Yesterday's Song

 Pieces of sky coming down with the raindrops, 

Clouds form: shining mirrors on the grass. 

They settle down until the sunset's fingers reach down and pull them back up again. 

Shower's over, show is done. Shower's over, Sunday is gone.

 

A Taste of Home

On a cool and cloudy morning like today, I could have fooled myself into believing  I was in Bagracote Tea Garden in the late eighties. It must have been the freshness of the rain-washed breeze; Bagracote was a place where it rained everyday round the year. At three p.m., without fail - and that, as I said, was in the late eighties.

Those days, a hot meal of Uppuma and chutney like the one we just had for breakfast would have taken me back 'home' in the same way.

Home : a world both Mohan and I had left so far behind, in Delhi. We had to travel for many hours to reach Delhi. There were no telephones and certainly no coloured images flashing on screens to bring other worlds into our lives all day and everyday. For this reason, very few people in the city knew anything at all about tea gardens. I had never heard of the Dooars myself until I got married!

We were all afloat in a world that was remote and had very little in common with life in urban India. Almost all the little towns in the Dooars had come up only because of the tea gardens. The gardens themselves were less than a hundred years old!! The nearest city was Calcutta. There was no way you could bridge the gap between city  and garden with ease in those days; besides, each seemed to exist in a different time zone. 

Language, music and food: these were our connect with home. It was much the same for the people we knew here, for all our friends, for all Mohan's colleagues and their wives. In this way we were all united, in spite of  the things that made each one of us different.We had all created a home away from home. We had gained a new community, new relationships, and a  new family where we lived. We had two homes, then, and we enjoyed each in its place.

Most of the young planters today have their families living in towns nearby. There are two reasons for this. First, most of them belong to this region. The tea growing areas of North East India have well populated towns, and any number of youngsters choose tea as a profession. People from places like Delhi, Dehradun, Chandigarh or Kolkata don't turn up in large numbers looking to make a life in tea any longer.

The second reason is that many girls who marry planters get an opportunity to work in town these days, and their children attend school there. The bungalow becomes a weekend home for them, and often the planter husband/father goes and spends Sundays with the family in town. There is no longing for a home far away, and therefore no need to create another in the garden.

Painting the verandah at Moraghat T.E. Burra Bungalow before Diwali

Some years ago, one of Mohan's assistants - let's call him Vijay - asked to go home, to a town just 50 kms away from the garden, for Diwali. His wife and children lived there, in the house in which he had grown up. They would visit him on weekends.

This conversation took place at the club Diwali 'do' when all the children were having a wonderful time with 'pataakas' (fireworks). Diwali was two days away. We would all do up our bungalows with a bit of paint, lights and so on every year.  Diwali has a special quality in the garden, an added 'flavour', and I've always believed it is enhanced by the darkness and the silence around us.

To get back to the conversation -  Mohan asked Vijay whether he really wanted to leave his bungalow in darkness on Diwali night, and the boy replied quite blandly that the bungalow could never be 'home' for him, so why should he stay there and not light diyas (lamps) at home in town!

We were really stunned to hear that he - and so many others, as we now realise - thought that way!

Somehow, our longing for the old 'home' meant we lavished a lot of love on our new homes in what was then a distant land. We gloried in the otherness of  this life. And this was home, after all, for our children!

One year, we were in Delhi at Diwali time. Our little one was just two years old. She heard the sound of 'pataakas' (fire crackers) going off early in the evening, and she announced happily to her grandfather that elephants had come! That was what firecrackers - especially the loud ones called 'chocolate bomb' or 'atom bomb' - meant to a tea garden child, because they were used to frighten herds of wild elephants and keep them away! Our children's idea of 'normal life' included elephants, leopards and snakes, forests, rivers and mountains.

The world of tea gardens is still unique. The language(s), the jargon, the 'dastoor' or customs ( most of them quirky and anachronistic ) and the hierarchy, the feudal spirit, the grave danger, the solitude, the darkness, the silence - it's all one of a kind. Definitely not a life to be taken for granted.

Workers dancing and singing at Diwali time, Moraghat T.E. Burra Bungalow

Look Through My Window

It's that time of year when the fruit trees are laden with lychees and mangoes.

There's a large lychee  tree outside my bedroom window. The bedroom's on the first floor since this is a chung bungalow, and the tree is one of the first things I look out on every morning. 

