Learning to Drive

by Rajesh Thomas

Disclaimer: The names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.

At the beginning of the last century, a planter in the erstwhile James Finlay company received a horse allowance of thirty rupees per month, probably a princely amount in those days. With ever increasing costs, in 1971 the last of the James Finlay planters who rode a horse received three hundred rupees per month as allowance. The company probably felt that maintaining a horse was more expensive than maintaining a wife as the same planter received only hundred and twenty five rupees increase in dearness allowance when he got married.

Jokes apart, it was recognized that transportation was a lifeline to a planter in the olden days, a time when communications were poor. Even after the advent of motor vehicles, transportation was of vital importance in  the life of a planter and his family - for work, social life and emergencies. Many a planter would readily admit that without his vehicles he would feel handicapped. Many newcomers grasp the importance of this soon or they learn it the hard way.

Photograph supplied by the author, see Editor's note for more

Funnily, not every creeper comes into the gardens with the experience of handling motor vehicles and quite a few of them learn to ride and drive after joining. For such assistants it is baptism by fire to learn to ride in treacherous conditions, especially if they join during the monsoons. Handling heavy ‘Bullet’ motor cycles (as an old manager put it they were built like Patton Tanks) for the first time in these kutcha field roads meant that during one of the inevitable falls they invariably had the silencer burn their legs. A silencer burn was called a company seal and was a source of mirth and enjoyment for all other Assistant Managers in a party or at the club bar.

More often than not, after a fall from the motor cycle is the embarrassment of having to be helped back onto one’s feet and the bike back onto its wheels. One of my father’s colleagues who started to learn how to ride after he joined the gardens had fallen for the umpteenth time - and for the umpteenth time the workers had to rush to lift him back to his feet. After he had dusted himself, one of the supervisors offered him a sympathetic piece of advice, “Why are you struggling like this, why don’t you just employ a driver for your bike?”

One such rookie Assistant in the High Ranges, when asked at a party whether he had mastered the motor cycle, replied innocently that he had learned to ride up hill and, “am now learning to ride down hill”.

Another novice rider in the Annamallais - let’s call him M - was coming back from a party, when he hit a porcupine and had a dozen quills stuck in his front tyre. When his Senior Assistant who was following him on  his motorcycle asked how he managed this, M in all innocence replied that he thought it was a peacock.

Another old timer on transfer to a new planting district, when asked whether he found the ghat road steep, gave a disarming reply: “I couldn’t tell, it was dark”! This same gentleman had a reputation of being rather rough on his old Amby, thereby giving the motor foreman at the group workshop a tough time maintaining his car. A colleague of his at the club bar had this observation to make, “We change gears while he changes gear boxes”.

Now that doesn’t mean that planters didn’t know how to drive. Most of them were expert drivers who could drive under any kind of conditions, i.e. when inebriated, on dirt tracks, up and down hill roads, through ditches, over streams and rivers - and that too vehicles in any condition. There was an enterprising planter in the Annamallais coming back from a late night party who found that his forward gears had jammed. Instead of panicking, he calmly drove the last fifteen kilometers in reverse gear, and through a startled bunch of donkeys inside Valparai town in the dead of night. Eighteen years down the line this feat is still talked about in Annamallais.

Not only do creepers learn to ride and drive on the gardens, so do many of the planters’ children. When my father was teaching me to drive a Jeep, I rolled it three times into a pruned field. Surprisingly, all of us including the Jeep escaped without a scratch. After it was pulled out a rather shaken self apologized to my father, for which my father replied with a grin, “You only rolled the jeep while your friend N drove a brand new estate tractor into a wall”. N was the son of one of my father’s colleagues who was my age, and more mischievous than me.  For a long time, this jeep was never referred to by its number but as the one Rajesh rolled.

The real excitement in the garden starts when the Manager’s or the Assistant Manager’s wife starts to learn driving. Most husbands do not have the patience to teach their wives to drive and usually use a standard phrase, “…there is a lot of work”, and excuse themselves. Normally one of the seniormost of the garden drivers is given the task of teaching the nuances of handling the motorcar to the Memsahib. This Senior Driver normally would have put in at least around 25 years in the garden and would have seen a myriad of Sahibs and Memsahibs. He would keep a stiff upper lip, maintain stoic silence and speak only when spoken to.

The Memsahib's mode of transport 'from Bottom to Top Station' in 1921. See Editor's note.

Before the start of the day, the Senior Driver would normally inform all other drivers about the route the Memsahib would be taking and caution all the other estate and bus drivers to drive carefully and to give her the right of way. The word would spread among the rest of the estate population and the women folk and children, when they saw the Manager’s car coming in the distance, would safely ensconce themselves behind two rows of tea.

