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.
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.
2 comments:
Such simple yet sincere thoughts. Would love to hear many such snippets of your time at the tea estate. Perhaps, the monotony and absurdity of your time there can be fodder for short stories non? :)
Oui Madame, I shall indeed do that, it shall be called Chaiwalla Bhaiya!
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