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

A Little Knitting Yarn

Our  girls are both wearing skirts knitted by their grandmother, my mother Maiji.

My love of knitting is something I've inherited from my mother. She knits round the year and keeps the entire family supplied with sweaters, ponchos and shawls. Knitting keeps the mind alert and the fingers agile. Summer or winter, it’s good to have a little project going. I’m sharing some memories of friends and past associations that come to mind whenever I knit.

When I was at school in Delhi, Miss Saldhana the needlework teacher taught our class how to knit. She took a double period with us on Tuesday afternoons. It was 1972, and it must have been a golden era if girls in Class V were actually allowed time for classes in needlework, art, elocution, singing and dancing.

Many of us found Miss Saldhana scary. Our first project was a pair of baby’s bootees. We had to bring two balls of wool from home. One girl brought black wool. Miss Saldhana called her to the front of the class and shook her shoulder with one hand while wagging the bag of wool at us with the other. 'Black wool! For baby's bootees. Like a sign of death on the baby's feet!'

Miss Saldhana's sharp tongue and good teaching ensured that we all completed the bootees in very little time. We actually enjoyed the work too. In the winter holidays that followed, I'd ask my mother or sisters for a bit of wool and knit useless little patches that could be undone and re-done.

Just one of the dozens of dolls Maiji has knitted!

My mother knitted all my sweaters, as she'd done for my brothers and sisters before me. I'd show off her creations in college. Some of my friends asked if Aunty would be so kind as to knit for them too, and she always obliged. It took her hardly any time to turn out colourful and imaginatively designed pullovers.

More knits by Maiji

I enjoyed going with her to the wool shop in Sarojini Nagar. We would spot a good knitting pattern in the latest issues of the English magazines 'Woman' or 'Woman and Home' from the mobile lending library which the magazine wala carried around on his bicycle. The patterns of those days fuelled the imagination. 'Our model is wearing this sweater in Ash, Rose and Snowflake,' one would say, and it might continue: 'Our knitting editor also recommends Toffee, Russet and Freesia or Navy, Cornflower and Magnolia.' The names were enough to transport me to an unseen land.  

The shop was quite big. It had 'lacchas' or bundles of wool tumbling out of shelves that ranged up to the ceiling. There were cardboard boxes, neatly stacked, which held balls of wool. There was wool in sacks on the floor. The shop was always packed with people buying, and there were many salesmen. One of them assigned himself to my mother, who was a big buyer. His name was Bhagwan Das. He wasn’t very young, but he could hop over the counter and up into the loft if required. He always managed to find just the shade we wanted.

I only felt the need to knit when I became a mother myself. The babies had outgrown what their grandmother had knitted, and she was going to be away that winter. Living in a tea garden was like living in an extended family. I turned to the other ladies on the garden for help.

I first asked Rosie if she could teach me to make warm vests for the babies. Rosie promised to come over and give me a lesson. Two or three days passed. A packet came from her bungalow with a note. It said, 'Sorry I didn't wait to wash them, Gowri. I was in a hurry to give them to you.' There were two pink vests, knitted in just the right sizes for the girls! I went to Rosie’s as soon as I could and thanked her with a big hug. She laughed happily and said she'd had such fun planning the surprise. It was lovely to be   knitting little pink things, she said, being a mother of two boys! That memory is warm, just like the handy vests which the babies wore for years. 

When our elder daughter started school, she needed a V necked sweater. This time Smita took what I had knitted and worked on it. I could only knit the back and the front pieces up to the point where they needed shaping. These pieces were sent off to Smita’s bungalow, where she did all the hard work, shaping the armholes and neck, and making borders for them. 

The next year I started on a sweater for my husband and took my work to the club like an experienced knitter. Western Dooars Club was full of ladies who knitted frantically in preparation for the cold weather. They all became my gurus.

Rafat took one look at what I was doing. 'Not Fisherman's Rib, Gowri,' she said. 'You'll use kilos of wool, and it'll take you ages to finish.' She made me rip out what I’d done, and thanks to her, Mohan got a sweater which was knitted in a sensible pattern - one which I could finish!

The following year, Mridula ripped out whatever I'd knitted of a sweater for my youngest because I'd cast on too many stitches. She sat and supervised while I cast on the correct number and began again.

Cold weather mornings in the club on the days leading up to the Christmas party were the most enjoyable ever. The mothers would be as excited about Christmas as the children were. We all wanted our little ones to be wearing new sweaters, coats or knitted frocks, so when we weren't putting up Christmas decorations we'd be knitting.

This Super Mario sweater pattern was in Woman's Weekly

Those days the good wool shops were all in Siliguri. We'd talk about them for hours at the club. There was 'Vandana Wool Emporium' and 'Bengal Wool House'. You could take your pick from many brands, but Vardhman was the best then as it is now. Later on two well-stocked shops came up in Mal Bazar, both called 'Siddhi Gopal Stores'. There was one in Birpara as well. 

Over the last few years, the unpretentious wool shop in Binnaguri has become the only place where I am able to shop for wool. This is where I find wool not only for my needs, but also for my mother, who can't get good wool in Chennai. When I need a little cheering up, it's the best place to go. The names on the ball bands send me on those little imaginary trips again – Gold Mohair, Feather Glow, Passion, Blossom, Christina - and the varieties, soft or sparkly, speckled or tweedy, suggest endless possibilities. It doesn't cost much to pick up a few balls of wool and start a small project like a muffler or a hat. Some bright wool and a finished product at the end of two or three days is just the cure for that 'Nobody Loves Me' mood.

I love what the wool shop stocks these days!

I asked Deepak, who runs the shop, if he had a lot of customers buying wool. I wondered what kept his shop going in Binnaguri when so many others had closed down. The Birpara shop stopped keeping any wool at all. So did the shop in Banarhat. Deepak told me most of his customers were the ladies who lived in the army cantonment. The jawans’ wives knit a lot. 'Hardly anyone from “civil” knits, ' he added.

The big shops in Siliguri, the ones we used to long to be able to visit frequently, don't look like wool shops any more. Four or five years ago, I found they had hardly any new stocks of wool, even after the cold weather and the knitting season had begun. What's more, the shopkeeper said it was a waste of time to knit when you could buy ready-mades! When he saw the expression on my face, he quickly said the women in his family were lazy and didn’t bother to knit. He got a positively dirty look from me for running down his own women.

I don’t carry my knitting to the club any more, but there are still many of us who knit in tea gardens – and I like to think we are all reasonably ‘civil’. The internet has any number of websites featuring knitting techniques and patterns. There are ace knitters out there who are willing to share their expertise: some for a price, and some for free. I don’t miss that old mobile magazine wala library any more.