Green Gold: The Empire of Tea

 

 

 

Chapter One

Memoirs of a Memsahib

I WAS BROUGHT up with all the colonial claptrap of my kind: that ‘Out There in India’ there were dark people irremediably inferior, who were lucky to be ruled by Us. At the boarding schools to which I was sent I looked with pride at the large part of the world coloured pink. I breathed in from birth the assumption that Orientals were subject races, by definition. There was something called the Indian Mind which was changeless, shared by the entire sub-continent.

Parents, grandparents, uncles and brothers had been Out There and in photos they stood in sepia rows, leaning on rifles or polo sticks or dead tigers, squinting haughtily into the sun. The women lounged in deckchairs on the ship or sat sidesaddle on shiny horses, floppy hats replaced by solar topees. Under the dappled canopy of tropical trees they were serene, since turbaned men held the reins.

Other men hovered around little boys in miniature jodhpurs on the backs of donkeys – there were more servants than relatives in these photographs, standing submissively waiting for orders. Out There, India, was where the men in the family went to join the army; usually becoming officers in the Gurkha regiments whose men were believed to be attached to their white officers to the point of worship. The girls went out to have a good time and then marry. In fact, India was the bin into which was tipped the less than brilliant, the plump, the pimply and the plainly unmarriageable.

Of course we didn’t see it like that – we were brought up to believe that Indians were lucky to have us, that they didn’t know what was good for them until we imposed our intellectual authority over them in the shape of scholars, missionaries, businessmen, soldiers and teachers. Our menfolk were educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho, or a similar public school, drilled to be ‘good with natives’. Between 1815 and 1914, 85 per cent of the world’s surface was colonised, so there were plenty of natives around, and there were politicians like Balfour booming ‘that they have under us a better government than in the whole history of the world’. Stereotypes abounded and were continually reinforced. Europeans were ‘selfless administrators’ who were ‘natural logicians’ with ‘ingrained intelligence’; white, male, wealthy. Indians were one and all ‘slipshod’ and, except for maharajahs, poor.

With my head stuffed with such nonsense I Went Out in 1938, as to a finishing school, to have my rough edges smoothed and my spare pounds shed, sixteen years old and ready for the long party my mother described Indian life to be. My hope and belief was that after a couple of years I would return to Britain to go to university, slim and self-possessed. My mother, on the other hand, was planning my trousseau from the moment we stepped onto the Strathnaver. India was well supplied with middle-aged men needing wives, not fussy about ‘looks’, maybe even appreciative of my good brain, a terrible handicap in the Jamesean world of matchmaking matriarchs to which she belonged.

The Cantonment in which we lived (my father had seconded from the regular army into the Cantonments Department) was an oasis of tidiness and order in the sprawling muddle around; Indians always lived untidily, it was part of being ‘slipshod’. We were surrounded by white fences, trees were painted white too, and gates and doors – everything was painted and repainted white, perhaps symbolic of the superiority of our colour. We lived in white bungalows around which grew marigolds, petunias and scarlet salvias (I have disliked these ever since) and in the centre of the complex was the Club with tennis courts and a golf course. There was a church and a hospital but no shops; the cook went to the bazaar every morning and my mother wrote down his purchases in her Memsahib’s Account Book. Everything was very cheap but the cook’s figures were daily questioned; Indians were ‘chilarky’, a word that covered lying, cheating and a general (innate of course) inability to resist being saucily devious.

The Cantonment housed a regiment or two, members of the Civil Service, the Police, the Forestry Department, a couple of doctors, the Royal Army Service Corps, which arranged supplies, and, tucked out of sight, some Railway People who were always Coloured and shared an inferior club with Other Ranks. In the hot weather the whole contraption moved up into the hills, except for junior staff and the Railway Riffraff.

