Blazing the Scholastic Trail

by Roma Circar
At the best of times they were long, winding and gleaming with asphalt; and at the worst of times, they were long, winding and as cratered as the lunar surface that Apollo the 11th touched down on that July afternoon in 1969. Either way, the rete of roadways that criss-crossed the tea districts, looping in the estates usually in oxbow fashion, was more bane than boon –but we could not live without it.

A bit of the good stretch on the National Highway near Binnaguri in the Dooars (pic by Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

Like the blood circulatory system in our bodies, roads were integral to our survival in the estates. Quite apart from the regular functions of facilitating the supply of essential commodities and keeping us connected with the outside world, mainly with each other and the clubs, they were the trickle (and I use this word after careful thought) of earth our children traversed each day on their way to and from their schools.

Of schools in the Dooars there was no dearth, but the more popular ones were a fair distance away from most tea communities. Most of our children began their academic journey in the army or air force schools within cantonments in the vicinity. After a rattling drive through our own garden roads, they would catch a smooth highway, maintained by GREF or the armed services, to their schools. These were joyrides in pool-cars that left them woefully unprepared for the rigours of life to come. From the point of view of the parents, these small kindergarten-type schools served the purpose of easing their children into scholastic life – although a great deal of time was spent thereafter on ‘unlearning’ the lessons learnt in their nascent years!

The teachers in my son’s very first school were impeccable personalities. However, those allotted to the infant sections were justifiably selected on the basis of their compassionate and nurturing qualities, rather than their language skills. They tended to be deficient only in the medium of instruction that the school purported to follow. Holding his school reader at the level of his navel, we were astounded to hear our son read aloud the following sentence: “There was a beer in the forest!”

“No!” protested my husband. “There’s a beer in my fridge!”

“In the forest too!” insisted our first-born.

“You mean a bear?” I suggested helpfully, scanning his page from a distance. “There are many bears in the forest.”

“I mean ‘beer’!” said the Imperious One.

My husband and I exchanged glances.

“Beer is only found in the fridge, Baba,” said my husband. I could see his patience running thin. “In the forests, you get bears!”

“Ma’am said there was a beer in the forest,” said young Viraj firmly, clinching the argument.

“Let’s go there for a drink then!” sighed my husband, conceding defeat.

We held our tongues with great difficulty when Viraj got to the poetry section of his reader. “Cats in the cup board, hahaha!” he recited with exuberance.

Cup board?? Really? But which parent is mighty enough to compete with a teacher?

St. James’ High School in Binnaguri followed – it was the inevitable trajectory of a tea child’s life. Mornings began at 5.15am, irrespective of whether you were at the eastern or western tip of the Dooars. Fathers would roar their offspring off to a designated petrol pump on the highway, on their motorcycles or Gypsies, before heading to work. This was where the children would foregather before boarding the school buses that would trundle them to school. There was a driver and a helper in each school bus, and a clutch of teachers who lived on sundry estates.

The eastern Dooars bus had PT Ma’am (no relative of PT Usha) who lived in Satali. She was a blessing for parents in those pre-mobile days of yore, and a terror for the bullies on the bus.When the eastern Dooars bus was introduced, the road to Binnaguri was as smooth as a freshly depilated Anne French limb where the voiceover claimed “the chiffon scarf just glides off”! A drive each way took all of forty-five minutes. Then came the monsoons, and another, and another; and without repair or restoration the tarmac crumbled from the sum of its parts to the bituminous mess that our children had to oar through each way.

The Western Dooars bus had a marginally better route, although the loading point was also a large petrol pump. The helper on the bus had a nickname for all his charges. My daughter, Mallika, was Sushmita Sen, on account of her swinging ponytail. Patri Bhaiya, as he was called by the children, was an ordinary man who performed an extraordinary service. When we moved to Nagrakata, it was he who gently ushered our kids off right at the gates of Nagrakata Club on Friday afternoons, from where they would charge in like a swarm of hungry locusts in search of grub! It was much later that we discovered that Patri’s moniker was actually Patrick.

