Dreams of Darjeeling.

An Arab acquaintance from Moka (yes, where your mocha brew comes from) told me how he tried a bit of humor at his U.S. visa interview recently. "How can you assure me that you'll return and won't simply settle in America?" the immigration officer inquired. "No way," my friend replied. "I can't stand your coffee."

He didn't get his visa. But coffee drinkers from around the world-- Arabs, Turks, Latin Americans, even Italians--complain incessantly about the undrinkable brown liquid that passes for coffee in this country. I have a different problem. As every Indian visitor to America knows, the only thing that is truly impossible to get here is a good cup of tea.

Order tea in most American eateries and what you receive is a cup of tepid water, with a mournful tea bag languishing by its side. (The classier the place, the more fancy the tea bag, but the principle's the same.) American restaurateurs have never learned that tea is made with boiling water, not merely boiled water. Nor are they in a hurry to immerse the bag in the water as soon as it has boiled. It arrives dry and forlorn, long after the water it is meant to be dunked into has lost anything approaching the temperature needed to brew tea.

Allowing the customer to dip his own bag is American individualism at work: it lets each person determine for himself how long his tea brews. It's equally clear that "hot tea," as they call it with unintended irony, is a minority taste. When a American thinks of tea, it is usually iced tea, just as "hockey" here means "ice hockey" rather than the sport the rest of the world plays on fields. Traditional tea got off to a bad start here in 1773, when rebellious American colonists tossed several chests of Chinese tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxes. It hasn't fared much better since.

Of course, the tea the American revolutionaries rejected so unceremoniously wasn't very good tea. The cargo that sank to the bottom of Boston Bay was a green tea, Young Hyson, a variety particularly popular in the colonies, which ordered more of it than could feasibly be grown. When demand exceeds supply and the ignorance of the consumer is matched by the guile of the supplier, beware. The Chinese, even in those days, realized quickly enough that Americans couldn't tell inferior varieties and spurious mixtures of tea from the real thing, and so they sent whatever they wanted to get rid of.

Americans, unsurprisingly, ...