Streamyx

The room we went into was huge, Belts and pulleys ran all across it. The smell here was even sweeter than the one before. I did not know what everything was. That was where the factory clerk came in to the picture. I finally came The room we went into was huge. It had all kinds of machinery in it. Pulleys and belts to reality and was back in the present.

There were three sets of machines with 3 machines in each. This was where the tea leaves were cut and rolled. The leaves came in from the room before and were fed into these machines. They looked like dinosaurs to me but the factory clerk told me that they had been changed from the old orthodox machines some time back. These were called CTC machines. I had seen the word CTC referred to on tea labels before and did not know what it was. Now I was seeing the machines that did that. It is a cut tear and curl process achieved by the way the rollers handle the leaf. There were two opposing rollers working in precision.

The tea came out of them in shape of small balls. They were then put in a huge roller machine that looked like a huge sieve made into the shape of a round roller. All these machines were run by pulleys and belts from above which I was told was connected to the engines that ran the whole factory. It must have been huge engines; I could not wait to see them. However the factory clerk again brought me back in the present and we moved on.

The next area was the fermenting room. All I saw was tea lying on racks on the floor. Tea takes about 45 minutes to ferment and it must be smart because it does it by itself. No machines nudge it along. I was thinking some pretty stupid thoughts when I was told we were moving on.

The next room had six old machines all made of steel. They had trays about 6 inches wide and woven into other trays into a loop. There were six loops in each machine one on top of the other. These were changed last in 1902. Hot air entered from the back on the bottom and proceeded onto the top. These were tea driers. They reduced the moisture in the tea to 2-3 percent. And the tea as I knew it at that time was formed. The tea was black. After the ctc machines the tea was green. The fermentation turned it brown and this made it into black tea.

Workers were taking pails of tea into the next room which I was told is the sorting room. Each room had its own smells and I was enthralled by them. I was like a kid in an adult candy store. The sorting room had numerous machinery in it. They looked like screens of different sizes. One on top of the other moving in opposite directions. Each screen was giving out its own balls of tea in different sizes. It was so simple, but somebody so long ago must have thought of it. At this time a worker came and whispered something into the factory clerk's ear. The factory clerk turned to me and said the Bara Sahib was in the tea tasting room and would like to see me. A kind of a chill ran down my spine. The manager of all this was going to meet me. Then I realized I was going to be his assistant. Things were sure looking up I could not wait to meet him.

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Binny Satin