A Bangalorean’s blog: some travel notes; books, the news, the Mac; some thoughts; and a Malnad Diary

A truck from the mines of Bellary speeds into Sakleshpur, part of a stream of identical trucks behind it, and ahead of it. Its load lies flat up to the top edge of the carrier and is rarely covered. 

Shree Advani is quoted today in banner lines on the front page of The Hindu: he has “never seen so much despair in India’s people”. He has the nuclear pact on his mind, just as his colleagues who are arrayed with and against him, as also our noisy zealous media. I don’t know that all my fellow citizens are despairing, for I have not his national apparatus to sense the mood of the nation. Shree Advani is an honorable man, but I am watching the government his party runs in my province, and that government is owned and run by the mine-mafia of Bellary, and the mafia has been buying legislators and propping men of its choice as ministers with a brazenness that only Bihar has experienced. One lone man*, who used to write great literature, whose once-robust body is now frail with age, is speaking with courage of the peril this new style of governance bodes for us. The rest—the intellectuals, the politicians, the bold entrepreneurs, the software sultans—are all silent. I can confirm to Shree Advani that I’m feeling a never-before-felt deep despair, even if for another reason—that I, too, am silent.
_________________________________
*U.R.Ananthamurthy

…any which way we can.

Some like me are half-settling in Sakleshpur. Some illustrious ones are leaving. Like Shankar Shetru.

We telephoned him and he offered to tell us how to plant and maintain pepper and he asked us to meet him with a two-hundred page notebook, and with two hours on hand. But he is seventy-six years old and has too much to tell, and he spoke of pepper not at all, but narrated instead his life story. We forgot about the pepper and listened.

He came to Sakleshpur a teenager and enrolled as a plantation-hand. The plantations were owned by the British then, and the manager of the plantation was a white man. Everything worked to neatly written-down systems, and not a step was missed in the work of the plantation, and pilferage was impossible. Only in that time of discipline was Indian coffee good coffee. Not a planter exists today who runs a plantation like that, nor delivers coffee of a quality like theirs.

Somewhere in this period, Shetru, lacking education, with only hard work to his merit, rose to become a writer. He was tough, straight. His superior—a manager—was cheating and wanted Shetru to join in the scheming. Shetru resisted and eventually caused the manager to be sacked.

When all the English left India, a new chief came who was half-English and half-Malayalee but appeared very English. His sisters were very like full-white women too, and they ran the plantation together with him, and they were all terrific administrators. The women played bhayankara badminton. (Shetru paused at this moment, and wondered out loud where those unmarried women went, and so abruptly.) Soon the planters were all Indian, and Shetru began to dream of owning one himself. He put together his first plantation slowly, then another, and another. We’ve seen two of them, and they’re immaculate. He meant that each would go to a son, but the sons are not keen to come back. One son, for instance, has studied at the Indian Institute of Science, has worked in the USA, and has returned to Bangalore where he works for a US corporation. He’s a doctorate, and though he often comes home to see father, he won’t settle here.

A few months ago, someone took Shetru to a Bangalaore hospital for just a check, but the doctors began a long process on him and detained him for days, weeks, and a month passed. You’re doing this only to build your revenues, he protested to them. They smiled at him and asked him to stay a little longer, now that he had completed so many diagnostic tests and only a few remained. A fifth week passed. Shetru threw their books and their bottles at them and stormed out of the hospital at the end of the sixth week. Sitting erect on a tall-backed wooden chair he told us he’s worked sixty years with his hands, standing on his legs, and nothing is wrong with him that he should lie in a hospital.

But he fell while walking in one of his plantations some weeks ago. He cannot go into them anymore, so he’s already signed a sale agreement for the plantation round his home. He asked us without salesmanship if we would buy his plantation at Kerodi, a piece that sits by a vast section of the picturesque Gorur backwaters.

In mid-July he’ll leave Sakleshpur and go away to settle in a town in South Kanara. Somewhere in this story he said the planter should walk everywhere in his plantation every morning—the trees and the coffee seek his smell. Shetru is a steely stern man, and only once (maybe I imagined it) I saw emotion steal through, when he said the plants and the trees are as children to him.

They’ll pine for his fragrance. Are the new owners of his plantation a worthy substitute?

The location of the new Ossoor Restaurant caused such envy in me, the lush green in the trees and in the coffee all round the restaurant (and across the highway on the front) paled before the green on my face. The Ossoor plantations run hundreds of acres each, and probably total to some thousand acres across Sakleshpur. The boys cleaning the restroom at the restaurant were speaking a language which when I asked they said was Hindi. “Kaaheka Hindi?” I asked them, wherefrom is your Hindi? “Bihar, saab,” they told me, delighted and astonished at being spoken to. Here’s how the corporate planters are managing labor-shortage in plantation country: importing them from as far as Bihar.

Balan has an idea to prepare for the imminent shortage of hands we’ll face in the picking season. He wants to bring in from Chitradurga some lambanis, gypsies, and house them in our labor line (a row of  dark  sooty rooms that we have inherited with the purchase of the plantation). He says more than one family will stay in a room. I wanted to ask: how will they cook their separate meals and do other things like, say, making love? I checked myself. A certain reticence is expected of the owner, the saukarru. I asked him to hold his idea for a while.

At the Planters Club, if you order forty-five minutes ahead, they’ll serve you a terrific meal in the local style. At breakfast, they can only serve bread, jam and omelette (and instant coffee in this coffee town!) because they cannot find enough help. Their guest house has been running full for the last thirty days.

