Teatime for the Firefly

by Shona Patel

  A wooden stile to keep out the geese led into the malibari. We stepped over it and the whole gaggle set up deafening honks of protest on the other side. The dogs jumped easily over the stile fanning their tails, looking happy at last to be rid of the nuisance.

  There was not much growing in the malibari besides chilies and tomatoes. But what tomatoes! I had never seen anything like them. They were a deep reddish-purple like clotted blood, monstrously clumped and falling off the vine. Simply magnificent.

  “Here, I’ll let ye pick,” Jimmy said, handing me an old pillowcase. “Take all ye want. I’ll ask my mali to put some seeds aside for ye.”

  “Oh, thank you! I did not dare to ask you for them.”

  “Hush, lass, why not? Y’saved my life, didn’t ye? Just don’t share them with anybody unless they save yours.”

  “I have never seen tomatoes like this,” I said.

  “Aye, it’s a rare variety,” Jimmy said. “They have a dense flavor and low water content.” A black-and-red-spotted ladybug was crawling up his shirtsleeve. He let it crawl on the stub of his missing forefinger and watched it fly away. “I got the seeds from Alan Hanks, the royal gardener at the Sudeley Castle. I give him Assam tea and he gives me seeds and cuttings. Did y’see the red flowers when we were driving up to the bungalow? He gave me those, too.”

  “What are they? Some kind of poppy?”

  “It’s a hybrid he’s developed from the Helen Elizabeth poppy variety. They grow only at the Sudeley Castle. But they seem to like it here in Assam. They’ve taken over the hill as y’see.”

  “They are spectacular.” The pillowcase was getting heavy. “I think that’s all the tomatoes I need.” I set the pillowcase down on an upturned wheelbarrow.

  He winked at me. “I know a secret spell to grow plants, lassie, that nobody knows.”

  I was intrigued. “What do you mean? What kind of spell?”

  He leaned forward conspiratorially. “It’s an old Celtic spell. What do y’know, my grandmother was a famous Irish witch. I can teach ye the charm, aye, if ye promise never to write it down.”

  I laughed. “I promise I won’t.”

  “Plant the tomato cuttings in early October and remember to water them with diluted milk and...”

  “Diluted milk!”

  “Aye, one cup to a pail of water. Say the spell over the young plants, lassie, when they are taking root and your tomatoes will overrun yer garden and grow plump as a milkmaid’s rump.”

  “What do you do with so many tomatoes?”

  “Oh, I give them to the servants, feed the cows—after I am done making my chutney, of course.”

  “You make chutney, too?”

  He winked. “Does that surprise ye, lassie? I’m not called Chutney Jim for nothing, y’know.”

  I looked at Jimmy O’Connor, this great big wall of a man with his fiery hair and kaleidoscopic eyes. He did not look like a Chutney Jim to me. The man was surprising in more ways than one.

  “Let’s get to my pantry and get ye a bottle. I’m making more next week. Ye’ll want my chutney recipe now, as well, won’t ye?”

  * * *

  Aynakhal

  16th May 1946

  My dear Dadamoshai,

  My pantry is full of chutney! The chutney is Jimmy O’Connor’s special recipe. The man is a genius if there ever was one. His bottle-khanna has been turned into a laboratory where all sorts of things brew, bubble, hatch and grow. There are jars of Kambucha mushrooms growing in tea solution; a homemade incubator with several dozen goose eggs hatching, and winemaking, and I don’t know what all. Jimmy has even invented his own pressure cooker—a rather untrustworthy device that sometimes shoots its contents up into the ceiling.

  This man has opened his heart and home to me, thanks to you, Dadamoshai. He is not considered the friendly sort and is generally misunderstood by people. I wish you could meet him. He is the most interesting man, and you should see his magnificent library of scientific books and his antique gun collection. Best of all, he tells the most exciting shikar stories—all true.

  Jimmy recently visited Alasdair in Dooars. Alasdair’s garden is in bad shape, he said. The new Indian owners have cut the tea pluckers’ pay and want to cut down one-third of the workforce. As you can imagine, the coolies have nowhere to go. They have been estranged from their old Adivasi way of life for several generations and tea plucking is all they know. So Alasdair is facing a lot of labor trouble in his garden.

