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Mr. Sen’s eyes wandered off into the jasmine trellis. He suddenly looked morose and crestfallen. His mustache twitched, and he nibbled his lips nervously, looking amazingly like a rodent.
“Manik Deb...” He paused, as if recalling a painful toothache. “Manik Deb has let us all down badly. He has devastated his family name and mine. It is unforgivable what he has done.”
Dadamoshai sat up, surprised, his eyes bright with curiosity. “Goodness gracious, is something wrong?”
“More than wrong, Rai Bahadur, sir, more than wrong! The biggest calamity has befallen our family.” Mr. Sen wiped his brow with the tail end of his starched cotton dhoti. He leaned forward, took a grateful sip of tea from the cup Chaya had just set down and sighed deeply and sadly.
I pressed against the wall of my bedroom, almost fusing myself into the plaster, trying to get every word.
“Can you believe that this foolish fellow has given up his prestigious job in civil service and decided instead to become a tea planter!”
“A tea planter!” exclaimed Dadamoshai in wonderment, and with a twinge of awe.
“Yes, a tea planter.” Mr. Sen spat out the words distastefully like small eggshells he had just found in his omelet. “Imagine that! Who goes through a fine Oxford education with honors and distinctions to become, of all things, a tea planter?”
I could see Dadamoshai was highly amused. He threw back his head, let out a belly laugh and thumped the sofa cushion. Mr. Sen stiffened.
“Why does this amuse you, sir? Please explain yourself. I do not see the joke in this.”
Dadamoshai quickly composed himself. “Pardon me, Sen Babu. I did not mean to insult you,” he said apologetically. “But I do think it is rather bold and adventurous of the young man to deviate from the beaten path. I have heard tea jobs are very prestigious. It is rare for an Indian to be employed by a British company. They only hire Europeans, I know. I think you should be proud of your future son-in-law. It is a great honor for an Indian to be selected, really.”
“Honor? So that he can run around in the jungles with those debauched Englishmen? Rai Bahadur, sir, I have not been so deeply ashamed in my entire life! He has made a laughingstock of us all. Kona and her mother have not stopped crying since they got the news. All we received was one brief telegram, that’s all. ‘Change of career. Accepted job with Jardine Henley Co. as Assistant Manager in Aynakhal Tea Estate. Details to follow.’ What details? There has not been another squeak from Manik Deb. He has not replied to any letters from his family for the past month. He has simply vanished like a coward into the jungle.”
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. A tea planter? Why would Manik want to do that, of all things?
“And that is not the worst part,” Mr. Sen was saying. “Manik Deb has signed a contract that does not allow him to marry for the first three years. It is the company rule. He did this without telling any of us. The shame of it all.”
“This may not be a bad thing,” Dadamoshai mused. “It will give Kona some time to mature before she marries. It is always advisable.”
“Mature, you say! Why, sir, my daughter will be a seed pumpkin by the time Manik Deb is ready to exchange garlands with her. How can I risk that?”
Mr. Sen nibbled his lips some more. Even from a distance, I saw glistening beads of sweat on his brow. “She has already waited seven years for this worthless fellow and spent all this time embroidering tablecloths! What is she to do for another three years? Embroider more tablecloths, you tell me?”
“Send her to school,” Dadamoshai suggested brightly. “An educated girl will make a fine companion for Manik Deb. He seems to enjoy intellectual conversations.”
“No, no, no, Rai Bahadur, sir, you are not getting the point!” Mr. Sen fanned himself furiously. “A girl of a marriageable age cannot be left on the shelf for too long. She will become like the suitcase left behind at a station where trains do not stop by anymore. Then I will have to pay even more money to get her married. I am beginning to doubt Manik Deb’s sanity. His tea-garden job has no future. Life in the plantations is very—what shall I say—different. There are only Europeans. I don’t know how my daughter will fit in. If only he could give us an explanation for his senseless decision. Which, my dear Rai Sahib, brings me to the reason why I have come to see you today. I need a favor from you.”
“Ah,” said Dadamoshai. He had probably suspected all along that his wily neighbor had an ulterior motive for dropping by.
“I know Manik Deb spent a lot of time in your company. He is a great admirer of your ideas, writings and such.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Did he by any chance talk to you about applying for a tea-plantation job?” Mr. Sen eyed my grandfather suspiciously, as if he was a coconspirator in Manik’s deceit.
“My goodness, he mentioned not a word of it to me,” said Dadamoshai, his eyes round and innocent as a child. “I am sure Manik has his reasons for making a career change. Have you tried to contact him?”