In the hills there was a lake, and the Boat Club became the centre of social life, a strict hierarchy being maintained. At the summit, in a house of palatial grandeur, surrounded by hundreds of acres of parkland, was the Governor. In a slightly smaller mansion the General in Charge of Eastern Command sat being rude to anyone who couldn’t respond to his boorish gibes. He employed his son as his ADC and his daughter as his housekeeper. We had to accept invitations from both these grandees; it cemented status, as did the seating arrangements. The Raj was scrupulously snobbish. Doctors from the Indian Medical Association were more respectable than those of the Royal Indian Army Medical Corps and got to sit closer to the Governor or his Lady. I was put down at the bottom of the table next to the ADC who was always a dashing cavalry officer tricked out in gold braid, shiny boots and spurs. The life of tennis parties, golf matches and evening dances was little affected by the outbreak of war that first September soon after my seventeenth birthday, but it put paid to my own hopes of soon returning home. Nobody, however, thought it would last long. We heard on the wireless about Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain and rolled bandages for some possible unspecified local needs. A whole brigade arrived to train, headily filling the Cantonment with young men in uniform. When I was eighteen one of them led me to the altar, to the enormous relief of my mother.

In peacetime he was a tea planter, which was something of a pity since ‘box wallahs’ (businessmen) were almost hoi polloi in my family’s vocabulary, but planters were known to be rich and to live in a remote and peaceful backwater. My mother sent me off happily with a trunkful of toast racks, entrée dishes and Chinese soup bowls to the eastern outpost, where a new regiment was being raised under planter officers to train the hill people of Assam. The Assam Regiment, along with my husband, went in various directions, I went in others, and it was five years and three children later that we started our married life together on a tea garden. I had visualised tea flowering as in an orchard, swathes of sweet-smelling landscape surrounding us and our first settled home. I had absolutely no idea of the process that turned this perfumed profusion into a drink from a pot. I arrived in July 1946 with all my misconceptions in place. I had spent most of the war with my parents, who still wouldn’t – couldn’t – believe in Indian independence. In their circle, Gandhi and Nehru were best behind prison bars. The talk at the Boat Club was of the amusing little processions bearing ‘Quit India’ placards; just children paid a few annas to shout and wave flags. My parents retired with their illusions still about them. I arrived in Assam cocooned like its silkworms in those same illusions.

At twenty-nine, with two years’ planting experience, Mac, my husband took over the management of a large estate so that the couple who had been there through the war could take leave. The Manager’s bungalow was almost as big as the ship, Strathnaver, on which I had sailed to India, and similarly constructed in wood with an upper and lower deck. We lived upstairs; the children rode tricycles round the pillars of the ground floor. In its centre was a locked storeroom. We found the key and discovered it to be packed to the ceiling with food, fridges, sewing machines, spare parts left by the departing Yanks. We filched a couple of tins of ice cream powder but had to wait for the returning Manager to buy off him a fridge and some fans.

Tea turned out to be grown on bushes some distance from the bungalow, and I saw nothing of its plucking or manufacturing. With no car and three children under five I spent my days wiping the sweat from my eyes as I kept them amused and safe. Huge black hornets nested in the ceiling, lizards the size of crocodiles wandered the verandas flicking their tongues; one day I looked down from the top veranda to see a humped bull with spreading horns leaning over the baby’s pram. As gentle as all Brahman bulls he recognised a small creature and went his way. There were probable snakes and possible tigers, but the most deadly creature was the mosquito. I carried a flit gun everywhere.

As prolific as the wild life of brilliant birds, butterflies and animals, was the riot of purple, scarlet, gold, apricot and pearly-white plants. They cascaded and fountained and clambered everywhere, needing little attention from the gardeners (malis) who mowed the acres of grass and then sat in the shade and drank tea out of watering cans. They and the other servants were from the labour lines (living quarters), Mac told me, but to me they were just brown figures who appeared from nowhere and melted back into the same nothingness. They were not as smart as my mother’s servants, who wore starched white coats with coloured cummerbunds held together with shiny brass clasps. They had lived in shacks at the bottom of the garden, called Servants’ Quarters. Having accepted the myth of the Cheating Native, I counted the cigarettes in the silver box on the coffee table and measured the whisky in the decanter. A scruffy lot I thought these garden servants, and wondered if white starched coats would improve them.

I looked forward to getting a car, and after a couple of months this turned up in the shape of an old Hillman Minx from some other ex-Yank scrap heap. It would get us to the club though, and I was excited. The company of toddlers and a largely absent husband was to be enlivened by meeting other planters and their wives. I dressed us all in crisp cottons and we launched ourselves into a steamy afternoon, our first outing for eight weeks. The children sucked their thumbs and dozed grumpily, Mac cursed the wandering cows and potholes. I saw tea for the first time and women bending above it with baskets on their backs. They looked cool and pretty under the shade trees. What a pleasant life, I thought, days drifting like swans on the green sea of tea.