Last night was a little blustery as rainy nights go, and I wasn't feeling too bright so I stayed at home while my husband went to the club. I had a good book* to read and decided to turn in early. The wind was fluttering outside my window at regular intervals in a rather strange way. I drew the curtains apart to see what it was.

Bats! There were at least two of them, taking turns to fly in from different directions to pick a lychee off the top of the tree, and each with a wingspan of at least two feet. Pale moonlight, rain, chilly gusty winds and these huge bat silhouettes wheeling about.

My very own Saturday night horror show.

 

*Norwegian Wood

April Fuel

April is bonus time for garden lovers.

Showers bring the last of the cold weather flowers to life and they bloom with renewed vigour, shimmering against rain-washed skies and new foliage. Heaven knows the same plants were looking dead just two weeks ago.

When the beds are filled with flowers in February, I'm already sated, but greedy. Where I'd longed for abundance, I expect perfection.  I'm impatient if all the beds aren't in sync, and feel sad if something hasn't come up to the previous year's standards. And then the heat picks up and I've learnt my lesson.

Then April weather comes along, and, gosh, are those the dahlias we were going to yank out of the ground?

 

 These gerberas are picking up so well! They are certainly not worrying about how summer or the   monsoon will treat them!

This azalea bush sulked through the cold weather, and has suddenly decided to have its own Matsuri!

 These salvias were planted - as fillers - in the bed where our showy Inca marigolds held sway till mid-February. They look all stylish now!

              Was someone calling us 'junglee'??

                                               

 A little wilderness where we saw the resident 'dhamna' snake in its usual corner for the first time this year.

                   Easter lilies are the new stars in the garden, popping up like magic everywhere.

         And there are new delights, the flowers of the season :passion flowers, orchids, cosmos, cannas.

Each year, the sounds, scents and sensations of April bring new hope and a sense of rejuvenation. It's an end to my moaning about how much I will miss the cold weather. These 'in-between' seasons have that quality; they change the way you look at the world.

Forward, March!

There was a time in my life when March meant school exams, and for years after, it came to mean that thing we all dread in tea, drought. The days are long gone when drought was the only obstacle to a splendid season ahead!
 
Every time the cold weather ended in the Dooars, it was dry and droughty. The longest drought that we experienced there lasted over 130 days. All the minor vegetation looked as if it was set to go up in flames.All except for the trees; the trees would put out leaf buds.

At this time of year, I long to visit Chalsa forest. There's a fragrance in the air that is as difficult to capture and hold as the fleeting season itself. Some traces of it linger under citrus trees, especially under the pomello and the 'curry patta'.  We spent a lifetime in the Dooars, and its forests, rivers and hills will always be ‘ours’ to treasure in my mind.

Time to return to the here and now: Easter lilies are popping up to keep late dahlias and other cold weather blooms company and the grass is green!

We moved to Upper Assam two years ago. There's much here that is the same as the Dooars world, but the climate is completely different. Weather patterns have changed over the last decade quite drastically everywhere, but these are my observations of the moment.

We’ve had rainy spells around the end of the cold weather that have lasted for three to four days. Days and nights were never so cold in December. The sun drives winter back into hiding in cupboards with sweaters and knitting baskets for company.
The mighty river that flows at the garden's northern boundary is at the heart of all things here. Our skies – ‘Brahmaputra blue’ - are the deepest blue I’ve ever lived under. The nights skies are spectacular.

P.S. The night of the equinox was rainy with chilly winds.

Loony!

I miss my father whenever there is an eclipse. He'd have been amused by the media hysteria around this 'triple' phenomenon or 'three-for-the-price-of-one' hype which is all around us.

When there was a total eclipse of the sun in India in 1980, there was no internet or satellite television. We didn't even have 24 hour telecasts on our lone TVchannel. There was a special telecast of a very popular Hindi film to keep people indoors that afternoon.

My father thought it was ridiculous to create fear and keep people indoors during a solar eclipse. Delhi only had a partial eclipse, but it was exciting enough. We assembled a couple of simple 'eclipse viewing kits' and he said we could get some customers to watch if we wanted!! Only, the streets were deserted on that February afternoon in Delhi. I was quite happy to stand outside with my father and watch the reflection of the eclipse in water. Many years later, my wish to see a total solar eclipse came true.

In tea gardens, if a thing is heard or seen on television, it is accepted without question.