The uncertainty of those days verily hinged upon the state of the roads and reams could be written on how substandard they were. Buses returning from school inevitably docked at port later and later each year, frequently getting lodged in asymmetrical cavities or breaking down altogether. Somehow word would reach the affected estates and vehicles would set off to collect the children and bring them home. While mothers wrung their fingers in anxiety, the children had a wonderful time devising games to play on the bus. Mobiles and computers were still far from a reality in our neck of the woods, and recreation was as organic as a freshly laid desi egg. Fortunately there were no encounters with leopards and elephants, our reality, and I can assure you none with that beer in the forest – because as we all know in the plantations, beer is only found in the fridge!

Meet the writer: Roma Circar

Says Roma, "At a fairly tender age, in 1979, I traipsed into the magical wonderland of Camellia Sinensis and shade trees.It was in this exquisite space that I began to give vent to my feelings, albeit in miniscule doses. A number of my short stories found their way into Eve's Weekly, the Telegraph,and The Statesman.

My experience with work in the organized sector, once we moved to Kolkata after three decades out in the sticks, was with e-learning in the corporate sphere. However, the long hours of slavery were not exactly my cup of tea. I now work from home. In addition to books, I am now turning more and more to reading what is churned out in this blog. It transports me to a slice of life that is already on its way to becoming an anachronism. Let us endeavour to record it for posterity."

 Click here to read all Roma's stories on this blog

Is this your first visit here? Welcome to Indian Chai Stories! 
Do you have a chai story of your own to share? Send it to me here, please : indianchaistories@gmail.com. 
My name is Gowri Mohanakrishnan and I'm a tea planter's wife. I started this blog because one of the things that I wouldn't want us to lose in a fast changing world is the tea story - a story always told with great seriousness, no matter how funny - always true (always), maybe a tall tale, long, or short, impossible, scary, funny or exciting but never dull.
 
Happy reading! Cheers to the spirit of Indian Tea!
ADD THIS LINK TO YOUR FAVOURITES : https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/Indian Chai Stories

Billet-doux

by Roma Circar
The slender mauve envelope stuck out like a sore thumb on his untidy office table. That it was scented as well was only discovered after its contents were read, remarked on, and ridiculed. The addressee himself did not find it risible enough to warrant the spasms of laughter that it evoked, but his colleagues had always appeared to lack good sense and sound judgement over things essentially classic – like deportment, height, complexion, six-packs, a Roman nose and a leonine head of hair. While a couple of them could indeed lay claim to some attributes, none of them possessed them all in the abundant measure that he did.

It was a love letter, and it was anonymous. Like most amorous epistles, especially introductory ones, it was flattering to its recipient. Written in rather battered English prose, it nonetheless got its message across. Harish (name changed) was thrilled beyond measure. He had been on this garden at the junction of Hasimara and Phuntsholing for almost a year, but nobody had quite appreciated him in the manner that he expected. This letter would change perceptions of him from a general garden dogsbody Assistant to a Don Juan!

After the initial euphoria subsided, Harish’s Roman nose busied itself with ascertaining who the letter writer was. Where had the letter originated– Hasimara? Phuntsholing? A neighbouring garden? His colleagues, my husband included, were only too happy to assist him in this endeavour. Who in their right mind would write a love letter to a dolt such as Harish, when there were so many handsome hunks among the management staff populating the Dalsingpara office? Even the Manager was a trifle curious – he was quite a titbit too, if memory serves! A tacit vote supported an investigation!

However, all investigative leads were at a dead end and attention refocused on loopers and helopeltis when the second billet-doux arrived. The first one had been dismissed as an aberration – the girl had evidently changed her mind after a second glance in Harish’s direction, but the second one put a clattering lid on that line of thought! Either the letter writer was a nitwit in the mould of the recipient, or they had overlooked something overwhelmingly dashing in their colleague. The management staff began to look at him with renewed interest and just a shade of envy.

