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.

Birpara : 'Bride and Prejudice'

Ghenwa the Jewel: A Birpara Story

One of the tough examinations I've had to pass in life was the test set by the bungalow servants in my first tea bungalow.

Ghenwa was cook cum head honcho of the world beyond the dining room. He looked like some kind of tribal Amitabh Bachchan: tall, thin, arrogant and unsmiling. He was a handsome man, with thick wavy hair, large brown eyes and lips that could smile when they weren't being curled. He couldn't have been much older than me, but he filled me with nervous fear. 

I, who had quelled classrooms of undergraduate students not four years my junior with one look just weeks before my marriage!

Mohan had been in the Engineers' Bungalow in Birpara for about a year before we got married. Ghenwa was a trusted aide. Mohan left the running of the bungalow to him, and Ghenwa served him with devotion; in fact he quite doted on him. He felt let-down when Mohan produced a bride at the end of one 'chhutti'. From Ghenwa's point of view - I see it now - it meant the end of independence, and a reduction in stature.

Mohan didn't want me to bother with the kitchen for the first few days. I was grateful only because I was too chicken to enter Ghenwa's domain. The bearer Joseph was a cute, smiling chap, quite cowed by Ghenwa, like me. He became an ally. He'd serve our breakfast in smiling silence while Ghenwa, after finishing up the cooking and delegating toast making to some unseen hands, would enter the dining room in state and take up his position at Mohan's right hand. He would stand there and declaim - a sort of daily round-up or news bulletin - in what was a strange lingo to me, and Mohan would reply in the same lingo. If Ghenwa wanted to make me feel left out, he succeeded. This colloquy would continue until Mohan asked him in Hindi what he was going to serve Memsaab for lunch. 

The first time I ventured into Ghenwa's store and pantry, I made a hesitant suggestion about the food. He gave me the full Amitabh Bachchan stare, and said by all means, I was free to issue any commands, but he could not guarantee that his saheb would like what I suggested. I fled.

I was the encroacher in his little kingdom, and I was too ashamed to tell my new husband how inadequate Ghenwa made me feel. His hafta chutti was probably the happiest day of my week. 

Once this tyrant went home at night, the chowkidaar took over as my chief tormentor. Etowah - that was his name -stole everything that wasn't nailed to the floor. Mohan told me how he'd served him tea one chilly morning wearing his - Mohan's - socks. When Mohan bellowed at him, Etowah swore those were the socks that a departing Chhota Saab had presented him many years ago. 

Another time, Mohan surprised him when he had his head in the fridge and several fingers in a bowl of custard! Etowah could also make sugar and milk disappear from bowls without a trace.

I was wretched. What kind of administrator was I, who couldn't even keep house for two without losing potatoes, onions, oil, milk and sugar by the kilo?

Life wasn't all housekeeping, though, and we had a lot of fun. Also, there were others like me, new to tea and with similar tales of woe. We all met regularly at the club or at one another's bungalows. 

There was a tradition of people coming in from the club in the wee hours to torment newly-weds in the district. We had our turn too. It must have been two thirty in the morning, when we woke to the sound of several cars honking outside our gate. We could hear voices yelling, 'Open up! Once the crowd of merry makers was in the bungalow, there was much leg-pulling and ribald laughter, and it was impossible to feel anything but happy. Everyone clamoured for coffee. Of course, coffee! That was the reason they'd all 'dropped in' barely two hours after we'd said goodnight, for an early morning cup of coffee!

I wasn't embarrassed when they'd all pounded on our bedroom door and asked how much time we needed to dress, but now, I was red in the face. By now, I thought, Etowa would have drunk every last drop of milk, copiously sweetened with every grain of sugar in the bungalow. Still, I rang the bell and weakly asked him to bring coffee. Everyone around me continued to shout with laughter and have a good time while I sat and waited for the ground to open and swallow me up. What was Etowa going to serve ? There must have been a dozen people there!

The door swung open and in he sailed, with my best (wedding present) cups on a tray, each filled to the brim with frothy and fragrant coffee. The sugar bowl was full, too. My nightmare was suddenly magicked into a happy dream! Today the man had changed his act: he was making things appear and not vanish!

Some months passed, with one or two more riotous night time invasions. These were no 'intrusions of privacy'. We didn't know what privacy was in those days, and I don't think we'd have cared much for it. What we had instead was community - a family that pulled you into its fold - in a world far away from home. If loss of privacy was the price we paid to belong, we were happy to pay in those days!! 

     'Family' Picnic

Ghenwa continued to dazzle and hold sway, and he must have been satisfied with my state of surrender. I had a brand new mixi and he had skill, and we'd started calling people over to eat. On one Sunday, we asked one of Mohan's oldest bachelor friends to breakfast. He'd - let's just call him B - he'd left Lankapara early in the morning and run into a colleague - T -in Birpara town. When he heard where B was headed, T called him a lucky man and said he felt like eating dosas too, so would he tell Mohan and Gowri that he'd be along soon with whoever was at the club?