  Things are changing in tea, Dadamoshai. Many British planters are leaving Assam. I think the Dega rhino case was a wake-up call. Tea companies can’t do much to protect their planters anymore.

  I was delighted to know you are in touch with Estelle Lovelace. Thank you for sending me a copy of her book. I will read it with great interest. Yes, I am well acquainted with Ginny Gilroy. She is a good friend of Mrs. McIntyre’s. Mrs. Gilroy is another avid gardener. But nobody can grow heirloom tomatoes like Jimmy O’Connor.

  With my love,

  Layla

  Jimmy O’Connor’s famous chutney recipe called for a unique blend of spices: dry roasted chilies, coriander and mustard seeds, ground in a mortar-pestle with malt vinegar and sea salt and cooked with tomatoes in that unreliable pressure cooker of his. The day we made the chutney, the pressure cooker hissed and spluttered and my sari was soiled.

  Manik came to pick me up from Jimmy O’Connor’s bungalow. I wanted to make a quick stop at the club store on our way home to pick up some baking powder. It was only minutes before the store’s closing time and I did not expect to find anybody there, but sure enough I had to bump into Laurie Wood. She looked curiously at my tomato-stained sari.

  “Oh, I was just making chutney with Jimmy O’Connor,” I blurted out.

  I immediately realized how it sounded, but it was too late.

  A sly look crept into her eyes. “Making chutney with Jimmy O’Connor, eh?”

  There was not much I could do. The cat ladies would have a good chinwag over that one, I could tell.

  * * *

  That year I took the blue ribbon at the flower show for both the heirloom tomatoes and the tomato chutney. Jimmy O’Connor, who was rather drunk, cheered noisily when I went up to collect my ribbon. In my little acceptance speech, I tried to give him credit, but just to embarrass me he yelled it was all hogwash and claimed not to know what I was talking about.

  Later, I overhead Betsy Lamont in the ladies’ room saying, “I can only imagine what Layla Deb gave Jimmy O’Connor in exchange for those tomatoes. These native women are so desperate. They won’t stop at anything to get what they want.”

  I pitied the cat ladies. They would never know the joy of true friendship between a man and woman. Jimmy O’Connor’s trust was a rare and precious gift, and it made me feel very special.

  CHAPTER 29

  The rainbird, the harbinger of the monsoons, started calling toward the end of May. Its plaintive cry—“make-more-pekoe, make-more-pekoe”—looped and twirled through the forest branches. The sky grew heavy and small drizzles fell, innocent and faltering at first, then in a steady drum of hoofbeats. Hundreds of miles to the south, the monsoon churned and roiled up the Bay of Bengal. The purple-black clouds swooped over the Assam Valley, the sky crashed open and a hard rain fell in flat, gray sheets, like steel.

  The Koilapani River, which cut through both Aynakhal and Dega tea estates, swelled to four times its size. The floodwater uprooted trees and carried huge mounds of debris and vegetation swirling and bumping in its tide.

  June limped into July. The air grew thick, and Assam turned into the abject armpit of the nation: the most dreaded and undesirable place on earth. By noon, the sun had been swallowed by a white-hot sky and humidity weighed down like wet burlap on all the miserable creatures below. The nights were even worse, sticky and
rancid, with no respite.

  For planters it was the busiest time of the year. If the monsoons arrived on time and the pruning, fertilizing and pest control had been attended to during the year, tea bushes flushed at an hysterical rate, and the succulent tips were ready for plucking every five to seven days. If a single cycle was missed, the leaf became coarse and useless. This meant double work and wasted manpower because the outgrown leaf still had to be broken off by hand so that the bush could regenerate new growth. Keeping track of the sections to be plucked and managing the labor was the assistant’s job.