There was no stopping the spate of mail after the arrival of billet doux 2, and the management crew was frustrated at being unable to identify the letter writer. The Gentle Reader has inferred correctly: Harish’s mail had descended to the level of garden property, and all were privy to its contents. What’s more, everyone was involved in unearthing the possible author of the purple prose in mauve envelopes. The list of suspects was long – even the name of the Fitter Babu’s daughter, who went to an English medium school in Hasimara town, was on it. Then, there was the retinue of Bhutanese princesses who often dined at the Druk hotel in Phuntsholing, and the daughters of army and air force officers, and GREF, based in and around the district. Why daughters alone? Caesar’s wife may have been above suspicion, but the same courtesy did not extend to the wives of the defence personnel in the area, and nor to, horror of horrors, the sorority of Dalsingpara wives and the lady members of Torsa Gymkhana Club!      

We, the estate wives, were kept in the loop. When Harish wanted a pat on his shoulder and time to soliloquise in peace, he came to one of us for a cup of tea and a slice of gingerbread with a drizzle of syrup or its equivalent. But after a three month deluge of scented mail, we were all growing a trifle weary of the entire affair.

“She should stop this!” remarked a wife at one of our frequent hen-gatherings.

“She will!” squeaked another. “Or she’ll switch to envelopes of a different colour – that’s 23 letters in mauve already! Maybe one more, to finish the pack!”

“Tell him to toss the next one in the bin without opening it!” said wife no.3 in grim tones.

Even as we were speaking, the 24th letter had been delicately slit open with a paper cutter in the office. The men came home in a great state of excitement. Apparently, Emily Bronte had suggested a meeting the next evening at the level crossing in Hasimara town. Come alone, she had written, at 5pm. Harish was beside himself with glee. At last he was going to meet the girl whose dreams, over the last trimester, had been populated by one hero alone – himself!

In the plantations, the men rarely if ever call it a day at 5pm, but the Manager readily gave the young man permission to set off on his metallic steed to Hasimara town at 4.30. Fifteen minutes thereafter, he was followed out of the lofty estate gates by all his colleagues!

A telephone call from the office had ensured that the bevy of belles on the estate congregate at Beech Kothi with a dish each for the revelry to follow. It took roughly a drop of a hat for us to gather together for a chinwag as a rule, and this was a special occasion! We outdid ourselves in the culinary department and took up our positions on cane chairs in the large red Beech Kothi veranda. The children played happily at one end while we fortified ourselves with cups of ginger tea in view of the still chilly weather.

A shiny moon struggled all evening to ward off competition from the stately row of newly installed halogen lamps leading to the bungalow, and it was at a low slung position when the bikes roared in through its gates. The removal of crash helmets revealed grins as wide as Halloween pumpkins, but of our leading man there was no sign. We craned our necks to spot another headlight, and strained our ears to hear an engine roar.

“Where’s Harish?” asked a memsahib, perplexed.

“Chatting up the besotted lady?” suggested another.

But our men were too busy sputtering and quivering like their motorcycles to provide a coherent reply. What was tickling them so pink?

Harish had ridden to Phuntsholing, we were told eventually.

“For a drink!” added an Assistant.

“But who was the letter-writer?” we chorused inquisitively.

There was stone cold silence for a moment before a second round of sputtering and quivering began, but one among our men deigned to assuage our curiosity.

“It was the Hasimara teashop guy!” he said, before dissolving into helpless chuckles again!

Meet the writer: Roma Circar

Says Roma, "At a fairly tender age, in 1979, I traipsed into the magical wonderland of Camellia Sinensis and shade trees.It was in this exquisite space that I began to give vent to my feelings, albeit in miniscule doses. A number of my short stories found their way into Eve's Weekly, the Telegraph,and The Statesman.