“Oh yes, we called the Jardine Henley Head Office in Calcutta several times. I finally spoke to one senior director. He was most cordial. When I told him I was calling from Silchar, he asked me if I knew you. His name is James Lovelace.”
“Oh yes, James Lovelace! Of course, I know him well.” Dadamoshai smiled broadly. “He is the brother of a very dear friend of mine. I heard James was in India, but I had no idea he worked for a tea company.”
“Well, James Lovelace is a big shot of Jardine Henley & Company. He is very impressed with your work in the field of education, and praised your intelligence, character, etcetera. And since you are such a dear friend of his brother’s in England...”
“Sister, actually,” Dadamoshai said a little dreamily.
Mr. Sen’s piggy eyes were quick to catch on. Ha! He seemed to be thinking, the sister—no doubt one of the Rai Bahadur’s sleazy English mistresses. But this was no time for moral judgments. He was on a crucial mission.
“Well, his sister, then...but maybe you could use your influence with James Lovelace to contact Manik Deb? We urgently need to speak to him. Manik’s older brother, who arranged this marriage, is very disturbed. He thinks he can convince Manik to change his mind before it is too late, which is why we have not postponed the date for the wedding.”
“That...I cannot promise,” said Dadamoshai evasively. He did not believe in arm-twisting someone in his or her career choice. “Maybe we should trust the young man’s decision. What I have seen of Manik tells me he is no run-of-the-mill fellow. The tea-plantation job may suit his adventurous spirit just fine.”
“But what about my daughter? Who knows what goes on in those tea gardens? I don’t know a single person who knows anything about the kind of life there, do you?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. I have an English friend who visited his brother in a tea plantation here in Assam. What he described to me was most interesting.” Dadamoshai rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I also read the most fascinating book on the history of Assam tea. It’s a real eye-opener. You should read it, Sen Babu. It will give you a much better understanding.”
Mr. Sen twirled the coral ring around his finger forlornly. He picked up his cup, but it was empty.
“Another cup of tea, Sen Babu?”
“Yes, thank you, I would like that very much,” said Mr. Sen. He decided to change the subject. “So how is everything going with the English school project? James Lovelace was very keen to know the details, but unfortunately I did not have much information. I told him I would give you his telephone number and you would contact him.”
“The school project is most challenging, Sen Babu. We have an acute shortage of funds as you can understand. Perhaps you would consider making a small donation? We have sixty students and only two classrooms. How can the poor girls concentrate on their studies when they are sitting four or five to a bench butting elbows, with no place to write?”
Mr. Sen waved his hands as if brushing off a gnat. “My dear Rai Bahadur, whose fault is that? Young girls were not meant to go through such hardships. They should stay at home and prepare for marriage. The importance of cooking and sewing for girls should not be undermined. Besides, what are the girls going to do with all this education? It is a cart with no horse!”
I could see Dadamoshai stiffening. “Mr. Sen, is not dignity and self-confidence in a young woman worth anything? Our society treats women like they came floating down the Ganges. Should they not be given a choice in their future?”
When Dadamoshai got riled up, his eyebrows bristled. He leaned forward, tapping the coffee table with his forefinger. “Tell me, Mr. Sen, how is a woman supposed to fend for herself if things go wrong? Young girls are married off to men twice their age! We have too many child brides and too many young widows in our society, Mr. Sen, too many widows! And you know how our society treats widows.”
“Rai Bahadur, sir, I agree it is unfortunate if a young wife loses her husband, but at least she still has her in-laws. Who does a spinster have? No one. I still believe marriage is the best solution for girls. At least it grants them an honorable place in society.” Then he waved a heavy ringed hand dismissively in the air. “But forget all that, getting my daughter married will put me in the poorhouse. I will not have even one anna to spare. You cannot imagine the exorbitant price of rui fish these days. I was speaking to the fishmonger only yesterday...”
But I was not listening anymore. Something told me unseen forces were shaping my future in mysterious ways. I was getting pulled into the flow, not exactly as flotsam, but a buoyant, eager participant, fully trusting the tide. And who knew? Maybe with the right “breeje” I would catch a current and float right into Manik Deb’s life.
CHAPTER 9
Manik Deb had vanished from my life into a tea plantation, swallowed by the roiling, steamy jungles of Assam, a territory so remote and forbidden that it was deemed inaccessible to common man.
Nobody knew much about tea plantations. It was an esoteric, colonial world barricaded by a cultural divide, so far removed from the life in our teeming Indian subcontinent that it may as well have been several stratospheres away.