We reached a river and climbed into an open boat, a flimsy affair, but the children woke up to enjoy the slushy bumpy crossing. As my crispness collapsed into damp, bedraggled disarray, I cheered myself with the thought of the club. I pictured polished floors, flower arrangements, chintzy sofas, tea trays and iced drinks carried by servants in white coats and cummerbunds. I thought of a library, a card room, a children’s playroom. I thought in fact of the clubs I had known on the other side of India, where magistrates, forestry officers, policemen had mixed with doctors and colonels to talk of their jobs and hobbies. Their wives sketched a bit, sailed skilfully, were keen gardeners and bridge players. The club for all its petty cliques and established racism was quite a civilised place. There was friendship and laughter and relaxation there.

When we had disembarked and climbed a muddy bank a company car drove us past some bungalows and deposited us beside one slightly bigger, flanked with tennis courts. Inside was a large room, its only furniture a circle of wicker chairs. Opening from it was a bar, and we walked past this out onto the tennis courts. We were to watch tennis, seated on a row of hard chairs, and then the men would retire to play billiards and their own bar. There was nothing for the children to do, no swings or sandpits; in fairness there were no other children. There were no interesting Empire Builders either, nothing but planters, all of a red-faced, thick-legged, sweaty Scottish variety it seemed, a stereotype that remains with me still.

After tennis a dozen women sat in a circle on the wicker chairs; and sat and sat. The children dozed on my lap, the fan ground and squeaked, and the conversation was about servants. There were particular horror stories about the paniwallah, the man who washed up and who never learned and heavens hadn’t one been telling him for years, to take the pot to the kettle. The woman on my right, who said what she didn’t know about running a bungalow in Assam would go on sixpence, kindly shared her deep knowledge about jharans, or dusters. I must give these out every morning and get them back each evening. I must see that each servant got the jharan his status justified – the best to the bearers, any old rags to the sweepers. I must of course lock up food stores in the go-down, a large stone larder that came with most bungalows, and hand out flour and sugar in spoonfuls. The fridge must be locked – watering the milk was a well-known dodge. Did I sew? No? Well in that case I needn’t bother to keep my cotton reels under lock and key, but the silver had to be given lynx-like attention. If any of the pieces started to move round the room be sure that they would gently disappear out of the door one dark night. The amusing thing was to pretend you hadn’t noticed and then pounce at the last moment. Remember that the servants were a pretty primitive race here, not long down from the trees. Like children really, always trying on their tricks, but you had to show them you were master.

After a couple of hours with the children clammily asleep, I said I was going to get my husband. The whole circle froze. It was unheard of for a woman to enter the precincts behind the swing doors where the men had their own bar and from which they would emerge when they were ready. This they did after what seemed like a hundred years, staggering a bit but ready to drive off to their gardens. When we had crossed the river, collected the car and carried the comatose children up the stairs to bed, I leant over the veranda rail and stared down into the compound.

The old man who guarded us, the chowkidar, was wandering up and down with a stick, dressed in a tattered shirt, barefoot. What sort of jharan should I give him? What was he guarding us from anyway? Tigers? Bandits? I knew that as soon as we were asleep he would lay himself down, his head on his turban, and dream the night away. Above his sleeping head the hornets dozed in their hive, snakes lay curled in dry corners, a myriad moths opened and closed their silver wings. The warm night was a humming symphony of sound, the buzzing of insects broken by the clack-clack of frogs, the distant howl of jackals, the beat of drums. It was full of light from fireflies and a canopy of stars, and perfumed with moonflowers and lilies.

I breathed in the sweetness and thought this is the last hot weather I’ll spend in Assam. When we went home on leave next year Mac would get another job and that would be the end of India. There would be no separations from the children, no terrible club circles waiting for the men to come and collect us, their shirts stuck to their pink stomachs, their fly buttons undone. I went to bed happily unaware that I would actually spend twenty years in tea; it would be 1966 before I was carried out on a stretcher from this beautiful, vibrant, exhausting, magical country.