My experience with work in the organized sector, once we moved to Kolkata after three decades out in the sticks, was with e-learning in the corporate sphere. However, the long hours of slavery were not exactly my cup of tea. I now work from home. In addition to books, I am now turning more and more to reading what is churned out in this blog. It transports me to a slice of life that is already on its way to becoming an anachronism. Let us endeavour to record it for posterity."

 Click here to read all Roma's stories on this blog

Is this your first visit here? Welcome to Indian Chai Stories! 
Do you have a chai story of your own to share? Send it to me here, please : indianchaistories@gmail.com. 
My name is Gowri Mohanakrishnan and I'm a tea planter's wife. I started this blog because one of the things that I wouldn't want us to lose in a fast changing world is the tea story - a story always told with great seriousness, no matter how funny - always true (always), maybe a tall tale, long, or short, impossible, scary, funny or exciting but never dull.
 
Happy reading! Cheers to the spirit of Indian Tea!
ADD THIS LINK TO YOUR FAVOURITES : https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/Indian Chai Stories

The Sisterhood

by Roma Circar
It was that time of year again, 24 years ago, when the sisterhood of planters' wives across the neck of the woods called the Dooars, was requisitioned to prepare for the Dooars Ladies Games Union (DLGU) AGM.  The date had been announced, and so had the venue (Central Dooars Club [CDC]), although official letters had not been despatched to the participating clubs. The mandatory inter-club competition for the year was decreed to be a short skit.

 Oyez, oyez, oyez! The news percolated down to the sancta sanctorum of all the bungalows along the length of the Dooars. This was the era of the three Ts – the Telephone, Telegram and Tea. No prizes for guessing the swiftest medium of communication amongst them – it’s certainly not rocket science! Even as the official letters from DLGU, bearing details, were possibly undergoing a manual spell-check, club-minded covens were sailing into their respective conventions on a fleet of broomsticks to seize the advantage of an early start to a ‘spell’-binding conclusion!

At our club, Nagrakata, in the prettiest district of the Dooars, there was a great deal of scratching of heads. What was our skit to be? To arrive at a consensus, Mrs. Kanak Saksena, the seniormost amongst us, called a meeting at her place one cornflower blue June morning. Saksena with a ‘K’- that was the spelling of her name, not to be confused with Saxena with an ‘X’.  I remember her waving an incorrectly addressed envelope in the air one evening at the club. “We aren’t the ‘Saxy’ types!” she had declared, tongue firmly in cheek, sending us into peals of laughter.

There were not too many lady members at our club, but what we lacked in numbers we compensated for with abundant enthusiasm. After several rounds of the most delicious elevenses over discussions that seemed to boomerang back and forth, we finally froze on the subject of our skit – politics. Mrs. Saksena believed it would give us an ‘intellectual’ edge over the other clubs!

Sudha Levin and yours truly were co-opted to script the skit, but what did we know about politics? Those were appalling times in the political firmament – one political goon had tossed his consort into the oven, another’s grandson had a rape and run accusation on his head, and yet another with dairy DNA had turned Bihar into his personal byre, milking away for all he was worth. There was enough fodder to write a scathing screenplay, and fortunately our combined brains found themselves equal to the task. We devoured reams of contemporary political newsfeeds, at once disgusted by our leaders and delighted at the prolific content we were amassing. Once our libretto was complete, we put it to the others at one of our umpteen meetings and it underwent an audio edit on the spot! Many more anecdotes and commentaries were added, some deleted, among much mirth. The combined fine-tuning honed it to acidic acuity, and the Nagrakata team declared its script ready! 

Casting was a much shorter process, because we discovered that all our ladies possessed the histrionic gene in no small measure. Reena Chaturvedi was a natural Lalu, and the cow we designed for her to milk on stage was an ‘udder’ masterpiece! Sangeeta Krishan played the creepy Sushil Sharma, accused in the Naina Sahni Tandoor murder case, to perfection. Tina Sisodia brought Beant Singh to life with her accent, head gear and hirsute jowls. Indu Bhagat was the diminutive Jyoti Basu, almost a clone of the original, and Keka Banerjee was the archetypal Narasimha Rao, although she often alternated between the Bengali and South Indian accents during rehearsals just to get a rise out of us!