Now that one of our local boys had disappeared into this rarefied atmosphere, our small town tittered with gossip. The question on most people’s mind was, why? Why would Manik Deb throw away a good job, jeopardize a marriage alliance of seven years and strain relations with his family to become a tea planter? To what end? A tea planter’s job had little merit or security.
And what sort of life would his wife have? There were no temples, no cultural functions, no like-minded Indians to socialize with. Forget about the Europeans. They were a different ilk. They stuck to their own. With their promiscuous women in short skirts, shamelessly exposing their legs, their uncontrolled whiskey drinking and wild dancing in the clubs, how would an Indian boy fit into this society? But anybody could see, Manik Deb was hardly a typical Indian boy. In many ways he was more like them. Yet, cynics would argue, Manik Deb may have buffed his fur with fine English education and manners, but he could never change his spots. He was an Indian and would always be one. The Europeans looked down on the likes of him: he was coconut-brown on the outside and white on the inside. Manik Deb would never be accepted into a white man’s world.
I, more than anybody else, itched to know the answers. I kept my ears pricked for news and clutched at motes of information floating in the air around me. I decided to look for the book Dadamoshai was talking about. And there it was, in his library—a slim green volume on the history of Assam. It was a 1917 research publication and it had a whole section detailing the tea industry in Assam.
I could hardly contain my excitement. I raced through lunch that day so that I could curl up on the veranda sofa to devour its contents. It was a mine full of information. I had always been an obsessive fact finder. Dadamoshai said I had a researcher’s brain that allowed me to sift through mountains of material and distill information. This was true. I learned more about Assam tea in one rainy afternoon than all the heads of our entire town put together.
In the 1940s, an era of the fading Raj, tea plantations in India remained the last stronghold of the British Empire. Owned by Sterling companies, they produced the finest teas on earth. Assam tea was grown exclusively for export and shipped from the plantations directly to London to be sold at the Mincing Lane tea auction for exorbitant prices. From there it was distributed to the rest of Europe and the world.
I stopped my reading to think. People in India drank a lot of tea, too. It seemed pretty ordinary stuff. So where did our tea come from? Here we were right in the middle of Assam, so surely it was Assam tea?
I got up from the sofa and went to the kitchen. I took down the container of loose tea and poked around the contents with my finger. It looked like fine granules, almost a powder. It smelled like tea. Nothing exceptional.
I decided to make myself a cup. I filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove. I leaned against the counter to continue reading in the dim light of the kitchen as I waited for the water to boil.
The next section was an eye-opener. Little wonder why we poor Indians never got a whiff of quality Assam tea. All the fine tea grown in the plantations, 100 percent, was shipped overseas. What was sold in the Indian market was the lowest grade, or what was commonly known as tea dust.
I closed the book, marking my page with a teaspoon. As I poured the tea through a strainer, I noticed it had a nice strong color and good aroma, but my newfound knowledge now told me I was drinking bottom-of-the-barrel quality. I would never have known that.
I carried my tea back to the veranda. The rain had stopped. The cat, all stealth and muscle, was creeping along the garden wall, stalking a sparrow, which was busy fluffing its feathers. The sun peeked through the parting clouds, and raindrops hung from the jasmine trellis like translucent pearls.
I returned to the sofa and stirred my tea as I read on.
The tea-growing belt in Assam was cradled in the fertile, silt-rich valley between two mighty rivers—the Surma and the Bhramaputra. The picturesque Khasi and Jaintia hills cut a green swath in between. This region was remote and largely unexplored. Tea plantations were located in far-flung areas, across bridgeless rivers, beyond the boundaries of any trodden path and in the middle of dense, malaria-infested rain forests surrounded by wild game and hostile head-hunting Naga tribes.
In 1823 an intrepid Scottish adventurer who went by the name of Robert Bruce tramped through the leech-infested jungles along the Assam-Burmese border, encountering unexpected mishaps and every manner of blight and misery along the way. He had barely recovered from a potentially lethal snakebite when he found himself spending a night up a tree, bone-rattled by a rogue elephant he had unwittingly enraged by misfiring his gun. As if that wasn’t enough, he was constantly being stalked by the hostile head-hunting Nagas, who lurked in the brush with their black-painted faces and poison-tipped spears.
Robert Bruce was beginning to regret this whole mission. He was harried and at the end of his tether when he spied a thin curl of blue smoke spiraling over the treetops. He approached warily, gun drawn, and came across a tribal settlement deep in the forest.