I put on one of the news channels this evening to check the time of the eclipse. I couldn't help but feel a little superior, as one who's known all about these things since childhood. I put on my coat and went downstairs to take a look at the sky. From the stairs, I heard screaming and metallic banging sounds coming from the workers' colony nearby and froze. The first thing that comes to mind is elephants - but there are none where we live. It had to be the eclipse! It must be whopper of a show, I thought.

Out in the open, the sky was dark, with not a glimmer of light anywhere, not even a star. The shouting and metallic banging continued. The sky was covered with clouds!

Half an hour on, status quo.

One hour later, the celebrity hadn't shown, but appeared to have cancelled without notice. Pink Floyd wasn't playing Dark Side of the Moon tonight. We'd got 'Obscured by the Clouds' instead!

The bawarchi came in for his evening shift. I asked him what was up, since the sounds had died out. They must all have gone home, he said. He was in social commentator mode today, shaking his head sadly. 'Baap re! Anyone would think a wild animal had entered the village. They didn't see a thing, but they screamed and shouted!'

A Pepper Tiger

Pepper's my favourtie spice. We never had to buy any in the fifteen years we spent in Moraghat Tea Estate, where it grew in abundance. We planted some vines in Bhatkawa T.E. and some here in Thanai, too. The photographs above, however, are of the peppercorns we bought in Tinsukia town yesterday. Our vines haven't fruited yet.

We bought one kilo of black and half a kilo of green for just R.120. What a steal!

Green peppercorns are popped into boiling water for a couple of minutes, when they turn black and are ready to be dried in the sun for storage. The black ones that we found in the bazaar yesterday had already been boiled and were damp, so we gave them another good boil at home.

I plan to use the green ones for another couple of days before boiling them up.

The veggie bazaar at Tinsukia is one of the most colourful I've seen, and if I hadn't been on a pepper chase, I'd have stopped to take pictures!!

Still Life with Fig

Gul-e-Fanoosh and the Pitfalls of Photography

Here is an old favourite. We had a number of these shrubs in my childhood home, and they all had pink flowers. I would stand under the branches after the rain and get a little 'shower' shaking water off the petals, long after I'd crossed the age when it was alright to play with water. 

The sight of these flowers always reminds me of the end of summer holidays. Schools reopened in the second week of July, some days after the monsoon set in over Delhi. Delhi was really beautiful those days, neither dirty nor crowded, but a city of gardens.

This is the tallest Gul-e-Fanoosh I have ever seen. 

 Botanical names are rarely pretty and lagerstroemia indica is no exception. I found some common Indian names at The Flowers of India website. Gul-e-Fanoosh isn't mentioned there. It's a name I learnt from this lovely old book pictured below, which my brother Raja found in a book godown  in Siliguri.

A 'pitfall' can be quite painfully literal, as I learnt after slipping and falling into this pit of 'jabra mal' or dry leaves and cut grass.

                 

Marvel of Peru

I have always had a running battle with my malis about the merits of local flowers.

Our mali in Moraghat, Mithoo, was a terrible snob who always pooh-poohed all the 'local' flowers that I loved to propagate. Cannas and hibiscus were 'common' in the gardens of labour houses and they were not fit to be grown in Burra Bungalow, he would say. We did battle for a good fifteen years, and like all people who disagree, we have a strong bond and a healthy respect for each other. 

        Mithoo in 2008
 
When we moved from Moraghat he made it a point to visit us every year just before the cold weather planting began. He'd bring seeds and seedlings of hollyhocks and cineraria, dianthus and asters. After his visit, I would hear how he'd been saying that I'd had taught him everything he knew about flowers. That was good of him, and it was not entirely true.

Mithoo regrets that we have moved to Assam and that too to Dibrugarh district, which is 'so far away' from the Dooars. When he last called, he said it would take him a day and a half to reach us and another day and a half to return. How would he ever get enough chhutti to 'pugaao' (reach) all the plants to me? He's promised to try and get away, though.

Thank goodness none of my friends was as stuck up as any of these gardeners who scoffed at any plant that didn't have an English name or lineage.

While we were in Moraghat, we'd see a lot of pretty yellow and magenta flowers which opened only in the evening. My mother knew the Tamil name, it was the 'Naalu Mani Poo' or 'Four o'clock flower'. I remember seeing some outside the homeopath's clinic in Mal Bazar. When I asked Dr. Sarkar, he was most happy to let me take some rooted cuttings.