Our rehearsals, at each bungalow in turn, were an amalgam of blood, sweat and laughter, delicious victuals – once even a Himsagar mango sandesh handcrafted by Tina– and scintillating discussions wherein the script went under the scalpel several times over, to excellent effect. Our closing song, that was to have all of us up on stage to take a bow, was a rehash of an old patriotic refrain that expressed our bitter opinion of poor political leadership. It ran into many verses, and began something like this:

‘Netao ke dagar mein

Baccho dikhao chalke

Yeh desh hai humara

Kha jao isko tal ke!’

Sadly, it was our beleaguered destiny to see our ‘intellectual’ skit bite the dust at the prize giving, upstaged by others like the ‘Kitty Party’, staged by the host club, and ‘An Emporium for Husbands’,  a Dalgaon Club offering deliciously pregnant with irony! There was no time to defend our reputations as the intelligentsia of the Dooars, because the loaded dialogues issuing from the makeshift stage hit our funny bones head-on and held us in their thrall! And then there was the sumptuous lunch to follow, meticulously arranged by the ladies of CDC and finally, of course, the heated AGM.

The DLGU AGM has, since time immemorial, been an impassioned affair. In a sense, it is a microcosm of the Indian Parliament, with clenched fists doing duty as mallets, horse-trading sans Swiss bank accounts, personal vendettas being aired for public consumption and a helpless moderator! It’s hard to fathom why the sisterhood of the Dooars metamorphoses into sister-‘hoods’ during an AGM. Where does that spirit of togetherness and esprit de corps vanish the moment the AGM begins? Club members who’ve worked tirelessly and merrily together for two full months to co-produce a magnum opus are suddenly seen shaking their fists at each other across the well of the house!

No matter! That’s part of the playing field too! Long may the DLGU AGM continue, and so too the accompanying schizophrenia. It gives the ladies the opportunity to let their hair down in the prelude to autumn each year, at a time their men are romancing the second flush hot off the drier mouths. The diverse competitions give free reign to their creativity, and the mind-pooling of ideas leads to some stupendous productions. They enjoy months of energetic rehearsals that culminate with cheers for each performance on stage and, in a fitting finale to all that diabetes- inducing sugar and saccharine, slide on their knuckle dusters and spice up the arena with brilliant volleys of brisk repartee!

Meet the writer: Roma Circar

Says Roma, "At a fairly tender age, in 1979, I traipsed into the magical wonderland of Camellia Sinensis and shade trees.It was in this exquisite space that I began to give vent to my feelings, albeit in miniscule doses. A number of my short stories found their way into Eve's Weekly, the Telegraph,and The Statesman.

My experience with work in the organized sector, once we moved to Kolkata after three decades out in the sticks, was with e-learning in the corporate sphere. However, the long hours of slavery were not exactly my cup of tea. I now work from home. In addition to books, I am now turning more and more to reading what is churned out in this blog. It transports me to a slice of life that is already on its way to becoming an anachronism. Let us endeavour to record it for posterity."

 Click here to read all Roma's stories on this blog

Is this your first visit here? Welcome to Indian Chai Stories! 
Do you have a chai story of your own to share? Send it to me here, please : indianchaistories@gmail.com. 
My name is Gowri Mohanakrishnan and I'm a tea planter's wife. I started this blog because one of the things that I wouldn't want us to lose in a fast changing world is the tea story - a story always told with great seriousness, no matter how funny - always true (always), maybe a tall tale, long, or short, impossible, scary, funny or exciting but never dull.
 
