by D. Dayalbhai & Company | Jun 9, 2026 | Blog
I’ll never forget the phone call. I got in the middle of the monsoon season, sometime in the late 1990s. It was from a garden manager in Darjeeling — someone I’d worked with for nearly fifteen years at that point. Unexpected hail damaged his monsoon flush....
by D. Dayalbhai & Company | Jun 9, 2026 | Blog
I walked into my first tea auction in Kolkata on a Tuesday morning in 1957. The auction floor was chaotic—or at least that’s what it looked like. People were shouting, papers were flying, and the auctioneer was talking faster than I could follow. A colleague...
by D. Dayalbhai & Company | Jun 9, 2026 | Blog
There’s a smell I will never forget. It struck me on my very first morning at the Kolkata tea auction—somewhere between wet jute, wood polish, and a floral scent I could not identify at that time. Forty-odd years later, I know that smell was a first-flush...