Another Assistant Manager - let’s call him R - after many nights of difficult driving after parties declared that he was only going to marry a girl who could drive, dreaming that he could sit safely in the passenger seat or probably take a snooze on the way back home. So when he met S for the first time he was completely bowled over by her and promptly asked her whether she could drive.

Pat came S’s reply that she had a drivers’ license. So they got married. 

On the first Saturday after that, R had a relaxed and enjoyable night at the club. Knowing that he did not have to drive, he knocked back a couple of more rums than usual.  He handed over the car keys to S in the club parking lot. Within a few minutes of leaving the Annamallai Club, S took the first two hair pin bends in true world rally championship style at sixty kilometers an hour and with that all the effects of the evening’s rum promptly vanished, leaving R in a cold sweat, totally sober and desperately clutching the dashboard.

Then the hard fact hit R that in India having a driver’s license and knowing to drive are two totally different things. The couple have been happily married for the last seventeen years but in all these years, however late the party is, and however  many drinks he has downed, R always drives. The rumor is that R has been on the wagon for the last couple of years, thereby further solving the problem.

Nevertheless many of the ladies in planting became accomplished in handling motor vehicles. In fact a now retired planter always used to let his wife drive inside Chennai, when they went on their annual leave. He always felt that she drove better than him in the city traffic.

N, a manger in the BBTC estates in the Singampatti group was posted under my father in the early nineties. His wife V, a city lass, never having seen a tea estate or the jungles, decided to learn to drive after getting married. As narrated before, a very senior driver named Karupiah was deputed to teach her driving.

The BBTC estates of the Singampatti Group are situated in the middle of one India’s last bastions of wilderness amidst the Kalakad – Mundanthorai tiger reserve. As the gardens are situated in the middle of the tiger reserve, the wild life there naturally considers the tea fields as a part of their domain. As V was driving on a narrow road, an ill tempered lone elephant charged at her car. She froze and the engine stalled, and Karupiah, with great of presence of mind, pushed her to the end of the driver’s side and took over the wheel. He had to reverse for over a half a kilometre before the elephant stopped chasing them.

Karupiah, born and brought up on the estate, probably knew every bump and pothole on those roads. His quick thinking and also the good fortune that the old ambassador cars did not have bucket seats and floor shift gear sticks ensured that he was able to move to the driver’s side easily. N and V later moved on to Chennai where they run one of the city’s most popular watering holes.

Nerves can either freeze a person or can galvanize a person into action. This incident amply demonstrates the latter. Another Assistant in the High Ranges – U - brought a car (a Maruti Van). Since he did not know how to drive, one of the staff promised to teach him. So the next weekend off they went to the nearby golf course at the Kundlay Club to master the motorcar. U was having a tough time getting a hang of the clutch and the gears and driving in a straight line at the same time, much to his staff’s consternation.

Meanwhile in the shola nearby, a tusker whose afternoon siesta was disturbed by this ruckus, was working himself into a serious rage. He decided that this white thing going around the fairways had to be shooed off and decided to take matters into his own hands. With a piercing sound he launched himself out of the jungle and at the Maruti Van. The sight of the charging tusker in the rear view mirror - coupled with the blood curdling trumpet - was too much for U to bear.

Spurred on by the charging pachyderm, U’s hands and feet miraculously swung into coordinated action as the gears changed and the clutch released automatically. The car moved as if it was on auto gear. U swung on to the tar road and never stopped till he reached his estate with the staff beside him frozen in fright. Meanwhile the elephant having victoriously reclaimed his turf went back to continue his slumber. There endeth the successful driving lesson. The Regional Transport Officer at Munnar had no hesitation in giving U his red badge of courage.

Much water has flowed under the old Victoria Bridge since U’s first driving lesson and he has gone on to become a safe and reliable driver, but his habit of anxiously checking the rearview mirror often continues to baffle many.

Editor's Note: 

'creeper' is the term applied to a new assistant on the plantation

'shola' is a patch of jungle

Many thanks to Rajesh for explaining the terms, and for the photographs, which are all from the two websites whose links are given below.

http://robinmoolamattom.blogspot.com/2013/05/top-station-to-kundala-main-road-1953.html

http://pazhayathu.blogspot.com/2014/03/blog-post_23.html

Meet the writer:

  Rajesh Thomas introduces himself:
"A second generation planter. Born and grew up in the planting districts of Southern India. Started my career in the High Ranges and Annamallais Planting Districts for twelve years. Had a stint in Africa for two years. Since 2009 been planting in the Nilgiris.

Read all of Rajesh's stories at this link: https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/search/label/J.Rajesh%20Thomas

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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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