Many of us have bad fathers, because it is our mothers who do all the picking, and work from muster at dawn, and if our fathers have nothing to do, they take the money from our mothers and go and drink it all away, and they come home drunk on arrack every night until they die from it. Almost no fathers do any picking. Sometimes our fathers and mothers take their daughters to a dorai and say, ‘Do you like any of these? You can have one if you like.’ And then the family gets money from her, and she lives in a nice house a long way from the house where his wife is, and he comes to stay very often and their children go to a school at Hill House in Nuwara Eliya that is specially for them, and the man has two separate families, and sometimes more than that because the two wives are not enough for them, and their native wife is happy because she has children to love and sufficient money for herself and her relatives, and she has times when he is not there to trouble her, and when he does arrive, then they are glad to see each other, because they do not wear each other’s patience out by living together continually.
My father was not a bad father who drank my mother’s money, no, he was a good man, he was a devout Catholic like most of us Tamils up here in this plantation, and he devoted himself to St Joseph because St Joseph was the father of Jesus. We had a picture of St Joseph on the wall, with the baby Jesus in his arms, unlike the others, who always had a Mother of God, or a Jesus with the Bleeding Heart. My father worked in the tea factory on the drying machine, and because of him the tea was never attacked by mildew, and because of him we had more money than most people, and he and my mother put their money together so we could afford to cook indoors on a petrol stove instead of on twigs and prunings, which was a blessing in June and July and October, and my father and mother had nice shoes for Sunday instead of chappals.
My grandparents came from India. They were Adi Dravida, the lowest caste, and life at home was a misery greater than anyone can imagine, and they heard there was work in the mountains of Ceylon and they came in little dhonis, which are the ones that have a little extra hull out on one side, and they came here to pick coffee, because before there was tea all the plantations were coffee, until the coffee all died of disease and something else had to be grown instead. And the coffee-picking season was at the same time as the north-east monsoon, and my family were in four boats, and only one of them arrived at Mannar, and all the rest were drowned at sea. And these survivors walked along the sand to Puttalam, and then they entered the jungle along the Deduru Oya River, and they walked through this jungle towards Dambulla, and there was a dorai called Cornelius Bassett, and he was the grandfather of the master we have now. When this dorai Bassett wanted workers, he would take his horse and ride to Dambulla and Matale, and he would find a high place and look out for the smoke of campfires, and when he found the camps he would come and recruit the coolies.
In those days the forests of the hills were still being cleared by fire and axe and elephant, and there was the shouting of mahouts and a great smoke over the mountains. And they were given rice, but it was paid for from wages so they had almost nothing at the end of the season.
And there were those who went home to India after the season, and then they came back the next year, and my grandfather said, ‘This is not for us. Why should we walk 150 miles every year? And why should half of us be lost in the sea every year? And why should we go home to a place that is worse every year, and where we are treated with contempt?’
And the Singhalese who were here already blamed us for bringing smallpox and cholera, and they hated us. There were coolies dying on the roadsides in those days, and on the long walk through the jungle two of my grandfather’s brothers died of malaria. And because of all this the dorais collected money and built a hospital for us in Kandy, but we don’t go there very much. We have our own doctor who is skilled in Ayurveda.
My grandparents saw how good it was to be a coolie here, and they decided never to go back to India, because here the treatment was better and there aren’t any Hindus on this estate who treat us like filth, and the Buddhists stay down below and laze about. They say that we Tamils are like the Jews, but we don’t know Jews, apart from the ones who are mentioned in the Bible. They must be picking tea somewhere else, like this China that I have heard of, where the tea came from in the first place.
My grandparents became Christian because a preacher arrived, and he said, ‘In God’s Kingdom there is no Adi Dravida, there is no caste, there are no Dalits and untouchables, because in God’s eyes all are equal, and God loves you all the same, and if you believe in Him He will admit you to paradise where there is no more pain and all the dead will rise again on the last day, and you will see again all those you lost on your long journey.’ And he washed their heads in water, and said that the bread he was giving was God’s body, but in the form of bread, and that the wine was God’s blood, but in the form of wine. We are very dark, but this preacher was of a light brown colour because he was descended from the Portuguese, and he had learned Tamil especially so that he could speak to us, and we took Portuguese surnames, though many of us kept our Tamil first names, or we used both, and because we were all Adi Dravida we were already nearly equals, and so we liked this new religion, and we did not go home to India ever again, and my father says, ‘Why would we go home to hell?’ and this preacher was named Fernando da Silva, which is why many of us are called da Silva, because he was like a new father to my grandparents, and they were like his children.
It wasn’t the custom for the dorai to come down to the lines. When they wanted to see us, they called us to muster with a horn, or whistles, and drums. We liked it when the muster was called, because it meant that something was going to happen. The dorais made our little ones go to their school and we got one free meal and we had a native schoolmaster. Ours was not very nice, he would strike our knuckles with the thin edge of the ruler, and throw the blackboard rubber at us if we smiled, but he is the reason that I am able to write lists and add things together accurately, and also he is the reason that I know about Queen Victoria and King George, and a poem in English about an eagle. We did all our writing in little trays of sand with our fingers, and I still think about how nice that was, the fingers moving in the little crystals that sparkled if you held one grain on the end of your finger and put it up to the sunlight.
