The Tea Taster Kept One Leaf Back

Story Time is original short fiction. The characters, places and events in this story are invented.

June 1983

Dilrukshi drew the spoonful across her tongue with a slurp loud enough to rattle the window, and the young man from Colombo took a small step back from the bench. Below the tasting room the roller thudded through its afternoon charge, and the floorboards answered it under her feet.

"Batch forty-one," said Mr. Kulatunga. "Fields Nine and Eleven. For the house blend."

She leaned over and spat into the brass spittoon. Ponnusamy had polished it that morning until it held her face. On the side table a jasmine garland waited beside a cake from the bakery in town, under a cloth, for afterward.

The briskness was there, and the copper of a good wither. Under them was the other thing: tight and sour at the hinge of the jaw, like a coin held too long in the mouth. Three hundred names, the clerks were saying, on a list nobody had seen. Field Nine was Valliammai's division. Those women had been plucking two leaves and a bud in the rain all week and talking about nothing else.

"Clean?" Kulatunga had the certificate on a clipboard, her name already typed beneath the line. "The board was very clear, madam. One house character, every season. Your last signature. And after that the pension arrangements go through without any—" He let the sentence find its own way home.

Ponnusamy was studying the floor. He had carried her trays for seventeen years.

She tasted it again, though she did not need to. Then she opened her handbag and took out the biscuit tin, its paint worn to bare metal at the corners, and prised off the lid. Inside lay hundreds of twists of grading paper, each with a date in pencil, each holding a single dry leaf.

"Before I sign anything," Dilrukshi said, "you should hear what I have been calling faults."

March 1974

The cup was thin. Not weak; she could have forgiven weak. It was a cup that seemed to empty itself before it reached the bottom, as if something had eaten the middle out of it.

In town the rice queues ran past the post office and round the corner by the hardware shop. The ration had been cut again. On the estate, the children from the line rooms had stopped coming to the factory gate to beg sugar, because there was none to give them and they had learned that.

"Well?" Mr. Abeywickrema, the superintendent, stood at her elbow with the broker's telegram. "Colombo says our Februaries are dull."

"Thin," Dilrukshi said. "Lacking body."

He wrote it down. It was true, in its way. Every word she had ever given him was true in its way.

She knew, because she had made it her business to know, that the field bonus was tied to the grade. Valliammai's women would get less this month because their tea tasted of hunger, and they would be hungrier, and next month it would taste of that too. She folded one leaf into a twist of paper, wrote the date and dropped it into the tin.

That evening she bought two measures of rice at the price of four from a man behind the cinema and left them on the step of the line room nearest the stream. She did not knock. She did not leave a note. There was no word she could have written on it that would not have needed the rest of the words behind it.

September 1966

"Madam, how do you know?"

Ponnusamy was nineteen, all elbows, and had been her tray boy for a month. He was holding the tickets he had just collected, the ones showing which field each sample came from. She had named all eight before he turned them over.

"Practice," she said.

"My aachi says there are people who can taste the hand that picked." He grinned to show he did not believe it, and watched her face to see whether he should.

The cup in front of her tasted of a wedding. Somebody's daughter in the Upper Division had married on Saturday, and the whole field had plucked the week before it in a flurry of borrowed saris and argument about the drummers. The liquor was bright, almost giddy, and it lifted at the finish the way laughter does when it is trying not to be heard.

She wrote bright, brisk, good point. For once the trade words fitted almost exactly, and she resented how glad that made her.

"Your aachi tells good stories," Dilrukshi said. "Clear the cups."

He cleared them. He did not ask again, not that day or that year, and she noticed she was waiting for him to, the way you wait for a bus you have already decided not to catch.

May 1961

Mr. Hollis had a cold, which he said was a disgrace in a taster, and so for a week Dilrukshi did the line alone while he stood behind her with a handkerchief and the grading book.

The mist sat on the drying lofts all morning. Rain had brought the Field Four bank down onto the lower lines on Tuesday; no one had been hurt, but two families had dug their pots and bedding out of the mud with their hands. The withering troughs were full of leaf from that week, and so was the cup in front of her.

She tasted, spat, and stood very still.

"Well, Miss Dilrukshi?"

"It is," she said carefully, "mournful."

Hollis laughed, not unkindly. He had been in the hills since before the war and would be on a ship home by Christmas, and he was trying to leave her with everything he knew.

"Tea doesn't mourn. That's a stewy note. Overfermented, I'd guess, they've let it sit in the wet. It's a fault." He tapped the book. "If it tastes of anything but leaf, it's a fault. You name it and you move on. Brokers don't buy adjectives."

She wrote stewy. Her hand did not shake. She thought it was a sensible system, really: a drawer for every kind of feeling, and a label on each drawer that nobody would ever open.

That night in her rented room above the tailor's she took a cracked matchbox from the back of her trunk. Its paper had gone soft as cloth. Inside was one curled leaf, nearly black. She moved it into an empty biscuit tin, and beside it she put a new leaf, from Field Four, from Tuesday.

October 1932

Amma came up from the field with her basket strap still pressed into her forehead, and from the fold of her cloth she took a handful of fallen leaf, the kind the conductor let the women keep.

She dried it on a tin plate over the hearth. She brewed it strong in the dented pot, with jaggery, and poured Dilrukshi the first cup before her own, which she never did.

Dilrukshi was nine. She had tasted tea every day of her life and it had always tasted of tea. This one tasted of a held breath. Of counting coins in the dark. Of a teacher's voice saying fees and Appa's voice saying she's old enough to pluck and Amma saying nothing at all while her fingers went on, bud and two leaves, bud and two leaves, all week long. It tasted of whether Dilrukshi would go back to school after the holidays. It tasted of Amma deciding she would, and not knowing how.

"How is it, duwa?" Amma asked. She was watching closely, as if the answer mattered more than a cup of tea should.

Dilrukshi understood that if she said what was in the cup, Amma would have to carry it in front of her too, out loud, in this small room where there was no space to put it down.

She drank it to the bottom.

"It's good, Amma," she said. "Very sweet."

Amma's shoulders came down from her ears. She poured her own cup and drank it without tasting anything.

When her mother turned back to the hearth, Dilrukshi reached into the dregs, picked out one wet leaf and closed it in her fist. Later she put it in an empty matchbox, and she kept it.