Last year, when we came to Assam, we met many people, some for the first time, and some after a gap of over two decades. Mrs Bagai - Ashima, she hates formality - was someone I met after over 25 years, and it was as if those years in between had never been. It was wonderful to 'talk plants' together, among other things. It was thanks to Ashima that I got to know that one of the fruit trees in our compound was actually a fig tree!!

One evening last cold weather, I spent a few happy hours with Ashima in her garden. I came home with lots of cuttings and seeds, and among them there were two packets which her malis had packed and marked 'Red' and 'Yelo'. I was touched that they had taken the trouble to write in English. These were 'Naalu Mani Poo' seeds. I wanted to learn what the English name was, and Google came up with 'Four o'clock flower' when I entered 'Naalu Mani Poo'! I was delighted. This was so wonderfully accurate!! And what's more, the Tamil name had been 'recognised' without a hitch.

The seeds sprouted and the seedling plants grew quickly. I'd never seen so many colours among these flowers. I was in for another surprise; a single plant bore blooms of different colours!

Some flowers were speckled and some...well, pied ( I have never forgotten Jacob and Laban and the sheep from The Merchant of Venice). I love the way the flowers mirror the colours of what we call 'kite paper'! Nothing like Indian flowers, my jingositic inner voice kept repeating to itself.

That voice fell silent today. I googled 'Four o'clock Flower' and got 'Mirabilis Jalapa' or 'Marvel of Peru'. Peru! How remote, how exotic, and how - well, marvellous.

Plum Crazy!!

Plum Crazy! That's what the husband called me when I lopped several branches off a couple of plum trees that were blocking the sunlight from a bed of cold weather blooms last January.

These trees were growing plumb (forgive me, I can't resist) in the middle of a bed of gerberas and nasturtiums, a vivid visual cocktail that was still in the getting-ready-to-hit-you stage. No flower lover could blame me, surely, for wanting to give them their due?? And after all, there were three other plum trees growing in a line nearby with branches reaching up high enough to threaten to bring down all our electric wiring.

As for the fruit, well, here's when things begin to get sour. The plum trees are quite lovely to see. Hands up all those who remember 'Lemon Tree' playing on the radio when you were young. You get it?
When we'd just moved to Assam and to this garden, I'd spent many happy hours photographing the trees with new foliage, then later on with blooms and finally, laden with jewels of fruit.

 The blossoms, above, against the blue cold weather sky

 Harvest! Plum heart with peach border

There were enough fruit to set me off on a frenzy of jelly making. We couldn't eat them just as they were. Our local expert made us a bottle of pickle with a new and unusual flavour, and a bottle of syrup as well. The jelly was much more tart than we'd expected it to be in spite of the amounts of sugar and the number of sweet Assam lemons we'd used up in it.
Whenever I'd made plum jelly in Moraghat in the Dooars, the fruit flavour would begin to 'awaken' after about a month or so and it kept getting better and better over time.  So I took some bottles to family in Delhi - only to find they'd left them in their fridges, months later, almost untouched. The jelly just seemed to be getting more and more sour over time, they said.

My husband didn't exactly say  I was unleashing my anger on the trees when I axed them, but the words seemed to hang in the air alright.

I reminded him of our Moraghat plum tree and how, after one of the April storms that we call 'Kaal Baisakhi' had attacked it we got fruits that were large and juicy. He went away mumbling about forces of nature and madness being two different things.

July is almost here, and the fruit's coming in now. The trees that were left untouched yield plenty of plums everyday- small, hard and sour, but I'm not buying sacks of sugar again! The trees that I, shall I say, treated, have fewer fruit: naturally, because they have fewer branches. But quantity is just not the same as quality.

See the picture!! Guess which ones came off which trees!

Joy in the Morning!

In the Maize

          
It's one of those post rain mornings. The wind lashed about last night after a hot and humid day, and the corn in our mali bari suffered its effects.

 The corn wasn't flourishing anyway, not with all the birds pecking away at it happily.

Just last week, we put in some scarecrows.
These men of straw were laid low by the rain and wind, and they looked quite wretched in the morning. I kept thinking of Ruth amid the alien corn. Some had lost their shirts as well - no doubt they took them off, as Nirmal the bearer said, because yesterday was so hot!!

                    Dignity restored!!