Kiran Chandra Tea Estate

The Kiran Chandra Tea Estate is right here in Bagdogra, which is part of the Naxalbari area in Darjeeling. Most days start early for us because that’s just how things go when you’re dealing with land and tea. It gets pretty damp here sometimes when the rains come in from the hills, but we just keep going. People know us around the village and the post office area. We spend a lot of time just checking on the plants and making sure things are moving along like they should. It’s not fancy work, and my hands usually have some dirt on them by lunch. There’s always someone stopping by to talk or ask about the season. We’ve been at this for a while now in this part of Darjeeling, and it’s mostly just a lot of walking and looking at the weather. You learn to read the clouds after a few years here. We handle all the sorting and the bags ourselves. Sometimes the truck comes late because of the roads, but we manage. It’s a local operation, nothing more, nothing less. We don't have a big office or anything, just the estate and the sheds where the work happens. If you walk down past the main post office in Bagdogra, you’ll eventually run into us. It’s a lot of manual labor, but it keeps us busy and the tea keeps growing, so we can’t complain much at the end of the day.