She is probably the reason we are a nation of tea drinkers. A comely smile connects cherry-tan cheeks, a mop of lustrous black hair peeps from beneath a colourful headband that holds aloft a polished cane basket and between her dainty smooth fingers a rain-washed tea leaf. All around her the supernal green glow of her sun-kissed workplace undulates in every direction. The trepidation in her eyes is alluring – one can easily change the leaf for a bitten apple. She is variously the quintessential worker adorning the cover of – and thereby responsible for – the great tasting/smelling tea inside the packet you have just bought, the fulcrum of a Rs 200 billion market in gung-ho business stories or the slightly bewildered but pleasant looking one in travel blog twofies. Then, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a tea estate you would have latched early on that this is an advertising ideal. The cheerier they come, the harsher the real picture.
Beyond the picturesque plantations
A succession of these workers, once their active tea-plucking lives ended, has worked at my home in Kerala. Rarely was there one not besieged by a respiratory, skeletal or neurological issue. ‘Occupational hazard’ as the good doctor calls them. But a lifetime of savings-draining sicknesses that befell them from the use of chemical sprays, carrying heavy loads and pressure of tools on limbs. Very often debilitating and confining them to the four walls of their layam. Many end their lives, egged on mutely by helpless relatives, rather than continue being heavy-tolling burdens. Every year, once the hubbub of Christmas is over, I drive my folks to an inhabited layam fringing a tea estate not far from home with gifts and other goodies. The drive is spectacular with jaw-dropping scenery. Nature, I have noticed, sometimes have a way of ensconcing jeremiads within its finest folds. Take the northeast for instance, or Kashmir.
We wound our way up the lush watershed mountainsides of the Western Ghats. Little brooks cuts across in many places where the road is replaced by a tumble of slide stones. When motorcyclists and buses don’t thunder past, you can hear the gurgle of a wayside brook and birdsongs; flycatchers, babblers and parakeets hop across the road picking after food crumbs strewn behind by touring groups. Rubber plantations of the plains are replaced by spice and tea estates and open grasslands as we climbed. And of course, the ubiquitous ugly homestays and resorts on stilts doddering over declivities each called some kind or other ‘view.’ Beneficiaries all, of a chameleonic land policy that favoured planters and dwellers beginning with the British. The destruction of the forests of Kerala began in the north with the establishment of the first coffee plantation in Wayanad in the 18th century – a ravaging that continued well into the 19th century with the growing of tea and cardamom and other spices in the Malabar and Travancore regions we were passing through now.
Approaching layam
Vagamon was the first travel piece I ever wrote. She welcomed you ‘trembling like the virgin on her nuptial night’ I went almost two decades ago. Over the years, she had become matronly and struggled to rein in a cacophonous brood. Resignation was writ large; she frowned inside when you entered her household, her relief palpable once you left. The famous tea estates of Elappara begin a few kilometres from Vagamon. Tea cultivation took serious roots in Kerala with the decline of coffee industry, the influx of cheap labour from across the border and better price in the London market. The climate was also favourable. But what lured more and more growers was its profitability – being labour-intensive, one could increase margins by just cutting down wages. Not only was there high labour extraction but wages remained low even during periods of acute manpower shortage. How communism grew – and throve still – in these fertile soils. Tea growing and drinking with related exploitation and attempts at correction through political ideology is a common thread that can be traced from Assam through West Bengal into the high ranges of border Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Red flags marked events and memorials for comrades dotted the land as we turned from Elappara towards the layam. The road non-existent now as we trundled over boulders which, during monsoons, we were told was a gushing stream.
Layam – then and now
Gulag-like
As demand for tea grew, plantations gobbled up vast swathes of forestland and workers poured in from all neighbouring states mostly closest Tamil Nadu. Estate owners put up gulag-like structures, thatched, in narrow straight lines or layam. Each layam had 20 or 30 units with three rooms each. One room was allotted to a family which meant up to 60 families cramped into each layam. Since sharing kitchens and living rooms became unavoidable, relatives asked to be allotted adjoining rooms – like the families we visited. Three sisters and their families lived next to each other all of whom had worked at our house. The last one was Mary chechi who didn’t work in the plantation due to childhood polio. She was the emotional – and at times financial – anchor for her sisters and niblings; maybe by dint of living in close proximities it was impossible to turn a blind eye to each others’ dilemmas as Mary chechi would point out wryly.
Our arrival was understandably much anticipated and there would be a reception party which would take my Mom’s hands from mine and lead her gingerly down the steep stone stairway towards the embowered dwellings. Agnosia had set in due to age and lack of care in the eldest of the sisters who had to be prodded repeatedly for recognition. Her eyes would light up briefly followed by a profusion of hugging and kissing but soon enough she would be looking around lost and wondering aloud who the visitors were. Mary chechi always had to be physically restrained from giving in to her terpsichorean tendencies despite her disability. There is much glee all around and tears of joy flow freely. Sporadic cafune invariably topped with side eyes alternatively around my corybantic hair and single station. While the ladies catch up, Dad and I step out for the most scenic micturition of our lives.
Fertile grounds
Afterwards, the old man invariably goes and reclines in the car, I walk around the layam. Open drains sprawl collecting flies and circulating stench. Women queue next to a sole tap with cheap plastic pots while their children gaze up at me on the verge of bawling. Housed within a more derelict layam next door there is a primary healthcare centre which I am told opened once – when it was inaugurated – and maybe for a few days afterwards. The Plantation Act of 1951 was meant to ensure basic needs which obligated the estate owners to provide drinking water, proper housing and medical facilities and a crèche even. The Act came into force in Kerala in 1959 – on paper. What the Krishnamoorthy Committee reported nearly 20 years later, in 1978, about ‘notable gaps’ between the law and its implementation continues to this day. My brief meanderings are invariably cut short by neighbours bescumbering each other; the issues remain stoutly matters of infidelities, drunken shenanigans and unreturned money.
Mary chechi
After some hours, sometimes spent taking aerial photographs of the Elysian landscape, I go into the layam only to find the conversation still in brim. I am re-introduced to the second generation of tea-pluckers none of whom are. Most are good at some skill – mobile phone or television repairing – or studies. Estate work is not what they want to do with their lives but anything else which will help them get out. Mary chechi spoke fondly about her favourite nephew who had promised her a room as big as their entire house. She used to tell us about him when she used to work for us years ago. She had financed his technical training and first few months when he set himself up in the city.
Right now she sat on her little cot surrounded by her worldly possessions on a roughly hewn wooden shelf – some glasses, vessels, a flask, portrait of Mother Mary and an old television salvaged from junk by her saviour who would be coming soon.
Writing on the wall?