It was ten years before I really started to look around the country. I taught my daughters until the elder was ten, and it was 1955 before I was alone with Assam. I had another ten years before we retired, and I sat on my veranda telling my Journal what I intended to do with my time. Mac was now Manager of a very beautiful tea garden on the edge of the Naga Hills. In the bad old days (of which I knew nothing) the Nagas had raided it, but now they only came down to a market where we bought beads and took photographs. On our fishing trips up a nearby river we watched them laying their bamboo fishtraps, and afterwards they joined us round our campfire, wet and naked. Mac had got particularly fond of them in the army, and in spite of language problems we laughed a lot as we shared our tea and sausages.

Language, my lack of it, was my concern. The labour force spoke so many dialects I was baffled at the thought of choosing one, but I would learn Assamese and go out into the villages to discover the country I had lived in so long and ignorantly. I would also see if I could help in the hospital and school. I knew nothing of the Plantation Act of 1952 with directions about housing, health and education. Mac had shown me the crèche he had built, a cement square in which no mother would leave her child so it doubled as a cattle pound.

Somewhere low down on my list was a visit to the lines. I passed these on walks with the dogs – rows of thatched hovels sharing a communal tap. No wonder the servants suffered from boils and colds, I thought, my clouded mind only mildly concerned. As I called the dogs off chasing ducks it was occupied with how to decorate my new air-conditioned room. Occasionally I considered how strange the servants must find it, leaving my taps and lamps and fans and returning to their one-roomed quarters without light or water. But that was the East for you.

The only books I could find to teach me Assamese were printed by the Catholic Church with half the pages upside-down, but Mac produced a local teacher, a schoolmaster who came up twice a week and sat on the veranda with his knees knocking together in terror. I told him very simple stories like Cinderella and he was too polite and frightened to correct me, so we made little progress. He wouldn’t let me pay him, instead arriving at the bungalow with fifteen-pound fish as if I was doing him a favour. Mac thought he probably had his sights set on a job on the staff.

Was it a bribe that he invited me to his house for a meal? I hoped not. It was the first time I had visited a village; we drove past them quite fast in a cloud of dust, but this one was a palm-shaded clearing, my schoolmaster’s house climbed over by pumpkins and morning glory. The whole village was spotless, a shadowy haven of rustling leaves, a pond at its centre on which floated waterlilies and ducks. Children played, watched over by women with bare gold arms curved round water pots. Beyond the coconut palms and banana trees, tender green tassels of rice were reflected in flooded fields. Cocks crowed, there was singing and the thump of an axe on wood.

As befitted my status I ate alone, waited on by the schoolmaster’s wife with her sari drawn across her face. An old lady with a plate came to the door and was given a handful of rice. This was the custom, my schoolmaster told me, the village communally cared for the old and sick. He had three boys and was paying off interest on a debt incurred by his grandfather, but his wife had silver bracelets and earrings and he had a share in a rice field and a pair of bullocks. If he could become an Assistant Headmaster he would be satisfied.

Clutching a bag of guavas I drove home elated. The first scale had fallen from my eyes. Assamese were not the ‘spineless sods’ planters had led me to believe; compared to the labour force in the lines they lived sumptuously. I could visualise retiring to a village shaded by palms, with pumpkins, bananas, coconuts and guavas dropping at my door. Mac, who had pitied me a dreary afternoon of very sweet tea and stilted talk, was surprised at my glowing demeanour.

I glowed because I had the key to escape from the club circles, the coffee mornings, the weekend Polo Sprees when the conversation still circled round the paniwallah. In all my years in Assam I never met another woman who wanted to escape. I was considered eccentric and Mac was pitied. Most of the time I didn’t care, sometimes self-pity seeped from my pores as sour as sweat.

From the village I moved on to contacting a middle-class Indian family called Bharali. I had written to a scholar whose books I could now read and asked if he knew of a family I could visit, perhaps even stay with. The eldest daughter, Anima, was working for a doctorate, a gentle bespectacled girl for whom there were no marriage plans, it seemed. Her pretty younger sister had married, but lost track of her husband when he went to London on a course and never returned. She hoped I would find him for her, which I did on our next leave, but I failed to persuade him to go back to her.

