Shona Patel - Teatime For The Firefly

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.