 That was B's style. Our club – well, all our tea clubs - were filled with eccentrics, both men and women. I could just visualise T going in to Dalgaon club and standing at the entrance, announcing, 'Everyone's invited to Mohan and Gowri's bungalow for dosas! Chalo!!!' When B told us about this, my jaw dropped in horror. I could provide dosas, chutney, sambar et al for another couple of people, say three more at the outside, but the early morning tennis crowd from Dalgaon Club?? What kind of disastrous life had I let myself in for when I married this happy-go-lucky moustachioed man? 

The man turned out to be as big a crack-pot as any of his nutty friends. He laughed!! He summoned Ghenwa and told him to expect another dozen people and said, 'Tum pugaa do; sab ko khilayega!' (stretch your resources, feed everyone). He looked at me and said, 'Relax! Our man will manage!' What blind faith, I thought.

Ghenwa piped in, 'Hum pugai dega, Memsaab! Aap log pehle kha lega!' ( I will manage! you should all eat first!') at which Mohan and friend B, the invited guest, expressed complete agreement. 

By this time, Burra Sa'ab's jeep had rolled in, and Jusep Driver had unloaded a case of beer. Burra Sa'ab and Mem saab would be along soon, he said, but they wanted us to chill the beer. I was fretting about place settings at the table but the two mad men in my bungalow urged me to eat quickly, and I remember I did eat, even though it choked me to think of what would happen when the crowds arrived.

It was Ghenwa's show all the way. In great good humour, he even treated me with kindness, bringing me my coffee himself with an air of deference. I was in shock, I think. 

The crowds came. Burra Sa'ab and Mem Sa'ab, a few friends, some tennis players I knew only by sight and of course the villainous T. Ghenwa fed them all until they swore they'd had enough. 'Excellent!' 'Brilliant!' 'Genuine South Indian taste!' was what I kept hearing. The ladies wanted their coffee in what they called 'those little south Indian glasses and katories'. They got what they wanted. 

After coffee, beer flowed. Burra Sa'ab and Mem were full of praise and thanks for a wonderful morning. 

Ghenwa had ensured that I didn't enter the kitchen, and I honestly have no idea, to this day, how he managed that show.   

 

Written for Indian Chai Stories

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!!

Waste Not...

I'm trying to define thrift in today's terms. Is thrift a virtue, or does it have only recreational value?

These questions weren't relevant when I was a child; that was the era of hand-me-downs and  re-invented leftovers. The word recycling was unknown because it wasn't needed. Everyone recycled what they could as a matter of course. You didn't buy new socks when the elastic wore out, you bought lengths of elastic and stitched them into rings big enough to hold them up. Our mothers unravelled old sweaters and knit them up again. Sewing and knitting were necessary activities, not just hobbies.
We didn't have a glut of readymade garments in our cupboards or even in the shops. Markets held goods and goodies in plenty, but they weren't exactly spilling over. Nor did we buy compulsively. We didn't shop for fun so much, or because it would make us feel better. We didn't feel deprived either. That's the way the world was those days.
Thrift isn't just a matter of survival; it involves some level of ingenuity, because you manage to make something useful out of something you would have discarded.
There are plenty of videos of handy hacks on the internet. One of them showed how to turn  an old summer top into a shopping bag. That too an environment friendly bag, a good way to say no to plastic.

The top, and the bag, below

Two days back, I was forced to recycle for an old fashioned reason : want. The New Year arrived, but no calendar came with it.
I remember what my dad had done one year in a similar situation. He turned the pages of the previous year's calendar until he found a month with thirty one days, and the first of the month on the same day of the week as New Year's Day. With his firm handwriting, he wrote out 'January' and then the year.  I thought it was brilliant, because I wasn't very good with numbers. The makeshift calendar went up on the night of the 31st.
That was how it was with my father; he changed the page on the daily calendar just before he went to bed. That simple act was hugely reassuring: no matter what happened, tomorrow would come along at the right time.
My calendar went up at noon on New Year's Day. And as it happened all those years ago in my parents' house, someone brought a calendar for us in the next twenty four hours.

Christmas Eve

We went to the Venkateswara temple after a long time this evening.

It was late. The priest welcomed us and told us Arati was about to begin. The lights were switched off. There was small cradle placed in front of the main deity. The priest lit an oil lamp and he rocked the cradle gently. Then he drew a curtain all round it and offered us prasad: a spoonful of warm, sweet milk.

This was the 'Shayan Arati'. The Lord, in infant form, had been put to bed for the night in a tender and reverent ceremony.

In the darkness around the tea gardens of Dibrugarh, every pond I crossed on my way home had a reflection of Sirius rising in the East.  

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!!