  The season was short and every productive minute meant profit, and profit promised bonuses for both labor and management. Pluckers worked in the rain with woven bamboo rain covers over their heads and baskets. Soggy leaves could weigh down and rot, so the baskets had to be emptied frequently. Every batch of leaves had to be monitored for quality. If assistants were not watchful, lazy pluckers would throw in coarse leaves and stalk and this would lower the grade of tea. The Jemindars, haggard and red-eyed, yelled at the pluckers, assistants yelled at the Jemindars and Mr. McIntyre yelled at anything that moved or breathed.

  Every able hand was put to work. Children plucked weeds and gathered broken leaf tips off the ground. Toddlers minded newborn infants in thatched shelters. If the baby cried it was taken to the mother to be breastfed while she continued plucking. Tractors putted up and down to the factory. The plucking schedule was ramped up to four shifts. It sometimes began as early as 3:00 a.m., the pluckers working by kerosene lamps. The last shift ended at 10:00 p.m. But the factory rumbled on all night.

  This was the life of a tea garden blessed by a rainbow. Not many other gardens in the Mariani district were so lucky that year. The tea gardens to the east of Aynakhal suffered a freak hailstorm that sliced off the tops of every tea bush, cleanly as if with a razor. Within a few hours the entire year’s profit lay wilting on the ground. Other tea gardens were still recovering from the earthquake or embroiled in labor problems. But for Aynakhal it was a year of abundance.

  Tea wives fled during summer months, retreating to cooler climes, to get away from the foul weather, and to escape their even fouler husbands. Summer was no time to be around a tea planter.

  I could see why. It was difficult to be around Manik. He chain-smoked, stank of stale whiskey, and was red-eyed, uncommunicative and inconsolable. He was rarely home for meals, ate sandwiches and cold cutlets at odd hours and, if he came home in the afternoon, fell asleep on the veranda with his boots on. Most nights he passed out like a wounded beast only to be woken up at odd hours to be summoned to the factory to troubleshoot some dilemma or another. It could be a machinery breakdown, a brawl or some other foul-up. Manik was on call twenty-four hours a day. He was like a man with a toothache: he could think of nothing else. Everything had ceased to exist in his world, including me. My presence made him feel guilty. He was unable to give of himself, and he hated for me to see him this way.

  I suggested I go visit Dadamoshai for a while.

  “Excellent idea.” Manik was visibly relieved. “Stay for a month. Spend some time with the old man. I will come and get you as soon as the workload lightens. Hopefully we will have exceeded our production targets this year and there will be a good bonus. We’ll celebrate when you get back.”

  There might be another reason to celebrate, as well, I thought. I had missed my first period, but I wanted to be sure before I told Manik I was pregnant.

  Dadamoshai was scheduled to meet with a publisher for a book on which he had collaborated with Boris Ivanov, and had to leave for Calcutta the day after I arrived. He was so rushed and distracted I hardly got time to speak to him. That evening he had a long meeting with a group of people inside his study. They were all unfamiliar faces and the only person I recognized was Amrat Singh, the Police Chief. By the time they left it was well past our dinnertime.

  “There is this matter of Prasad Sen’s daughter,” Dadamoshai said to me at the dinner table. “She has returned to her father’s house. There may be a court case.”

  I stopped eating to stare at him in surprise. “Kona? My goodness, what has happened?”

  “Her husband died and her in-laws abandoned her. It’s a pathetic story, maiyya. Moon will give you the details. She will be here on Thursday with the children. In the meantime, if there is a crisis and Kona comes to this house seeking help, Chaya knows what to do. Bithi Mondol, the social worker—she was the elderly lady who was here today—will need to be contacted immediately. Kona may need police protection. Amrat Singh knows about this. I don’t expect anything to happen during the two weeks I am gone, but I am telling you all this just in case.”

  I barely had time to absorb what he was saying when Dadamoshai pushed back his chair and got up from the table. His dinner was almost untouched.

  “You must excuse me, maiyya, but if I don’t get my papers in order I will miss the train. I have to be at the station at dawn. Please finish eating properly and get some rest. We will have plenty of time to talk when I get back.”

