Typical Day
Tea-mothy Brewster III wakes up early on Sunday morning to the sun shining and a breeze wafting through the latticed window. He pulls on a pair of comfortable khaki shorts and a simple button down. The Brewster family has long since abandoned the silken dress robes that Granddaddy Jones used to wear in the mornings.
Dressed for the day, Tea-mothy heads to the dining room table. One of the house-help brings his breakfast: an aloo pancake with assorted sauces and dips. Along with the dress robes, the Jones family has also abandoned Granddaddy Brewster's insistence on a full English breakfast in the mornings. Tea-mothy makes an effort to eat local foods from here in Darjeeling, in the Indian state of West Bengal where a quarter of India's tea is produced.
The househelp hesitates for a moment, before asking whether Tea-mothy would like tea with his breakfast.
"Do I ever not have tea with my breakfast?" Tea-mothy says, raising his eyebrows and looking up from the tea and coffee magazine he's reading. "Haan," he adds in Hindi, for good measure.
The househelp waits a second longer. Tea-mothy makes his more specific requests: an imported Chai spiced, both the first and second flush darjeeling teas from this year, and an English breakfast. Some habits die hard.
"Oh, and just a small amount of each, please. I can't be drinking tea all day," Tea-mothy adds. "You know what the caffeine does to me."
Tea-mothy eats his breakfast while jotting down notes from the magazine. At the bottom of the notepad, Tea-mothy also includes a few of his impressions of the four teas he sampled.
Properly caffeinated and fueled for the day, Tea-mothy heads out into the field. One of his overseers mentioned in yesterday's meeting that a few of the crops on the more southerly acres were struggling. Tea-mothy takes personal pride in the well-being of his crops, and his workers when they're cooperative, and so he promised to inspect the plants himself.
Tea-mothy is grim as he examines the wilting leaves of the Camellia sinensis. He pulls out his notepad and begins to catalog exactly the issues he sees. Walking the perimeter of the plants, Tea-mothy tries to determine exactly how many plants have been affected.
Back at the main plantation building, where he lives with his wife and two children, Tea-mothy scoots his chair closer to the computer. For the next two hours, Tea-mothy scours articles with titles like, "Abiotic Stress Responses in Camellia sinensis Plants" and "Possible Zinc Modulations in Drought-Related Biochemical Damage in Tea Plants."
There was a time, Tea-mothy reflects, when he would have hated reading any of this stuff. The teenage Tea-mothy wanted to be a Steampunk rocker. He wore all-black, even in the sticky heat of Indian summers. He skipped out on the apprenticeships his dad had arranged for him. And worst of all, he refused to drink tea. To his parents horror, he would brew pot after pot of coffee, filling the house with that rich (to them, nauseating) coffee smell. He traveled around the world, and shirked his duties.
Then his parents died. And against all odds, a slightly older, and possibly more mature, Tea-mothy took up the family business. Just then, a window popped up on the screen of his Mac computer, interrupting all these fond recollections.
"4:00PM TOUR GROUP ARRIVES," it said.
Tea-mothy had completely forgotten. Hastily, he grabs his old-timey hat, which was mostly for show, and heads down to the entrance gates to meet the arriving group of tourists.
The tour groups were Tea-mothy's idea after meeting a couple of tourists in downtown Darjeeling who were fascinated by the sheer existence of "tea plantations." Tea-mothy realized this was a great way to bring some extra cash in, and get some more communication with the world outside the plantation.
"Hello, folks! Or as we say here on the plantation, Namaste!"
No one says "Namaste" on the plantation. Tea-mothy couldn't remember the last time he heard one of the tea pickers say "Namaste." But whatever. The tourists eat it up.
After passing around some of the tea leaves in various states of oxidation, Tea-mothy then takes the group to the buildings where they process the tea leaves. He shows the group the plantation clinic, where workers can get rudimentary health services.
After a cup of tea with the tourists, Tea-mothy finally sends them packing. While the rest of the Brewster family heads out to one of the local Chinese restaurants in Darjeeling, Tea-mothy stays home to crunch some of the day's numbers late into the night. Tea-mothy also sets aside a six-step plan and compiles an additional list of resources for addressing the failing crops he inspected earlier today.
Chuckling to himself, Tea-mothy wonders what young Steampunk Tea-mothy would think of who he became.