Teatime For The Firefly

After four days, the postman finally resumed his rounds. I saw him lean his bicycle on the front gate and walk up the garden path, sifting through the letters. There was a small package for me.

It was professionally wrapped in brown paper, tied neatly with white string and fastened with red lacquer seals. There was a return label that read The Oxford Book Suppliers Ltd. and a Calcutta address. I opened it quickly to find a slim volume of Tagore’s poems, Gitanjali. It was a beautiful handmade book, bound in red silk with a gold-patterned border. It reminded me of a wedding sari. I flipped it open to a page that held a bookmark. The bookmark was cream-colored, die-cut of nubbly handmade paper with a block-printed gold paisley motif. The name and address of the bookstore was printed below it. I read the poem on the marked page, my heart beating wildly.

Pluck this little flower and take it, delay not! I fear lest it droop and drop into the dust.

I may not find a place in thy garland, but honor it with a touch of pain from thy hand and pluck it. I fear lest the day end before I am aware, and the time of offering go by.

Inside the cover of the book, Manik had inscribed For you in an elegant scrawl that ran right across the page. It was signed with an M. Mysteriously obtuse, no names mentioned anywhere. Inside was a folded note.

Dear Layla,

I came across this book of Tagore’s poems and thought of you. Please accept this small gift as a remembrance of our talks together.

Manik

I could envision him scrawling across the page, the nib of his fountain pen catching slightly on the rough fibers of the handmade paper. Was it a coincidence that the bookmark had been on that particular page? Of course not! I chided myself. He was just a friend, nothing more. Yet what if...? Tiny tendrils of hope pushed through my brain.

That night I slept with the book and Manik’s handkerchief under my pillow. I had the strangest dream. Manik Deb was standing in a lily pond among the reeds and shaking out the pages of the silk-covered book. Hundreds of fireflies fell out into the water. They spun around in dizzy circles, sizzling like cumin seeds in hot oil before their lights extinguished one by one. At the far end of the pond, on the opposite bank I could see a small girl stretching out her thin arms toward him. “Look at me, Dada, I can fly!” she cried in a chirping voice. But Manik did not see or hear her. He just continued opening the pages of the book and releasing the fireflies.

It was then that I woke up.

* * *

It is hard to describe the emotional turmoil I went through in the weeks that followed. I felt hopelessly conflicted. There was so much I wanted to believe and so much I dared not. A streak of guilt coursed through my mind every time I thought about Manik Deb. Our society was bound by unwritten rules and I had overstepped an invisible line. Accepting a gift of love poems from another woman’s fiancé was as illicit as being kissed. Yet it was deliciously arousing and I felt hopelessly drawn.

I could have brushed off Manik’s gesture, put the book on my shelf and gone on with my life. Yet I clung to it like my last, slim, red-and-gold hope on earth. I caressed the silk cover, kissed the long pen strokes of his inscription. I savored every poem and swelled with the cadence of the lines and felt irresistibly connected to the heart where it was coming from. I knew it was the poet and not Manik who wrote the words but I wanted desperately to believe otherwise. Those were strangely melded days where I floated in limbo, an outsider to the world around me, a firefly baffled by daylight.

CHAPTER 8

Finally the rains abated. The sky gathered her dark, voluminous skirts and swept over the Himalayas into Tibet, leaving behind a drizzle like a sprinkling of fairy dust. Life returned to normal.

The ground was rich and moist. The earth turned a shrill and noisy green, vibrant as a parrot. The evenings felt lighter now, and on some days there was a lilt of autumn in the air. A river breeze flitted through the house, suffusing rooms with the scent of jasmine. Dadamoshai resumed his writing on the veranda.

It was late afternoon and I was reading in my room when I heard an unfamiliar voice calling out a greeting on the veranda. I parted the curtains a crack. My heart skipped a beat when I saw it was Mr. Sen, Kona’s father. He was not a regular visitor to our house.

Mr. Sen was a portly, round-shouldered man, dressed traditionally in a white dhoti and a handwoven brown waistcoat over his long starched cotton shirt. His face was black and shiny as a plum. He had oily hair, bright, beady eyes and a neatly trimmed mustache over a small mouth that was pulled tight as a purse string. His small plump hands were weighted down with an array of auspicious gemstone rings—coral, tigereye, topaz—each promising some aspect of health or wealth to its wearer.