Happy reading! Cheers to the spirit of Indian Tea!
ADD THIS LINK TO YOUR FAVOURITES : https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/Indian Chai Stories

Unrequited Love

Roma Circar

Circa 1980

Provenance: Golaghat Sub-district

‘Club night’ was a misnomer for Saturday nights at Goriajan Club, smack in the centre of Koomtai Tea Estate in Assam. Members converged on it from 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon for a spot of tennis and wound their way home at the crack of dawn on Sunday, a good 12 hours later. Dawn was yet to break, but the roosters were all a-stir to announce reveille that particular Sunday morning, the one of which I speak. In the car, K as usual had unscrewed her earrings and stuffed them in her bag as M drove steadily through the humps and bumps that led to their estate, an hour away near the town of Golaghat. Whatever the sundry ambitions they harboured at other times on other days of the week, the only objective set for early on Sunday morning was to hit the sack as swiftly as possible.

Sleepily tumbling out of their car – a Fiat, if memory serves – they entered the bungalow to behold a drawing room in utter disarray. Completely ransacked, the family silver had vanished; the majestic chamois silk cushions propped up on their prehistoric sofas had done the disappearing act; and a spotless 7x12 rectangular patch on the ground bore testimony to the carpet that had graced it not a dozen hours earlier. On the wooden bar, like alcoholic sentinels, stood a medley of opened bottles of booze, crystal glasses, coasters and scattered pipe-cleaners.

It dawned on K, exactly at the time the golden orb lifted off the horizon, that they had been robbed. Made of sterner stuff in times of less consternation, K, like a Georgette Heyer heroine, prepared to swoon. Scarcely had her lashes coalesced into a single semicircular fringe on either side of her nasal bridge, when a shout from M prised them apart at once.

Like a De Beer’s diamond, a planter radiates multiple facets. He is the original Superman, identified not by a swirling red cape, but rather a prosaic pair of shorts. Under duress, he can also function as a sleuth. Through the simple expedient of using his little grey cells, Sir M had actually nailed the culprit. Two strides later he was behind the bar yanking up the sleeping criminal who burped, gently opened his eyes, and then purposefully sprang to attention. Tsk, tsk! It was the bungalow chowkidaar, who had looted what he was deputed to guard.

K turned accusatory. “I have never trusted this man,” she announced with a degree of pomposity. “How many times have I complained about him? Does anyone ever listen to the memsahibs in this estate? And now he’s made a clean sweep of the bungalow!”

But where were the spoils? You didn’t need a magnifying glass to see they weren’t there.

Senior Assistant M lodged a case against the man at the estate office, but he proved a tough nut to crack. He insisted that armed burglars had broken into the bungalow and for a time he had valiantly held them at bay. Overpowered at last, he had collapsed into stupor, waking only after the lags had fled. To drown his sorrows, he had turned to the wine in M’s bar. It explained his position at the scene of the crime.

However, when his tribe, ashamed at his behaviour, turned against him, he capitulated and confessed. After the heist, for which he was solely responsible, he had carted the booty over to his quarters in the lines and returned to his duty. Remorse at his heinous act overtook him sometime between midnight and the false dawn, and he was forced to take recourse to bacchanalian remedies to assuage his conscience.

“I am very sorry, Sahib. I will return everything. Please forgive me,” he pleaded, genuinely sorry now, not for his grave misdeed, but for the loss of his stature among his tribesmen.

True to his word, and watched balefully by the members of his community, he returned every bit of what he had stolen – down to the last toothpick. Bric-a-brac restored, apology accepted, the matter came to an amicable close.

But had he truly returned everything?

Many months later, a junior Assistant Manager, on inspection of all the workers’ quarters in the lines to update the census register, found himself locking astounded eyeballs with a sepia-tinted snapshot of a jaunty figure, on a wall in the errant chowkidaar’s home.

It transpired that while the wily worker had indeed returned every article of value purloined from the bungalow of the Senior Assistant, there was one inexpensive item that he had kept for himself, that no one had missed – a goggled and bell-bottomed photograph of his detractor, K.