He’d feared his intrusion would provoke hostility, and was surprised to find the gnomelike natives were a cheerful and friendly lot. They were the Burmese Singpo tribe, undoubtedly the sweetest, most benign people on earth! The Singpos welcomed him and escorted him with the beating of tom-toms to their moonfaced, lotus-eyed chief, who went by the grand name of Bessagaum Ningrual.
Bruce was seated on an elevated platform, fanned by palm fronds and offered a swig of steaming brew from a bamboo cup. Not wanting to offend his host, he took a few hesitant sips of this strange concoction. To his amazement, he felt immediately relaxed and all his cares and woes floated away. After downing the last drop, Bruce was so invigorated that he wanted to scale a tree and shout at the sky. What was this strange drink? He was told it was Cha, a beverage made by steeping the tender leaves of an unknown plant in boiling water. The plant grew wild in the forest, and when he was taken to see it, he found it was the size of a poplar tree and had deep green serrated leaves and pale waxy flowers.
Robert Bruce could not get over the remarkable rejuvenating properties of Cha. As he bade farewell to his friendly hosts, he carried the seeds of the plant in his pocket and turned them over to the Botanical Society in Calcutta for research and development. The plant was subsequently named the Camellia assamica. Research showed that when this plant was pruned tight like a privet hedge it flushed with a profusion of tender leaf tips. These tips, handpicked and processed, yielded the finest tea in the world.
I was familiar with the camellia bush. It was a common flowering plant in Assam. Till then I had no idea it was the same plant that yielded Assam tea. In fact, we had a camellia bush growing right by the garden wall. I wondered if the leaves smelled anything like tea.
Outside in the garden, the air was fresh and moist after the rains. The cat had nabbed the bird. It licked its paws and rubbed its whiskers and looked at me with baleful yellow eyes. All that remained of the poor sparrow were a few feathers and a bit of bloodied wing.
The camellia bush in our garden was heavy with pink blossoms. The flower was larger than a primrose and similar in shape, and just as delicate and pretty. I picked a leaf and crushed it between my fingers. Strange, it hardly had any tea smell at all.
A beautiful mottled green-and-gold snail inched up the mossy garden wall. It moved ponderously, pausing to sense its way with large striped feelers. Not like our impetuous friend, Manik Deb, I thought, who plunges into the unknown and goes crashing off into the jungles. A little snail-like caution might have done him good. I was beginning to agree with the townsfolk: he did sound like a lunatic.
I returned to the veranda and picked up the book again.
It seemed the discovery of Assam tea in India could not have come at a more crucial time. Tea drinking was the rage in Victorian England, and the demand for fine teas had spread like fire all across Europe. The fad was started by the fashionable Duchess of Bedford in England, who experienced what she described as a “sinking feeling” in the late afternoons. It was she who popularized the tradition of high tea as an afternoon pick-me-up, and tea parties developed into a dainty ritual and became a fashionable pastime among the ladies of the court.
The only tea available in England back then was imported from China. As demands for the beverage skyrocketed all over Europe, the Chinese raised their prices and arm-twisted the British, holding them hostage. To counter this, the British resorted to subterfuge. They stole Chinese tea seedlings and smuggled them across the border through Burma into India and tried to secretly grow Chinese tea in Assam. Although the climate and topography in Assam was almost identical to China, the plant did poorly and the experiment failed.
It was about this very time when Robert Bruce stumbled upon the Camellia assamica after being befriended by the Singpo Chief, Bessagaum Ningrual. One can only surmise how elated the British must have been with this momentous discovery. To find the best tea growing wild and free in their own colonial backyard! Better still, the indigenous Camellia assamica was far superior to the Chinese variety. Growing tea in India opened up immense lucrative possibilities for the colonial empire and promised to augment the royal coffers significantly.
But sobriety soon set in. Discovering the plant was one thing; setting up an organized tea industry in Assam was another.
Assam could be brutal and unforgiving. The climate was a curse, the food unpalatable and the natives baffling. Assam received an astounding one hundred inches of rain per annum. Roads got washed away and bridges rotted to their demise. The most grueling part of tea-plantation life was the isolation and loneliness. The only way to keep the young men there was to make them sign a company contract. Planters were not allowed to marry for three years so that they could concentrate on their job without distraction and, more specifically, female whining. It was believed that women were the root cause of men quitting their jobs.
Many young Europeans fell victim to accident and disease, never to see the shores of their homeland again. Some took their own lives in desperation. There are hundreds of moss-covered graves scattered across tea plantations in Assam, mostly in wooded areas, tangled in vegetation and overrun by creepers. Many are unmarked but some have carved inscriptions that speak of the short, precarious lives of these young men in Assam.
