I don’t believe that I had ever downed a cup of hot tea before I set foot on English soil, by which time I was already an adult. Iced tea there had been aplenty, especially in the heavily sweetened form once (and still, for all I know) common in the South. However, I have made up for my earlier abstemiousness with a vengeance. In fact, I have become nearly addicted to Lipton tea, seldom beginning any early morning without downing two huge mugs of the stuff. I got on to Lipton because as it says right there on the package, it’s America’s favorite tea. I also remember it as rather cheap, though that is no longer conspicuously true. For the same money I could probably be drinking a high quality boutique Earl Gray if I just cut back a bit on the quantity.
For I have no illusions concerning the actual quality of “America’s Favorite Tea.” If I ever did, they were dispelled in 2013 on a visit to Sri Lanka. I say this very casually, as though I travel frequently to exotic places. In fact this trip was unique and for us a big deal at the time. It is my only experience of Asia, assuming that Turkey, where we had a wonderful trip in celebration of our fiftieth wedding anniversary, doesn’t count. In 2013 Luke and Melanie, with the newly arrived infant John Henry, were on research leave in Sri Lanka, residing in post-imperial splendor in Colombo. Luke, a linguistic anthropologist, was fascinated by various aspects of the linguistic scene. The population of the country reveals the palimpsest of its colonial history. The first Europeans to arrive in large numbers were the Portuguese. Today many of the Sinhalese natives of the cities have surnames like De Sousa, Barros, Gomes, and Oliveira. There was an important Dutch period. One still saw on the streets occasional striking Eurasians looking to me like characters from a Conrad novel as I have imagined them. A huge old stone Dutch Reformed church, beautiful in its unexpected vastness, rises on the Colombo waterfront. But of course it was the traces of the British presence and the lingering whiff of Victoria Regina that provided the heaviest Western overlay. They are everywhere, and one Sri Lankan intellectual told me, casually, that colonial remnants of the civil services are “the only things that work in the country now.” He was perhaps having a bad day. English, the “link” language between the majority Sinhala and the minority Tamil (the two official languages) seems to be spoken by almost everyone in public or commercial life.
Luke and Melanie had invited us to spend a week with them on a private hired van tour of some of the island’s major attractions, and a fascinating week it was. It was in some ways a staggering experience. Oddly enough Sri Lanka, under the name of Ceylon, was a distant Asian land about which I had fantasized as a child. The springboard of my interest was a set of beautifully engraved postage stamps from the early 1940s featuring George VI’s cameo head against a variety of picturesque backgrounds, one of which was an elephant herd. Miraculously. I still have the stamps, of scant financial value of course though forever a young boy’s treasure. I found in Colombo a fascinating, hyperkinetic, dirty city almost overwhelmed by the internal combustion engine. Though everyone told me that the density of population of the place was as nothing compared with their experience of India and China, it was enough to overwhelm me. Genuine squalor is not far to find, but so also are many elegant sights and private residences. Americans no longer deserve the right to comment on huge and obvious disparities of well being.
It is not easy to get the sense of a place on a short visit, especially under the privileged circumstances we enjoyed, but there was still a slightly disturbing feel. A single sprawling family, the Rajapaksas, long held most of the power in the country. Their stranglehold may have been ended by the crisis of the summer of 2022. At the time, there seemed to be a general awareness and begrudging acceptance of the inevitability of a corrupt government—one sensed this instinctively in the air rather than by vivid personal experiences-- and perhaps even still some hint of the violence with which the Tamil rebels had been slaughtered in the civil war hovered over the place. Melanie, as a Tamil specialist and Tamil speaker with many personal and scholarly friends among Tamil experts, perhaps felt this more keenly than others.
We saw many beautiful things, natural and man-made, in Sri Lanka. A visit to the temple of Kandy, in which the great relic of the tooth of the Buddha was being ceremonially venerated, was necessarily one of the highlights. The cascades of flowers that seemed everywhere a feature of Buddhist devotion were almost overwhelming in their effect. We stayed overnight at classy resorts, where Chinese tourists have replaced my countrymen and assorted eastern Europeans as the obnoxious loud-mouths of international travel, and where I earned the gratitude of a young doctor in her medical sari by giving her a few tablets from a prescription bottle containing something vital for one of her patients but unavailable in her country. But we also spent time in the lovely countryside, and especially in the “tea hills,” so-called, of course, for the many tea plantations undulating over them. Most of these, we were told, were at least the remnants of the vast holdings of Victorian Scottish entrepreneurs. A visit to one of them was a part of the tour, and remembering it allows me to return to the ostensible subject of this essay. We visited a large tea factory which consisted of one huge sorting or grading machine that gave off the vibe of a long toy railroad which, with every shake and jerk of its serpentine progress shook off differing grades of the dried tea leaves constantly being cast by the bushel upon it. The machine itself, powered by electricity, was a work of art, its flawlessly burnished teak bars looking like museum pieces. Surely the date of its creation had been nearer to 1880 than to 1980?
The guide at the factory was a beautiful young woman wearing a beautiful sari, the classiness of which derived from the fact that the gold from which it appeared to be made was so tastefully unburnished. She obviously knew everything there was to know about discriminating among the qualities of teas, and displayed her expertise in a voice that would not have been out of place in a drawing room of Lambeth Palace or at a seminar led by John Ruskin. Never had I encountered a commercial pitch so upper-drawer, and it was impossible to leave without purchasing a specially prepared and outrageously expensive house selection. What she said at the end of her spiel sticks in the mind. She was concerned to stress the ecological purity of the enterprise. Everything was perfectly natural (or “organic” as we ludicrously say in this country), and everything usable was used. There was no waste. She had given a long list of the European tea retailers to whom they sold their product, few of whom I had heard of before. “And we keep perfectly clean even the leavings.” She explained that the leavings were the tiny bits of crushed leaf and stem incidentally caught up in machine parts. “Nothing is wasted,” she said proudly. “We sell the leavings to Lipton’s.”