It is entirely possible that, for the ready reference of her boss, Perry Mason, Della Street may have classified this episode as under:

‘The Case of Unrequited Love’.

Meet the writer: Roma Circar

Says Roma, "At a fairly tender age, in 1979, I traipsed into the magical wonderland of Camellia Sinensis and shade trees.It was in this exquisite space that I began to give vent to my feelings, albeit in miniscule doses. A number of my short stories found their way into Eve's Weekly, the Telegraph,and The Statesman.

My experience with work in the organized sector, once we moved to Kolkata after three decades out in the sticks, was with e-learning in the corporate sphere. However, the long hours of slavery were not exactly my cup of tea. I now work from home. In addition to books, I am now turning more and more to reading what is churned out in this blog. It transports me to a slice of life that is already on its way to becoming an anachronism. Let us endeavour to record it for posterity."

 Click here to read all Roma's stories on this blog

Is this your first visit here? Welcome to Indian Chai Stories! 
Do you have a chai story of your own to share? Send it to me here, please : indianchaistories@gmail.com. 
My name is Gowri Mohanakrishnan and I'm a tea planter's wife. I started this blog because one of the things that I wouldn't want us to lose in a fast changing world is the tea story - a story always told with great seriousness, no matter how funny - always true (always), maybe a tall tale, long, or short, impossible, scary, funny or exciting but never dull.
 
Happy reading! Cheers to the spirit of Indian Tea!
ADD THIS LINK TO YOUR FAVOURITES : https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/Indian Chai Stories

Lessons from Tea

by Roma Circar

A recent picture of Roma with her Mistri Saab

I simply couldn’t imagine why he had been allotted to us, this feral, almost fey man – and that too as bungalow chowkidaar. A huge gap-toothed smile split his face into two hemispheres. He had a strange lope –long stride, dip, long stride – and he could barely speak an intelligible word, using bizarre gestures to get his message across. Several times in the dead of the night, when only phantoms and Mistri or Kol Saabs are ordained to traverse earthly soil, I spotted him executing a solo primordial dance on the illuminated veranda, baton in one hand and a crude cleaver in the other, through the curtained fronds of my bedroom window. Jugnu was his name.

“He frightens me!” I complained to my husband. “You’re away all night at the factory. What if something happens to me?”
“Nothing’s happened so far,” countered my better half, stifling a huge yawn. “He’s a good chap!”
“There must be many better chaps,” I whined. “The bungalow needs someone strong and able. If anything happens, I’ll have to protect him!”
“If he doesn’t do you in, first!” the man I abandoned civilization to follow said, with a chortle.
It is impossible to argue with a Mistri or Kol Saab for the simple reason that he is the proverbial nocturnal animal and the only grunt you can extract from him after daybreak is a snore.

Every night after my husband left for work, I would bolt the door, finger the Hanuman Chalisa under my pillow, occasionally clutch the steel penknife on the bedside table as I had been directed to do by my anxious mother, and pray that I would fall into a deep sleep. If I was going to be cleaved to kingdom come, I’d rather not know about it first. On nights when these remedies failed, I would cyclically clutch at my nightie, clutch at the curtain fronds and clutch my heart in some kind of pagan dance of my own, and watch Jugnu execute his intricate steps on the veranda as usual.

Circa 1980. Venue, Assam. The months glided by as they are wont to do, and soon we found ourselves straddling the onset of the Durga Puja. Bonus negotiations were growing acrimonious as the Company and the unions failed to agree on the bonus percentage. In a solid show of strength the unions decided to declare an indefinite strike until their demands were met. All workers would be withdrawn from their duties. In a particularly vicious stroke, the unions suspended all emergency services as well. To add to this, they announced, in no uncertain tones, that any member of the bungalow staff who dared to report for duty at the bungalow would be severely dealt with by their co-workers.
It was bad enough that the garden was on strike, but how were we to cope without any bungalow staff? Who would tend the malibari, milk the cows, feed logs into the drum for hot water, sweep, swab and protect the management staff from threats that could as well arise from within the estate as without, under the prevailing circumstances? There were plenty of hotheads among the workforce capable of instigating violence.