The dorais gave us the little rainproof houses with one room, and they left us alone, apart from when the government inspectors came to make sure that we were well, and then there was much scurrying about, making everything clean and tidy. We lived together as people who live in a village. When I was a child we had no sanitation at all, and we had to go out into the woods or the plantation, and this was not a good thing for the women because there were bad men and drunken men who might wait for them. I didn’t like it because I am frightened of poochies, especially spiders, and there were very many poochies everywhere. If there was a poochie in the house I used to call my brothers to get rid of it, because boys like poochies, and they put them down your neck when you are not looking, and run away laughing. We did have water from a tap, but we also had a stream running down the mountain, and that water was much nicer.
It was dorasani Rosie who broke the custom and began to come down to the lines. She was concerned about our health, and already worked in the new clinic that dorai Bassett had set up, but we never trusted their medicine and we used our own and only went to theirs when our cures failed, and dorasani Rosie said we should go to theirs first because theirs was better, and it only did not work because we always went too late. Sometimes she was very angry with us and had no patience, we frustrated her, but she was a good woman who was doing her best for us when she did not have to, and she tried to persuade us to have inoculations so that illness could not strike us down, but what really killed us was the hard work and childbirth for the women, and the alcohol amongst the men. We women had terrible pain in the neck and shoulders in old age because of the tea sacks we carried on our heads
all our lives, but we didn’t like the new ones that dorai Bassett tried to make us use, and we just left them hanging on the pegs and used our old ones because it was so easy to toss the leaves into them.
Dorasani Rosie had brown hair and very blue eyes, and the kind of skin that reddens in the sun and has freckles, which look like a kind of disease, but not a serious one, and you do get used to seeing them and you stop noticing. She was taller than us, but not fat, and she liked to put on shoes and go walking on the estate with her little girl and she was a very sweet little girl who liked to hold our hands, and she had a toy bear that was called French Bear, and usually she had her thumb in her mouth. For quite a long time she only miaowed like a cat, instead of speaking. Dorasani Rosie let her play with our children, which was not normal for the masters although it did happen, and little children don’t notice what colour anyone is, or not for very long.
It was dorasani Rosie who decided that we must have sanitation, and because it was too lengthy to put one device in every house on account of all the pipes and the digging up, she had a block of latrines put at one end of the lines and another at the other end, and near each of them was dug a very deep pit and we were paid for digging the pits which we enjoyed doing until we hit the rock, and then a pipe was sent from the latrines to the pit, and another pipe was put at the top which ran some way down the mountain in case the pit was to overflow. The idea was that the excrement would soak into the earth. We did not believe that it would work, but it did. Every year the pits were emptied out and the dung was spread on the vegetable patches. This was all dorasani Rosie’s innovation, and we were very grateful to her and very fond of her, because she was a good woman who seemed to love us. And it was true that afterwards we had less illness in our stomachs, and the women were safer.
And so I swear by the Virgin and all the saints that I meant her no injury.
Dorasani Rosie and dorai Pitt were very happy together when they arrived. In their garden they would hold hands when they looked at the roses. Dorai Pitt often had the little girl on his shoulders. They played tennis together on Sundays after church, and he went to Nuwara Eliya to play golf, but he never stayed long at the Hill Club or the other one, and he was always back soon on his motorcycle, and when he came home he would toot the horn so that dorasani Rosie and Esther could come out and kiss him. At that time they were an example of how to be married without unhappiness.
Then dorasani Rosie gave birth to a monster which had all its guts on the outside, and after that nothing was the same. She became very quiet and although she carried on her working at the clinic, her servants said she spent a lot of time praying and was becoming a holy woman who was disconnected from the world. It was Preethi who mostly looked after Esther, and she stopped being interested in telling the servants what they had to do, so the head servant had to make up the orders, and write in the beef book, and organise the beef box that was delivered every week, and make sure that dorai Pitt’s letters were given to the tappul who is the letter coolie, and buy things from the tambies who come from India to peddle their spoons and whistles and allsorts. He said that the masters got through very many goat chops, and called it mutton, and he did not understand why they did not want to have more variety.