For mysterious reasons, Manik Deb had disappeared into this uncertain and little-known world. I was suddenly filled with despair. Would I ever see him again? He seemed to have faded into the ether, beyond reach. What if something happened to him?
I closed the book. All I wanted to know was—why? Why had he just upped and gone?
Little did I know, I would soon find out. And I would hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.
* * *
The letter was addressed to me in a familiar slanted hand. Just the sight of it made my heart flutter. I went to my room and shut the door. I turned the letter over. No return address. The smudged stamp of the post office read MARIANI. It was from Manik.
Aynakhal T.E.
17th September 1943
Dear Layla,
I take the liberty of writing directly to you. I hope you forgive my audacity. You are the only person I feel will not judge me too harshly. Maybe you will take pity on a lonely tea planter and write back. I only dare to hope.
I have not written a single letter since I have been in Aynakhal, which is almost three months. I feel a strange sense of disconnect with the outside world.
Before this job, I had little idea of life in the tea plantations. I was aware tea gardens in Assam are located in remote areas, but Aynakhal Tea Estate seems to be in the godforsaken nowhere.
All hints of civilization disappear by the time we cross the Dargakona Bridge, which is sixty miles east of Silchar. We enter the forestland and it takes another two-hour drive over dirt roads (if they can be called such) to get to the outreaches of Aynakhal. The last stretch is little more than an overgrown jungle track. It is common to see elephants cross the road. Plenty of sambar, barking deer and wild pigs, too. Once, late at night on our way back from the Planters Club, we saw a leopard.
We have had a spate of heavy rain, rather untimely for this time of the year. Puddles all over the jungle roads. Mud butterflies congregate by the hundreds. You don’t notice them until you come right up to them. Their wings are the most brilliant cerulean-blue you can imagine. The flock takes off like a shimmering silk scarf when we drive past. I have never seen anything quite so magical.
Jardine Henley (the British company that owns Aynakhal plus six other tea estates in the Mariani district) provides us with company jeeps to get around. They are used army vehicles, four-wheel drive. Without them we could get nowhere. Actually, there is no place to go except to the Planters Club on Monday nights and visits to other gardens. I am still trying to get used to the isolation here but I can’t say I am unhappy.
Most evenings I go hunting with Alasdair Carruthers. He is a Scottish fellow and Assistant Manager at Chulsa Tea Estate, the neighboring garden just cross the Koilapani River. He is a crack shot and is teaching yours truly the rudiments of shikar. I must admit he has me hooked. We have an excellent selection of wild game and plenty of opportunity to practice. It’s Greener Pigeon season. Good eating bird. I bought myself a blunderbuss (an old 12-bore Belgium shotgun), which, to my exasperation, seems to jam at the most inopportune moments. But this is the best that I can afford right now.
I hope you enjoy the small book of Tagore’s poems I picked up for you in Calcutta. I have fond memories of our time together.
Best wishes,
Manik Deb
I lay in bed imagining Manik tramping through a jungle armed with his blunderbuss—a rusty old musket, in my imagination. The thickets rustled with dangerous game and flocks of greener pigeons took to the skies. I felt his keen sense of excitement and heard the joy in his voice. Manik Deb did not sound like a coward hiding in the jungle: he sounded like a koel set free.
CHAPTER 10
That October I started training as an assistant teacher under Miss Rose in Dadamoshai’s school. In the afternoons I gave private tuition to students at home. One day just as the girls were getting ready to leave, I saw an army type of jeep pull up and park under the mango tree outside our gate. A European gentleman unlatched the gate and held it open gallantly like a doorman as the three little girls giggled past him. He then closed the gate and walked toward the house.
He was a stocky man with a craggy weathered face and the kindest blue eyes.
“Is this number eight Rai Bahadur Road?” he asked with a shy smile. He spoke in a rich brogue.
“Yes,” I said, wondering who he was.
“I have a letter for Layla Roy from Manik Deb in Aynakhal,” said the man. “My name is Alasdair Carruthers.”
Alasdair Carruthers, Manik’s hunting partner!
The letter had a postage stamp. Alasdair explained that Manik had asked him to post the letter in Silchar, but it was quicker for him to drop it off. He saw Rai Bahadur Road on the address and realized it was the very same road he took to go to the village across the river—which was where he was headed.
The village across the river, how very odd, I thought. No white person ever went there. It was a rather desperate section of the town, inhabited by poor Muslim fishermen and accessible only by boat. I wondered if Alasdair knew that.
