En route to Madurai in Tamil Nadu, my brother, Austin, Matt and I spent three nights in a tiny Tata (yes, that Tata) guesthouse in Munnar, Kerala. We scrambled up impossibly steep hills where the gnarled roots of tea bushes seemed like the only living things that could survive the incline. Yet we'd come to the steepest incline, almost on our hands and knees, to find the female pickers with their large clippers straddling bushes in their soft-soled sandals. We spent those few day navigating the landscape of tea in those hills, returning to our guesthouse to wonderfully prepared meals. It was a dramatic, if brief introduction into the world of Indian tea.