The Bharalis’ house was square and solid and we sat on the veranda drinking lemon sherbet and talking about the things we would do together. They had an outing lined up; at the end of the rains when the river had subsided, we would visit a holy island in the Brahmaputra, where a yearly drama was enacted to celebrate the life of Lord Krishna. The island was entirely inhabited by monks, and there was one special one Anima’s mother wanted to be blessed by. Anima herself, a graduate and from a younger generation, smiled at such old-fashioned nonsense, but thought the experience would interest me.

Mac thought the whole thing would be a ‘bloody shambles’, but produced a car and driver to take us to the river. We picked up Anima, her mother and an aunt who wanted to come along; and a trunk and several large bundles and a couple of chickens in a basket. Anima’s mother carried a tin of cooking fat, which she intended to smear on the sacred feet of her guru, and which was already beginning to melt and smell quite pungent.

We were to spend the night in a hostel on the riverbank; our room had four beds whose sheets looked grey and crumpled and well slept in, but Anima and I sat down on a couple of them while the two old ladies went off to kill the chickens and prepare a curry. She told me the story of Lord Krishna. I knew nothing of Hinduism, vaguely connecting it with a lot of gods and some messy rituals of squirting red liquid about. Anima believed in a purified and monotheistic form of it, with Krishna as a Christ-like incarnation. The monks on the island held this view, the man her mother was wanting to see had the reputation of being impeccably holy.

After a night hemmed in by the snoring old ladies, I woke excited. In my mind the holy island would be a collection of sacred groves drifted through by gold-clad, chanting figures. An air of solemn mystery would surround us as we made our way towards a specially venerable Mahatma on a hilltop. My Christian belief was almost exhausted and I was prepared to be blessed by other gods, at least for the space of a day.

We drove to the riverbank to board the steamer; us and half the population of Assam and their livestock and their bicycles. As we scrambled aboard and fought our way to the railings I pushed to the back of my mind stories that regularly appeared in the press of boatloads of drowning passengers on just such crossings. Almost as soon as we were under way Anima’s aunt said she was going to vomit, and promptly did so all over my shoes. I couldn’t move to clean them, being pinned in by a bicycle and the backside of a goat. How Mac would laugh and say ‘I told you so’, when I described the scene to him.

A nephew was to meet us at the island; he owned a taxi, one of the few non-holy members of the community. Anima’s mother had told me that he was very black and therefore difficult to fix up with a wife. Less of a problem was that he was an alcoholic, which didn’t fit in very well with being a taxi driver, but there was little traffic on the island. When the crowd had dispersed he appeared, only a little tipsy, and we climbed aboard his taxi along with the luggage and the tin of Cocogem cooking fat.

As we made our rather zigzag way along the rough island roads the nephew spent a lot of time turning round to tell me that he was a poet, and a great admirer of Wordsworth. Did I not think the little houses we passed were reminiscent of the bard’s lowly cot? All they lacked was daffodils, no? One day, with my help, he hoped to visit the great man’s dwelling and see the daffodils.

Meanwhile, we were making little headway in finding the right dwelling of the right monk. The Cocogem was dripping down the tin as we lurched along rutted tracks and landed up in front of the wrong monastery. The island was just like any other part of Assam, with banana trees and wandering cows and clusters of houses where cocks crowed and women winnowed grain. It didn’t feel holy, it felt irritating; hot, dusty, untidy. Why hadn’t someone brought a map, for heaven’s sake? I closed my eyes, the word ‘slipshod’ hovering behind my lids.

I opened them when Anima exclaimed, ‘Now we are here.’ Here was a small hillock with steps leading through a park where two or three scabby deer and a moulting peacock lay under the trees. We climbed up to a tin-roofed house, where a couple of disciples took our shoes and asked us to sit in an ante-room to wait for an audience. His holiness could only see a couple of people at a time. They brought us glasses of cloudy water to drink, which I sipped with closed lips, suspicious that the sacred feet might have been washed in it. The backs of my knees stuck to the wooden seat of my chair and my stomach rumbled.

Anima and her aunt were called first, and then her mother and I were led into a room where a large man wrapped in a white shawl sat on a platform. Candles and flowers were strewn around; as I touched my head to the floor in front of him I thought I should have brought a bouquet, it was only polite, an omission I hoped he wouldn’t mind. I kept my eyes down as the melted fat from Mrs Bharali’s tin was emptied over the holy feet. A murmuring, a stretching-out of a hand to her head, and she rose and left the room backwards.

