Puri, was a planter posted in Darjeeling and the Dooars, I spent my childhood to teenage years on the estates, watching, learning, absorbing a world that most people only read about. At sixteen, my father put a cup of tea in front of me and began teaching me how to taste it properly. That moment set the course of my life. I went on to join Duncans Tea as a tea taster in 1994, but before all of that, before the cupping tables and auction catalogues — there was the club.

And the club, for a tea estate boy growing up in Darjeeling and Dooars, was everything.

Budwaar — The Wednesday Club Day

Mid-week Wednesday was sacred on the estates. Managers and assistant managers would find their way to the nearest club — some driving, some zooming in on their motorcycles, trainee assistants hitching a ride with a senior. In Hindi, Wednesday is Budwaar, and in the Dooars planting belt, Budwaar simply meant one thing: Club Day.

The clubs in the Dooars were well-appointed places — golf, tennis, squash, billiards, table tennis, and always a cards room. You played your games, freshened up, went in for tea, and then found your way to the bar. That was the natural order of things.

My father playing tennis in Darjeeling Gymkhana Club

There was a tradition — one I remember watching as a child with wide eyes — that whatever your seniority, you were expected to bring food from home for Club Day. It was served to the entire gathering, which in a smaller district might be fifteen to twenty-five people, and in the larger districts could swell past forty.

This was the young bride's moment. The newly married wives of assistant managers would arrive with their carefully prepared dishes, hoping for a "Shabaash" — a word of approval — from the Burra Memsahib or the Burra Sahib. It sounds quaint now, but it mattered enormously then. The Burra Memsahib, the manager's wife, was an institution unto herself. She taught the younger women how to present food, how to carry themselves, how to host. Club catering — where each member contributed a dish, either for the regular Wednesday gathering or for a visiting club — was a serious affair.

The assistant managers, meanwhile, were considerably less refined in their motivations. They simply waited for the tea to be laid out and descended on the spread with considerable enthusiasm.

My Father's First Club Day

My father spoke of his first Club Day many times, and I am grateful I listened carefully enough to remember his exact words. He passed away some years ago, but his voice comes back to me clearly when I think of those stories.

He recalled wearing white shorts and a white T-shirt to the club. "I used to play tennis," he said. "The club had grass courts. It was like getting ready for a Wimbledon game — your canvas shoes had to be clean and white, and one had to be smartly turned out for the game and the evening."

That was the Dooars. Grass courts. White canvas shoes. A formality and a elegance that existed in the middle of jungle and mist and mud and hard physical work. The contrast was part of the life.

Saturday Nights and the Ride Home

Wednesday was the midweek ritual, but Saturdays were a different creature altogether.

Work done by afternoon, the young, eligible assistant managers would throw a leg over their company-issued motorcycles and ride toward the nearest club with the particular urgency of men who have been in the fields all week. There were no city lights in the Dooars — no cinema halls or restaurants to speak of. There was the club, and the club was enough.

Tennis and golf before sundown. The bar and billiards table after. The billiards room was an unspoken male preserve — a place where men could smoke freely, speak without editing themselves, and settle arguments the way men of that era preferred to settle them.

My father in the middle at Darjeeling Platers Club

Movie nights brought out the families. A 35mm projector, some reasonably good films, and the unwritten rule that each reel change was an occasion to refresh one's glass. By the time the credits rolled, the room was, as one senior planter once described to me, "happily composed."

After the films came the chaos. Pillow football — a cushion for a ball, the participants scooting across the wooden floor on their bottoms — was apparently a fixture. There are stories of assistant managers tying a particularly pompous colleague to a tennis court post and, in the fog of the evening, quite forgetting to untie him until morning light. These were public school boys, many of them. They had absorbed a certain amount of this sort of thing at school, and they gave it back with interest.

As the sun rose over the tea gardens and the dew caught the early light on the leaves, young planters rode back to the estates with splitting headaches and the particular contentment of men who have spent themselves completely.

The Dances, the Fights, the Planter's Week

Dances were held regularly — live bands, the floor going until the early hours. Young assistant managers flirted shamelessly with senior managers' wives and with their daughters home from boarding school. Fights broke out. They were settled, more often than not, on the tennis courts with fists, which was considered entirely appropriate.

The Planter's Week was the high point of the entire calendar. Official meetings on plantation matters during the day, and a relentless succession of parties, dinners, and sporting events in the evenings. The clubs of the Dooars were full to capacity. Everyone who was anyone in the tea estates was there.

What the Clubs Were, and What They Became

The clubs of the Dooars and Darjeeling, like those elsewhere in India, began in the British era as sporting and social centres for the management cadre. They were, in the beginning, exclusively European spaces — a fact that carries its own complicated history. Club membership was listed as a perk in appointment letters, but as father's generation of Indian assistant managers discovered, the reality of that perk was sometimes a different matter entirely.

By the time my father was riding to the club on his motorcycle, and certainly by the time I was old enough to follow the adults around during club evenings as a child, those walls had come down. Indians had not merely been admitted — they had become the fabric of these clubs. And they brought with them the same hunger for camaraderie, the same love of sport and argument and a good meal, that had always made these places vital.

The Quiet That Followed

I am fifty five years old now. I grew up in an environment where the only thing that mattered was a good cup of tea.  I am still learning from industry pundits about the garden to the cup.

And I can tell you plainly: the clubs are quieter now.

The economics of tea in the Dooars and Darjeeling have been under pressure for decades. Work pressure has increased sharply. Saturdays that were once half-days are now full working days on many estates. The long ride to the club on a motorcycle at the end of the week feels like an indulgence that the industry's margins no longer easily permit.

The young assistant managers of today have only heard the old stories from their seniors — the same seniors who now push them for higher productivity and keep their noses firmly to the grindstone. The contradiction is not lost on anyone.

The world I grew up in — the grass tennis courts, the white canvas shoes, the grand Wednesday tea spread, the Saturday night billiards and movies — that world shaped me before I ever stood behind a cupping table. It taught me that tea is not merely a commodity. It is a culture, a geography, a community of people who gave their lives to a particular piece of land and a particular leaf.

My father knew that. He wore his white shorts to the grass courts and played his game properly, because on a tea estate, everything worth doing was worth doing properly.

I learned tea tasting from him at sixteen.

I am still learning everything else.

Divya Puri is a second-generation tea taster from Darjeeling, a former tea taster with Duncans Tea, and a writer on the history and culture of Indian tea.