  * * *

  I thought about Kona a great deal the next day. Dadamoshai’s cryptic words kept playing in my mind. Kona involved in a court case. Why would she need police protection? I wondered. I walked past the Sens’ house on my way to the river, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. From the high river embankment I could look over the walls of the pink house and see a slice of the courtyard. The first thing that caught my eye were two white borderless saris—the kind worn by Hindu widows—fluttering on a clothesline. The windows of the house were tightly shuttered. A moldy-looking female peacock walked by pecking in the yard but not a single soul stirred in that heavily fortressed, strawberry-pink mansion.

  Aynakhal

  24th July 1946

  My darling,

  It’s agony here without you. The lack of sleep plus not having you next to me doubles my misery. I have moved into the guest room just so I don’t miss you so much.

  Production is at a feverish pitch. This is one of our best years. As an incentive Mr. McIntyre has promised the pluckers an additional bonus so work goes on nonstop. Our new tractor broke down and the spare part is taking forever to arrive. This has backed up production and caused some problems but we are managing.

  Yesterday I ran over a twelve-foot python (a monster!) in Section 3 with the jeep. The laborers cut open its stomach and found a baby goat inside. I have taken a photo to show you.

  Wendy has been hospitalized with typhoid fever. She is out of danger now, but it was a close call.

  I have some sad news but I might as well tell you. Mr. McIntyre has announced his early retirement. He is leaving Aynakhal end of this year and going back to his hometown of Grantown in Scotland to take over the family distillery. On a happier note: it looks like Aynakhal will hit a production record this year and there will be a BIG bonus for us all. We will be rich, darling wife, and you can have anything you want in the world.

  All I ever want now and forever is you.

  M.

  One day I noticed a slim lavender envelope, postmarked Cornwall, England, for Dadamoshai in the mail. It was from Estelle Lovelace. I placed the letter prominently on top of his desk and hoped I would be there to watch his face when he picked it up upon his return. Perhaps I would detect a glimmer of excitement in his eye, but with Dadamoshai it was always hard to tell because he hid his feelings well.

  Moon finally arrived with the children. Anik was now a serious young man of five—a self-conscious, unhuggable age—who walked around with the aloof air of a preoccupied professor. He had been soundly chastised by his rascal sister, Aesha, a tiny hellfire not quite two. Aesha had coal-black eyes in a small pixie face and deep dimples like her mother. Moon said if Anik had aged her by ten years, Aesha had aged her by another twenty.

  It was early afternoon and the children were asleep. Moon and I sat on the porch steps o
f Dadamoshai’s house eating green mangoes sprinkled with chili and salt. Sharing this tangy delicacy brought back memories of our childhood summers. Now pregnant, I craved sour mangoes all the time.

  “Moon, what happened to Kona?” I asked.

  Moon looked at me levelly. “Dadamoshai didn’t tell you the whole story, did he? Kona’s husband died. He had a sudden attack of meningitis. He was dead within days. It’s very sad because Kona has two small children.”

  “What is this about a court case?”

  “Yes. It may come to that. You see, Kona’s in-laws are very conservative and very superstitious. After her husband died, they packed Kona off to the widow’s ashram in Vrindavan. It’s a terrible place, Layla. Widows are forced to shave off their hair, dress in white rags and beg for alms outside the temple. It was heartbreaking to see her.”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Dadamoshai had told me about the infamous widows’ ashram in Vrindavan, one of India’s holiest cities. The inhumane treatment of Hindu widows was a social disgrace, he said.

  “You saw Kona? Begging in Vrindavan?” I said, aghast.

  “No, no, not me. Spinster Aunt did.”

  “What was Spinster Aunt doing in Vrindavan?”

  “That old bat has a religious streak, as you know. She goes to holy places to pray for wicked souls like me. Spinster Aunt went to Vrindavan on a pilgrimage. She saw the widows lined up outside the temples, banging their begging bowls on the ground, making a terrible din, she said. They are mostly toothless hags but some young ones, too, abandoned by their families. Spinster Aunt was coming out of the main temple when this young widow grabbed her sari with scabby hands and cried in a shrill voice, ‘You know me. You know me. I am Kona. Please, help me!’ The girl was wearing a torn, dirty sari, and there were all these mangy dogs, her pets, sniffing around her. Spinster Aunt said she was thin and bony and looked just like a beggar.”