What happened next I have remembered for the rest of my life. A hand rested on my bent head, and through it, onto my clammy forehead, into my dusty scalp, right inside my head and then flowing down my body, sweetness and strength filled me. It was like sunshine pouring into a dark room, like rain falling on dry earth. It was as if the windows of my mind had opened and all the beauty of the world blown in. It was the secret of happiness plainly revealed.

When he took his hand away the joy remained. He spoke a few halting words; his lack of English was like a rock, he said, but round it and over it would flow wisdom. Distance didn’t matter, no matter the miles between us, he would always be there, his hands ready to bless. Did he know – I think he did – how often in moments of despair I would cross that great river, climb that dusty path, and lay my aching head down at his sacred feet?

When I got home next day I told Mac about the boat and the nephew and the drama that went on all night. I didn’t tell him, or anyone, about the brown hand of a stranger that had blessed me forever. Looking back I wonder why I never returned to that island in person, though often in my thoughts. Perhaps I was afraid the miracle would fail next time.

Anima gave me history books to read and I learnt about the Ahom kings whose tombs were on our tea garden. They had been buried in large mounds with gold and ivory, which had been looted, but there was a temple on one of the mounds, now lost in the jungle. I would clear it and dig up the remains of the temple. I set off every morning with a picnic and spade and scraped away at the pink tiles. When I lay on my back and rested a couple of vultures would drift above me, hoping I was dead. I rubbed my hands raw and progress was slow, but I was very happy and thought that soon some government-sponsored society would move in.

Did I ask anyone’s permission to begin the work? I don’t think I did. Did I consider that I might be ruffling superstitious sensibilities? No, I never gave it a thought. So I was grieved when every weekend the work I had done was destroyed, my walls knocked down. Students, Mac said, undisciplined hooligans who needed their backsides skelped. He was angry over my disappointment, and sorry to see the colour fade from my cheeks, a rosy glow from being out in the fresh air all day. I wrote a huffy letter to the papers and gave up. I missed the vultures covering me with their inquisitive shadows.

The hospital was my next target. Tea estates were very proud of their hospitals, so I was surprised when I entered this one to find only two rooms, for men and women, filled with iron beds very close together. Another room behind was reserved for special cases, and there was a small dispensary. Women sat on the beds holding babies. There were no tables or chairs, relations bringing their food (not supplied by the hospital) put it on the floor. A cloud of flies hovered and crawled, the mothers waved thin arms above the babies’ heads.

The Doctor Babu, who was trained in Bengal and didn’t speak any of the patients’ languages, told me that anaemia was a big problem. Too many children, that was the mistake. He showed me some slides of blood samples, very pale, one almost yellow. He gave injections while they were in hospital but when they returned to their houses and their work their conditions deteriorated. Nowadays with DDT they didn’t get malaria, at least. In the single room a small girl lay in the bed, the only piece of furniture. TB, said the Doctor Babu, advanced, too much advanced for treatment. Her family were many and there was little room for her at home, it was better for her to be here though there was little to be done for her. She needed fresh milk but this was hard to obtain. Her name was Neelima, he told me, but when I spoke it she went on looking at the blank wall.

Mac was willing to put in fly-proof doors, but as for the rest – family planning work, some furniture, cheerful paint, a few toys for child patients – I would have to ask Dr P. He was the European in charge of all the Company hospitals, who visited once a fortnight, a nice man, a friend, who didn’t even have a word of Urdu, which was not considered unusual. His job was to see that the necessary medicines were stocked and records kept.

The Company weren’t keen on family planning, he said, the more the merrier – it was a mechanism for keeping wages down. With trade unions now compulsory by law there were a lot of clever dicks around advising the labour of their rights, the best thing was to have a great many people desperately looking for work. However, I would be allowed, within reason, to give family planning advice as long as I didn’t expect the Company to pay for the rubber doo-dahs.

The rest of my plans – to make the hospital a bright, cheerful place with pictures and curtains – sorry, no can do. No could even understand the need of it, frankly. If Mac wanted to use a few pots of paint fair enough, but let’s face it, would these people even notice? Look at where they came from. It was too soon for me to suggest that if where they came from was supplied with running water and sanitation it would save on expensive drugs. I homed in on family planning and wrote off to Delhi on the subject.