Burra Bungalow came with its own plethora of staff quarters. The indomitable and fiercely loyal Jeevus, undoubtedly christened after PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves by a British planter, would creep his way into the bungalow at the witching hour if required. If he was caught milking the burra mem’s cows, he would brazenly claim that he was doing it for his own family, and offer some to his interrogator as well! He was a smart cookie!

But Kol Kothi was a different kettle of fish altogether. Set up on a knoll beside the factory, it did not boast a single staff quarter, and was within clear view of, though distanced from, a number of labour lines. I was in a soup! No bungalow staff, however loyal, would be able to come to my help.
On the first day of the strike, all the management staff on the estate left for Jorhat for another round of meetings designed to resolve the impasse. I was alone at home, and suddenly I wanted my mother!
From my vantage point upon the veranda, my eyes swivelled around the expanse of green around me. They took in the factory, and the new suite of management offices, and then the road that led up to our bungalow. I blinked. Did I just see a series of long strides, dips and long strides coming up the path into the bungalow? My first instinct was to run inside and lock the door, but I stood my ground till Jugnu was clear enough for me to spot his trademark gap-toothed smile. Ignoring my presence, he walked past the veranda, to the kitchen at the rear, picked up the wood axe and began to splice the wood into logs for the hot water drum.

What was he doing? He was a night chowkidaar. This was not part of his job profile. I gathered enough courage to walk towards him. “Go away,” I said. “You’re not supposed to be working today!”
He paused for a second; then continued hacking at the wood.
The gate rattled ominously as more people entered the compound. Three tempestuous youth, they rushed towards Jugnu, clearly livid that he had showed up for work that he had been proscribed from doing. He stepped back from the pile of freshly hewn logs, raised the axe and bore down upon them in fury. They fled for their lives!
Undeterred, he continued with the task that he had set himself, seeking more work from me through sign language.

Jugnu showed up for work, 24 hour duties at his own behest, for the duration of the strike. A one-man army, short of rustling up cream of tomato soup in a silver tureen, he handled all the chores that a bungalow, by virtue of its size demands. Our malibari received water, vegetables were gathered, the cows were milked, there was plenty of hot water, and the house was swept and swabbed to perfection. I wanted to tell him to take a break, dance his dance, rest and relax, but he was like a man possessed. What’s more, no garden worker dared enter our compound to call him to account.
I believe that Jugnu was part of my learning curve. He personified the adage ‘Never judge a book by its cover.’ On days when we were alone in that chhota bungalow, just Jugnu and I, I found myself making a cup of tea for him whenever I deigned to make one for myself. It was a small gesture of appreciation for his loyalty – and for the huge lesson he had wordlessly taught yours truly.

                                                        
Meet the writer: Roma Circar

Says Roma, "At a fairly tender age, in 1979, I traipsed into the magical wonderland of Camellia Sinensis and shade trees.It was in this exquisite space that I began to give vent to my feelings, albeit in miniscule doses. A number of my short stories found their way into Eve's Weekly, the Telegraph,and The Statesman.

My experience with work in the organized sector, once we moved to Kolkata after three decades out in the sticks, was with e-learning in the corporate sphere. However, the long hours of slavery were not exactly my cup of tea. I now work from home. In addition to books, I am now turning more and more to reading what is churned out in this blog. It transports me to a slice of life that is already on its way to becoming an anachronism. Let us endeavour to record it for posterity."

 Click here to read all Roma's stories on this blog

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My name is Gowri Mohanakrishnan and I'm a tea planter's wife. I started this blog because one of the things that I wouldn't want us to lose in a fast changing world is the tea story - a story always told with great seriousness, no matter how funny - always true (always), maybe a tall tale, long, or short, impossible, scary, funny or exciting but never dull.
 
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