It was at this time that much of the happiness slipped out of their door and left the house, and it even affected the little girl, because this was when she began to talk by miaowing instead of speaking. I know this because at Christmas we take our presents to the masters, and they give us presents in return. On that Christmas we gave them half a goat, and fourteen coconuts and some bread, and they gave us steel pans and some fireworks and a small cake each. I saw the little girl, and she miaowed at me, so I pretended to comb my whiskers, and she laughed. Dorasani Rosie was often very angry with her because of the miaowing, but dorai Pitt seemed not to mind very much at all, and sometimes he would miaow back, and they would have a strange conversation in this manner. We often thought that the white masters were a little mad. For example, no one could see the point of all the sports they liked to play, such as tennis, which is the hitting of a hollow ball back and forth over a net which would be better used for fishing, and croquet, which is the hitting of a wooden ball with a large wooden hammer through hoops set in the ground, and golf, which takes a great deal of land out of cultivation, just as the tea took away the forests, but the course does look nice, and every night they remove the flags from the holes because otherwise people come in and steal them, and quite often the little boys go and look for lost balls and sell them back to the players, and every year the rich Singhalese who are white apart from their colour come from Colombo and play all at the same time, and then they leave Nuwara Eliya again. That week is called Blackberry Week by the white masters.
It was explained to me that the point of the sports was to have fun and to keep the body well, if you are an idle person who has no real work to do. I have never played sport, so I don’t know if it would be good for someone like me, and in any case, I am a woman, and I was always tired from the picking and the walking about on hillsides, and the carrying of the sacks of leaves.
There was a day when the flamboyant trees were all in blossom, just after the new moon celebration, and dorai Pitt came down with dorasani Rosie, and I could see that a wall had come up between them because they were walking apart though side by side, she did not have her arm through his, and they were talking only in little morsels, and looking away from each other. I thought he seemed angry and that she was sad.
Now, I was squatting by the doorway, shaving a block of jaggery with a knife, because I wanted the sweetness in a drink, and I looked up and realised that dorai Pitt was observing me. He was curious about everything, and always wanted to know how everything was done, and so I knew he was watching me not as a woman but as someone shaving a block of jaggery.
Then our eyes met, and I felt fate like my father’s hand on my shoulder. I looked down, because I am modest, but then I looked back up, and our eyes met again, and he smiled at me. Then he made me laugh by twitching the end of his nose, and I put my hand to my mouth.
Dorasani Rosie said something sharp to him, and he turned away and they continued down the lines, and she was pointing to the roofs, where they were torn, and he was making notes in a small book, and she was pointing to the ground and making gestures, and so I am sure she was talking about improvements, because not long afterwards some materials arrived in hackeries, and we were put to work to improve our houses and dig a channel for the rain down the middle of the path, lined with concrete and covered over with slabs for walking upon. After that the road was much less messy for us when it was wet.
Now, ever afterwards, when dorai Pitt and I crossed in our paths he would raise a hand and greet me with a smile, and I used to arrange it so that there was more chance of our paths crossing, which was easy because there was a routine the dorais liked to enforce, and usually one knew where they were.
I didn’t do this because I am shameless, but because I was enchanted. Everybody was surprised that he had not taken up with the little girl’s ayah, because Preethi was very beautiful and very sweet, and so, when I looked at him, it was with a heart that was open, because his had not been closed. He was quite thin, so he seemed tall when he was not, and his legs did seem very long. His eyes were blue, like dorasani Rosie’s, and he had a neat black moustache, and he had his hair held down with some kind of grease that smelled quite nice, and I don’t know what it was, it wasn’t coconut oil, and his hair was shiny black, with a little grey at the temples. His hands had long fingers with the tips a little bit like spades, and when he talked he waved them about much more than the other masters did. When he was annoyed he swore in a language that was not English or Tamil. They were not words that any of us understood. Sometimes when he went for long journeys on his motorcycle he would come back sunburned apart from the place where his goggles had been, and this gave his face a funny appearance that m
ade me smile when I saw it.
I am a small woman, and my mother said I had the bones of a bird, but I am strong, and I can carry my load all day as well as any other woman. A man could get his thumb and forefinger around my wrist without touching me. My hair was long and very black, and when I brushed it, it was beautiful. I had coconut oil for it.
Now, I knew that dorai Pitt had been a hero of the war that had taken so many white men away from the Ceylon Planters Rifles, and so I was not only in love with his appearance and his manner, but I also admired him, because bravery and honour are very great things.
One day I encountered him alone on the mountainside. It was the day after a thunderstorm when none of us could go out, and the lightning had been flashing across the sky, and the thunder had been making big echoes that went from mountain to mountain, it always filled us with awe, even though we had known these storms all our lives, and the sun had disappeared behind the blackest clouds, and the rain had come down so hard that it made little mists that rose out of every corner, like ghosts. On the day after this, he was sitting on a rock, enjoying the sunshine above the tea bushes, looking out over the valley, with his hands on his knees, and he was throwing seeds to a little squirrel. I believe that a man who is kind to small animals must have a good heart. When I saw him I stopped, like a wild animal that has suddenly seen the hunter. A woman fears to be alone with a man to begin with, even if she likes him. But then he saw me before I could leave.
‘Samadara,’ he said, ‘vanakkam.’
I knew he had been learning Tamil because he understood us without speaking to us very much, but somehow I had not expected him to speak to me in my own language. I said, ‘Naan nandraak irrukkiren, neengal?’ and these are all pleasantries about ‘how are you’ and so on, such as one always says.