Kai Karto Tumi?

Another Sunday evening, the first drop of rainwater touches an electric cable and the power goes out in slow motion. Electricity department workers who wouldn't give you the time of the day during work hours were spotted relocating a transformer... on a Sunday...such rare sightings of endangered species must be documented. 2 murders, one robbery, an assault on a policeman and a hit and run later, we could very well be heading to another WTF moment. There is a mall being constructed with parking at a trip-and-fall distance from the hospital, with prices for a 200 sqft store going up for Rs 30,000/sqft, needless to say everything has been sold even while they clearing of the area hasn't been completed, forget about the foundation. I think the rest is still the same otherwise, the weather is still haywire, mild arguments still lead to fatal hemorrhages, the police is still toothless, the village hick is still aspiring to be the white girl's boyfriend and the herds of Bengali tourists waddle around under layers of woolens rattling nonsensical terms of wonder leaving behind a trail of plastic wrappings, beautiful unaware of the shitstorm brewing all around them.

While I watch from an inconspicuous corner, avoiding eye contact and conversation with all human forms, I know someday I will be cornered for "acting too smart" and "not talking to people." This isn't quite the place to be left alone, only foreigners are allowed to be left alone, not for too long though!

I have a feeling I'm getting one of those "being-at-home-for-too-long" syndromes, and awareness of the problem combined with the futility of all efforts to address the newfound awareness can pose a problem. Very soon, the people who think they know me will start turning the other way when they see me trundling down the hill! Therein lies the problem with boomerangs, you throw it hard and far and forget about it, then it hits you. Not pretty.

Meanwhile my daily jaunts during the wee hours of the mornings have been giving me great images, some I have never seen before, and I hope I never forget. The nights are starry, the days are hot and sunny, its not right. For all I know, the people of this town may very well be bathing with mud come winter, and then the new problem shall arise, mud can be hard to come by in an urban setting. Hmm, visions of a post apocalyptic world coming in too soon?

Saint Andrew's Church

These photographs were taken on the same morning, it was not particularly warm, cloudy skies and a crisp chilly breeze. The clouds above the church looked rather interesting, I figured it would be a wonderful contrast against the staid lines of the church's walls. I was skeptical about the result of the second picture, with the clouds cracking just enough to let those few slivers of beautiful light through, just enough to brighten up the morning for the people living in that area down there. The camera isn't as sensitive as the eye, of course in my case its the other way round! Even my phone's camera is better than my eyes!

A friend celebrated her birthday on Saturday, with an afternoon filled with the most bizarre flaky conversations and directionless strolls, the gathering continued at the cafe with relative ease!

Well that doesn't look too bad now, does it?! Yes the lights are all red and the room is very dark, and I really had to pump up the ISO, after which the focus began having seizures, the finally had to hold my breath! Phew!

So anyway way, that's the end of that one!

Chaiwalla Bhaiya

A lazy Sunday, waiting for god knows what! I shall proceed to continue my stories of my days in tea.

A normal working day would start at the crack of dawn, of course, and I'd have to slip on a pair of ridiculous shorts, and be in the office by 6:30 am. No I was never on time, I'd crawl in by 7, because if I did turn up by 6:30, I'd be the only fool there, no my boss refused to understand that. The next hour was spent behind a desk drinking tea flavored sugar syrup, signing attendance records, thereby establishing proof that I could officially be implicated on a later date for signing without looking. I never looked what I was signing, and was pulled up on several occasions, could never care less! The workers would start trickling in, and I had to get on my bike and wrangle them like a herd of cattle, screaming at them to make it in time. Workers would have walked for almost an hour, only to see me across the bend hollering on the top of my lungs, not a sight anyone would want to see. Of course I could bloody well have shut the fuck up and stood quietly watching them crawl in, but in the industry such an act is deeply frowned upon, and pages of reports can be written about such 'un-planter-like' demeanor.
After shouting some more in every part of the garden, I could get in for breakfast. Now I had a bungalow alright, Elroy knows only too well, with a garden, trees, shit like that. I also had a retinue of 6 servants. Oh, it sounds right lovely, a king's life indeed. The six servants consisted of 6 uneducated alcoholic kleptomaniac oafs with a nasty habit of not turning up for work. That is also 6 people doing the work of 1 efficient human being, so needless to say, the food they cooked for me was consistently getting worse by the day, well most of it was stolen anyway. As soon as I'd sit at the table, the boss would call up, time to run again, it is sacrilege to be in the bungalow when the boss is out. Hmm. Some more shouting and screaming and cursing and hiding from the harsh sun, and standing around pointlessly. Lunch time, shit food, phone call, run, come back, steal a snooze, make it back up just in time to see workers sneaking off from work well before time! Oh the management can have none of that! How dare the workers try to shirk they Rs 58 a day wage?! So of course some more shouting and screaming. Back to my office, some more tea flavored sugar syrup, make grand plans for the next day, write it all down in a book. Bike it back to the boss's office, conveniently placed 5 Kms away. Then sit and wait. I'd make it to the office around 4 or 5, the boss would meet me around 8, if not 9, a lot of nodding, and waiting, and bitching, sitting around an archaic computer pretending to be busy. I'd be home by 10, if not 11, dodging drunk workers crawling home, leopards, rain, among others. With just enough energy to eat shitty food, but not enough energy to complain about the shitty food, trying to ignore the wafts of alcohol coming out of the watchman's breath. I'd make it to bed or the computer, then the girlfriend would hound me with "why don't you talk to me?" and by some divine intervention which would result in an argument could I finally sleep, if the heat would let me. Early morning, we're back again.