Almost none of the labor on our plantation are young. The few men we have, they suffer their slow, reluctant walk on filaria-ridden legs. The women are stronger, are more able (not eating paan masala, not alcoholic, not smoking, not refusing tasks that demand bending to the ground), but the pressure from them is to leave work sooner than closing-time, every day.

We have a new friend, a fifty-year old wiry planter whose rugged weathered face is proof of his toil; he carries his success on the farm with quiet dignity, and his face breaks often into a shy attractive grin—at which point he is a fine study in humility. He has been incredibly helpful and shows a genuine concern for us, for our newness to the place, and he worries regarding our inexperience. Sujaya pointed out our women to him, about their slipper-clad feet immersed in slush in these monsoons—the women have sores between their toes, and Sujaya asked: “Shouldn’t they wear boots?” He answered without lowering his voice, almost within earshot of the women: “They’re used to it. Now, don’t pity them so much that you rush and buy boots for them.”

The young ones have been going away to Bangalore, where in the new enterprises employees enjoy respect, hot meals, healthy workplaces, and the promise of a career. Their parents and the parents preceding them have never known ambition, have never dared to aspire. In Bangalore, anything is possible for these youth.

Can the planters afford what the businesses of Bangalore offer their employees? A planter invited me home, and politely asked me not to pay the labor (and the writer) “too much”: “We’ll all suffer.” The suffering he spoke of is real: the plantation takes a year of effort and investment, is dependent on the right amount of rain arriving in time, and on the rise and fall in prices in Brazil and Colombia and Vietnam. Some years are good, some years are disasters, and good planters measure their earnings as an average over years. To counter risk, small and medium planters do not pay electricity bills, nor repay loans (expecting a waiver from the government at election time).

At harvest this year, many planters had no labor for picking berries and they lost the crop they had struggled to grow. So labor-shortage is the severest risk for the survival of coffee plantations in Malnad.

What is the collective plan to make work fruitful for those young who prefer farm-life to the city? This is not a challenge for the labor department; rather, if they wish that the lovely plantations should remain, that they should prosper, then planters need urgently to hatch a plan to make farm-work rewarding for workers; and they should create conditions for the workers to feel as stakeholders in the success of the plantation. Yields from the plantation should be brought to levels that allow for rewarding workers. Are some planters meeting somewhere and generating ideas?

I wish to meet them.

See also: Why did you come here?

Large tree-trunks lie uprooted on both sides of the highway for miles. Their giant roots, snapped, are covered in soil that drip red now in rain, so the trunks appear to be bleeding, and now and then, because there are so many of them, the vision of an ended epic-battle between Bheemas and Ghatodgajas flits across my mind. Here and there the contractors have set upon the trunks the machines that haul them into trucks. While the trunks wait to be taken, where no one is around, villager-couples saw off little branches to take them home for firewood—wispy women, hair loose and full of energy like Maramma, and withered men, both struggling with the saw, all in furtive hurry.

****************************************

It was overcast today, but the boulders on the hills caught the light and glowed while all around there hung a grey-green gloom that takes me to a dreamy plane. A hill came up which resembled a lion, crouched and in a fixed gaze—in its glow it appeared sacred. My vivid memory, though, is of the hill with, at its feet, row upon row of coconut palms whose branches strained skyward and seemed to pull the trees to their toe-tips; the lower branches stretched sideways, their tips dipping—trees like ten-thousand tall ballerinas, still and frozen on the plains between Hassan and Bangalore.

I’m reading it a second time, slowly, only a few pages a day. When Bharat put the book in my hands twenty-five years ago, I had enjoyed more its prose—I had cringed at Naipaul’s penetrating observation, had felt terribly exposed. I am now able to see the book in the eye, and there is fun reading it in this time of rapid change, of stupendous transformation. The prose even now entertains, and I am excited at the next book I’ll read, which Wounded Civilization points to: R.K. Narayan’s Mr. Sampath.

Technorati Tags: books

I’m puzzled at Dharmappa. His war with the writer has been about wanting to send labor to us. And, after that—so the writer says—to sell us saplings from his nursery, and to also ask for a loan to buy a second jeep. It is ten days since we relented and asked him to bring us labor, although, through him, they are expensive. We asked him not so much to help him as to help ourselves—the writer is short of help in this time of rain. His people are busy pulling out the perky shoots that have sprung from the wrong branches. Those workers that he can spare are spraying the peppers, so there are no hands to remove the broad-leaf weeds that are soaring skyward at top speed, threatening to eat away all the expensive nutrition we’ve fed the coffee. (The fertilizer is more expensive than the money we paid for it. It is in such short supply that last week a man was killed in Haveri rioting for it.) Every day Dharmappa telephones with a new story, and in the end brings up another matter.

He says the threatening call the writer says he got two weeks ago is a lie. He wants the exact time of the call so he can go to the telephone exchange and verify that a call was made at all. I’m intrigued by this tenacious hounding: Dharmappa is a busy man, and though when he visits us Sunday evenings at the plantation his loose white shirt appears clean and crisp, and the pleats are neat and straight on his wide trousers, one can see he’s been working hard all day, lugging in his open-jeep men and women and materials from plantation to plantation and from plantations to town. A trip to the exchange costs him time he can hardly afford.

He has shriveled further and has begun to look older in spite of his jet-black hair. I couldn’t look at him last Sunday, when he stood before me, arms behind, one hand clasping the elbow of the other, his body seized tight and crumpled by his years.

Technorati Tags: coffee, malnad, plantation

The clouds are dark and heavy and promising, but they aren’t downing rain yet. They have brought on a chill that Duke and Raja are comfortable in. The two wear European coats in this tropical place, and they can’t take them off. How much hotter for them, the summer that went!