Dadamoshai was in the middle of his writing, and I could see he was distracted with a thought half strung across his brain. As usual, he looked like a preoccupied sage, surrounded by his books and papers, his snow-white hair unkempt, his glasses askew on his nose. He was barefoot, his worn wooden clogs undoubtedly lost somewhere under his desk.

“My dear Rai Sahib, I have been meaning to pay you a visit.” Mr. Sen leaned his umbrella against the post and held out his hands in an exaggerated gesture of effusiveness toward my grandfather.

“A pleasant surprise, Sen Babu, a pleasant surprise indeed!” Dadamoshai exclaimed, patting absentmindedly for the cap of his fountain pen under his papers and shuffling his foot under the desk to feel for his clogs. “Please, please, do have a seat.”

Mr. Sen gathered the pleats of his dhoti with care and perched on the edge of the sofa, like a plump sparrow on a windowsill. He watched with a beatific smile as my grandfather tried to get his bumbling act together. Despite all the cordiality between him and my grandfather, their relationship bordered on distaste. Mr. Sen’s visit was undoubtedly suspicious.

I strained my ears to listen to their conversation. Mr. Sen was talking about the preparations for Kona’s wedding. He dropped numbers here and there, pretending to bemoan the costs of things, but all the while seeking to impress Dadamoshai with how much money he was spending.

“You have no idea how much it costs to get a girl married these days. We are in the middle of wartime and every item is either in short supply or priced to make your hands bleed,” he lamented.

Dadamoshai was trying very hard to look engaged. “I must congratulate you, Sen Babu. You have indeed made a fine choice of a son-in-law in Manik Deb. He is an exceptional young man with a remarkable future ahead of him,” he said conversationally.

Mr. Sen’s eyes wandered off into the jasmine trellis. He suddenly looked morose and crestfallen. His mustache twitched, and he nibbled his lips nervously, looking amazingly like a rodent.

“Manik Deb...” He paused, as if recalling a painful toothache. “Manik Deb has let us all down badly. He has devastated his family name and mine. It is unforgivable what he has done.”

Dadamoshai sat up, surprised, his eyes bright with curiosity. “Goodness gracious, is something wrong?”

“More than wrong, Rai Bahadur, sir, more than wrong! The biggest calamity has befallen our family.” Mr. Sen wiped his brow with the tail end of his starched cotton dhoti. He leaned forward, took a grateful sip of tea from the cup Chaya had just set down and sighed deeply and sadly.

I pressed against the wall of my bedroom, almost fusing myself into the plaster, trying to get every word.

“Can you believe that this foolish fellow has given up his prestigious job in civil service and decided instead to become a tea planter!”

“A tea planter!” exclaimed Dadamoshai in wonderment, and with a twinge of awe.

“Yes, a tea planter.” Mr. Sen spat out the words distastefully like small eggshells he had just found in his omelet. “Imagine that! Who goes through a fine Oxford education with honors and distinctions to become, of all things, a tea planter?”

I could see Dadamoshai was highly amused. He threw back his head, let out a belly laugh and thumped the sofa cushion. Mr. Sen stiffened.

“Why does this amuse you, sir? Please explain yourself. I do not see the joke in this.”

Dadamoshai quickly composed himself. “Pardon me, Sen Babu. I did not mean to insult you,” he said apologetically. “But I do think it is rather bold and adventurous of the young man to deviate from the beaten path. I have heard tea jobs are very prestigious. It is rare for an Indian to be employed by a British company. They only hire Europeans, I know. I think you should be proud of your future son-in-law. It is a great honor for an Indian to be selected, really.”

“Honor? So that he can run around in the jungles with those debauched Englishmen? Rai Bahadur, sir, I have not been so deeply ashamed in my entire life! He has made a laughingstock of us all. Kona and her mother have not stopped crying since they got the news. All we received was one brief telegram, that’s all. ‘Change of career. Accepted job with Jardine Henley Co. as Assistant Manager in Aynakhal Tea Estate. Details to follow.’ What details? There has not been another squeak from Manik Deb. He has not replied to any letters from his family for the past month. He has simply vanished like a coward into the jungle.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. A tea planter? Why would Manik want to do that, of all things?