"Executives" we were called, farmers were what we should have been called.

I remember I once came home tired and mindfucked, as usual, and I hear this low grunting noise coming out of my guest room. I went in to investigate only to find my cook passed out drunk on the floor, needless to say dinner wasn't ready at all! What was I to do? I had to pick up the good man by his collar, drag him one floor down and throw him into my lawn, it took a while for him to wake up though. After which I had to start screaming again.

I am and always will be harshly critical of this industry, which from the days of its inception has always kept its workforce in abject poverty, always squeezing out more from them, making sure they are far away from the influences of the outside world, keeping them convinced that the outside world holds nothing for them.

It is such a lovely picture from outside the gates, and the shit inside is never visible to the naked eye. The smiles are always misleading, the rot is set in far too deep. The bungalow and the servants? Fucking sham, Elroy came to visit me, god bless his rotten soul, I had to "inform" (ask permission) my boss, and write a letter to the head office in Calcutta "informing" (asking permission) them of him staying with me. Same protocol for my parents, and wait for the last straw, if my girlfriend were to visit me, she'd have to stay in my boss's house! Why? They didn't want to workers to think she's a whore. Hmm...

I was entitled to 35 days of paid leave in a year, in 3 years I had racked up more than a 100 days. The functioning of a tea garden has been designed in such a way that the garden will function perfectly even if no one was in charge. But everytime I asked to go home, the response I'd get was, "When my son was born I was at work." Or some random drivel to similar effect. I eventually gave up on that also. The amount of professional insecurity and immaturity is downright appalling. People having worked in the industry for decades were scared of newbies, and no one knew why. I for one, knew my first promotion wouldn't come near for the next ten years! And that's what the truth was and still is, and everyone would be out for blood, waiting to step on the next one to make a mistake.

So why did I keep hanging around if I didn't like it? Quite simply because I'd have to pay through my nose to get out, so I figured I'd rather stick around.

The industry is very open to new people, my advice? Create a fake lineage of Maharajas and Governers, make sure you haven't seen the world, have a liver of steel, you're sorted.

Ramblings of the bored mind

It feels kinda odd to be blogging again, somehow I seem to have gotten used to slacking in this department, a gap of five years is evident! My life here seems to have gathered some semblance of pace now, I have direction, or so I'd like to believe, I'm on my way to getting my health back. I may have found a place for a working space. Let's hope that comes through. My plans aren't so random and unrealistic anymore. I often think back upon my days in the tea gardens, I clearly remember my first day, not knowing where to start, calling everyone 'sir'. I remember how I didn't like it from the very first day. Closed gates always make me want to run, and boy were there a lot of closed gates. I had to learn a strange new language, deal with a volatile labor workforce with the collective intelligence of a doorknob, learn to treat leopards with disturbing nonchalance, pretend to be permanently angry, drink like a true alcoholic and develop an immunity to stupidity. Among others. My colleagues were nice people, but somehow I always sensed that they had given up on themselves and life in general. The fact that they were all more than 20 years older than me didn't quite help. It didn't take long before I was thrown into this pit of mindless madness like someone spun around one time too many in a game of blind man's buff after one bucket of whiskey too many.

One told me to talk to the bushes and hear them talk back.

I somehow enjoyed my moments of silence once I came back to the bungalow after work, which sadly were few and far in between. The evenings at the club involved 'sir-ing' and 'ma'm-ing' the entire crowd of middle aged lost souls, and listening to endless hours of drunken slurring about the men and their conquests during their days of yore, and how we drank like pussies and how I must bang whores with questionable levels of hygiene. I'd have to eat shit food and force myself nods of extreme excitement over the 'delicious food', which sometimes ranged from roadside samosas and ketchup sandwiches. Yes, two slices of bread, with ketchup in between. I'd have to engage in conversation ranging from, again, the current prices of whores, the amount of tea leaves we managed to get our slaves to pluck, and what new insect was chewing up the tea leaves.

I often looked around, fully conscious, and watch the happy faces nodding and laughing away in absolute delight. I often had deep philosophical thoughts running through my mind, which began and ended with "What the fuck?" Was I the only one awake? Or was I the only one sleeping? In a room full of the wrong ones, the right one is usually the one who becomes wrong. I assume that's what happened to me, and that's why I never fit in. I just didn't get it, all I had to do was abandon all sense of independent thought. It was that simple, and I just couldn't do it.

When the British first planted tea, they dug a hole 18 inches deep, and a foot wide, filled the hole with cowdung and what have you, and so the method followed suit forever, and there were volumes of books discussing and describing the exact same thing, over and over and over again. Tea today involves processes that were adopted from the very discovery of the plant, and yet it's treated as rocket science. Its nothing but a collection of numbers and measurements and bizarre units of measurement which I feel is present only to sound smart, but in reality is rather pointless. The world measures rainfall in millimeters, the tea gardens measure it in inches. See? Was it only me who could see the pointlessness of it all? Why couldn't I question the blatant stupidity of my boss and my superiors?

So there was this one time when the garden I was working in had to host dinner at the ghastly club, and in the midst of this high profile and extremely intense meeting, my boss goes, "yes, we will serve them snakes," o_O

WTF?

The rest of the meeting was lost to me as I sat there befuddled wondering if I really did hear what I just did, and I was mildly excited over trying out snakes! After much deliberation in my head, I realized that that he was Assamese, and he was genetically incapable of pronouncing "snacks" the way it should be. I smiled to myself and left it at that.