The Inimitable Dharmam

by Saaz Aggarwal

I was just 11 when we left the last place where Dharmam and my dad worked together (as they had done for several years), and we never met again. And, even though I had never had much contact with Dharmam myself, the memory of who he was appears to have remained quite vividly. I suppose that’s because my father always held him with such a great degree of respect

I began working on a book based on plantation life in April 2013, first interviewing Uncle Sin (NSV Sinniah), who had started his career as a tea planter in Ceylon before moving to E&A, followed by a few more with other Ooty locals that year. In March 2015, I interviewed Ravindran and Ram Adige in Bangalore, both former E&A employees and colleagues of my father. It was a wonderful session, but the book took a back seat to other projects. So, when Ravindran told me in June 2019 that he had a collection of stories he wanted my help in publishing, I agreed at once and have enjoyed the process of weaving in context and fleshing them out with memories from him and others, including my own.

Working on this book took me back to an idyllic childhood, its pristine air-quality, vistas of sloping valleys of smooth green from the sitting-room windows, brilliant night skies, and a certain formal grandeur and privileged way of living compounding the fundamental isolation of plantation life. The sunsets at Prospect were spectacular: one time, driving towards the fork in the road that led into the estate, the sky ahead was streaked with clouds that carried every colour of the rainbow, the entire spectrum from purple to red, a sight that remains fresh in my mind nearly fifty years later.

Seated: Dharmam (his son Bimal Rajasekhar is standing next to him), Saaz, Situ, Bob and Ravi Savur. from Saaz’s album. High Forest, 1967

Out of the blue I remembered Dharmam, a mechanic at Prospect. I phoned Victor to ask and he said, “Of course I remember him, he was your dad’s favourite!” Victor went on to give me a few examples of Dharmam’s ingenuity:

At Prospect we used motorized power sprayers and to start them, we had to tie a rope around the motor and pull. But it was so cold right around the year that a simple pull never worked. We had to keep pulling, it took a lot of time, a lot of tries and a lot of strength, and they still wouldn’t start. Until Dharmam came up with a brilliant idea: he hooked the rope to a V-belt on one of the machines. When the machine was turned on, its rapid revolution started the sprayer in no time.

From Planting Directory of Southern inDia, UPASI, Coonoor (1956)

As I wrote this down, an image emerged from the deep recesses of my memory: the door to ‘Aladdin’s Cave’, a dark and perhaps windowless restricted-entry room in the Prospect factory, Dharmam’s secret stockroom. When anything needed fixing, Dharmam would retreat into the cave and emerge carrying a piece of scrap or spare or strange-looking tool, and get it working in a jiffy. Victor remembered that he never threw anything away; that he used discarded lorry shock absorbers to make stools to sit on.

My brother and I even had a car, which Dharmam had made using discarded metal sheets, a marvel of technology with a working steering wheel, a discarded lorry horn and discarded bicycle pedals.

Dharmam was a genius and, in different circumstances, could have been an inventor who formed the backbone of a national space mission or corporate R&D department.

His father, PA Charles, had gone to work at Dunsinane Estate, Ceylon, and rose to be teamaker there. After some years he quit to return to the family home in Nagercoil, Tamilnadu, and subsequently worked as teamaker at High Forest and Seaforth. Dharmam, well qualfied and highly skilled, joined High Forest in 1954. These facts I learnt from his son Rajappa. I had made many attempts to locate Dharmam’s children, and it seemed like a miracle to do so just days before this book went to print – particularly because, on that 2016 visit to Prospect, I had been informed (mistakenly, as it turned out) that Dharmam was no more.

Dharmam's family: Rajappa Charles and Bimal Rajasekhar, in cars fabricated by their father. Rajappa grew up to be an engineer, and Bimal is a doctor with a Master’s degree in Public Health from London School of Economics. Their mother Helen was a much beloved teacher in the estate schools. Dharmam retired from Seaforth in 1987 and they continued living there until she retired four years later.

In fact, Dharmam celebrated his ninetieth birthday in April 2019. And in September I learnt from him that it was a rotorvane that took Peter Sausman’s finger. A rotorvane is the machine in which tea leaves are loaded after going through the rollers, forced through a barrel by a screw-type rotating shaft with vanes at its centre. Peter evidently got too close. He lost a finger, but his sense of humour, as Ravindran describes earlier in the book, stayed on.

Visiting Prospect in 2016 I had asked after Hutcha too, and was told that he too was no more. Hutcha was a lorry driver in our time, and of English blood, as I deduced from an email from Denis Mayne in 2015, followed by a conversation with others who knew. Denis now lives in Belfast, and I had come across his post ‘When I was in India’ on a Bangor Aye blog, in which he described his initiation on Prospect, less gentle than Ravindran’s would be a decade later, with a manager who sent him off saying: I’ll see you on Friday. In the mean time you are in charge of four hundred acres of tea and four hundred men. Only one man speaks English and you can’t believe a word he says. Good Luck!

I was delighted to get connected to him through the blog, and through him to Carolyn Hollis; their words and photos have brought parts of this book alive. As for Hutcha’s biological father, you could probably spot him in the photo on the last page, one of the last grand collections of British and Indian tea planters c1958. Most of them are no more.

Chittu is long gone too. One evening at Kodanad in the 1980s, he went off as usual to run around and do dog things, and never came back. “Dog eating panther,” as the butler English of our days described it, not an unusual end for an estate dog, much mourned by all of us, especially my dad, who would now have to ride out to the fields on his own.

Epilogue:
 
Meet the writer:

Saaz Aggarwal is a contemporary Indian writer whose body of work includes biographies, translations, critical reviews and humour columns. As an artist, she is recognized for her Bombay Clichés, quirky depictions of urban India in a traditional Indian folk style. Her art incorporates a range of media and, like her columns, showcases the incongruities of daily life in India. Her 2012 book, 'Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland', established her as a researcher in Sindh studies. 

 

The book on plantation life co-authored by Saaz, An Elephant Kissed My Window (and other stories from the tea plantations of South India) is available on https://www.amazon.in/elephant-kissed-window-stories-plantations-ebook/dp/B07YJDZZF7

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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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