“And that is not the worst part,” Mr. Sen was saying. “Manik Deb has signed a contract that does not allow him to marry for the first three years. It is the company rule. He did this without telling any of us. The shame of it all.”

“This may not be a bad thing,” Dadamoshai mused. “It will give Kona some time to mature before she marries. It is always advisable.”

“Mature, you say! Why, sir, my daughter will be a seed pumpkin by the time Manik Deb is ready to exchange garlands with her. How can I risk that?”

Mr. Sen nibbled his lips some more. Even from a distance, I saw glistening beads of sweat on his brow. “She has already waited seven years for this worthless fellow and spent all this time embroidering tablecloths! What is she to do for another three years? Embroider more tablecloths, you tell me?”

“Send her to school,” Dadamoshai suggested brightly. “An educated girl will make a fine companion for Manik Deb. He seems to enjoy intellectual conversations.”

“No, no, no, Rai Bahadur, sir, you are not getting the point!” Mr. Sen fanned himself furiously. “A girl of a marriageable age cannot be left on the shelf for too long. She will become like the suitcase left behind at a station where trains do not stop by anymore. Then I will have to pay even more money to get her married. I am beginning to doubt Manik Deb’s sanity. His tea-garden job has no future. Life in the plantations is very—what shall I say—different. There are only Europeans. I don’t know how my daughter will fit in. If only he could give us an explanation for his senseless decision. Which, my dear Rai Sahib, brings me to the reason why I have come to see you today. I need a favor from you.”

“Ah,” said Dadamoshai. He had probably suspected all along that his wily neighbor had an ulterior motive for dropping by.

“I know Manik Deb spent a lot of time in your company. He is a great admirer of your ideas, writings and such.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Did he by any chance talk to you about applying for a tea-plantation job?” Mr. Sen eyed my grandfather suspiciously, as if he was a coconspirator in Manik’s deceit.

“My goodness, he mentioned not a word of it to me,” said Dadamoshai, his eyes round and innocent as a child. “I am sure Manik has his reasons for making a career change. Have you tried to contact him?”

“Oh yes, we called the Jardine Henley Head Office in Calcutta several times. I finally spoke to one senior director. He was most cordial. When I told him I was calling from Silchar, he asked me if I knew you. His name is James Lovelace.”

“Oh yes, James Lovelace! Of course, I know him well.” Dadamoshai smiled broadly. “He is the brother of a very dear friend of mine. I heard James was in India, but I had no idea he worked for a tea company.”

“Well, James Lovelace is a big shot of Jardine Henley & Company. He is very impressed with your work in the field of education, and praised your intelligence, character, etcetera. And since you are such a dear friend of his brother’s in England...”

“Sister, actually,” Dadamoshai said a little dreamily.

Mr. Sen’s piggy eyes were quick to catch on. Ha! He seemed to be thinking, the sister—no doubt one of the Rai Bahadur’s sleazy English mistresses. But this was no time for moral judgments. He was on a crucial mission.

“Well, his sister, then...but maybe you could use your influence with James Lovelace to contact Manik Deb? We urgently need to speak to him. Manik’s older brother, who arranged this marriage, is very disturbed. He thinks he can convince Manik to change his mind before it is too late, which is why we have not postponed the date for the wedding.”

“That...I cannot promise,” said Dadamoshai evasively. He did not believe in arm-twisting someone in his or her career choice. “Maybe we should trust the young man’s decision. What I have seen of Manik tells me he is no run-of-the-mill fellow. The tea-plantation job may suit his adventurous spirit just fine.”

“But what about my daughter? Who knows what goes on in those tea gardens? I don’t know a single person who knows anything about the kind of life there, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I have an English friend who visited his brother in a tea plantation here in Assam. What he described to me was most interesting.” Dadamoshai rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I also read the most fascinating book on the history of Assam tea. It’s a real eye-opener. You should read it, Sen Babu. It will give you a much better understanding.”

Mr. Sen twirled the coral ring around his finger forlornly. He picked up his cup, but it was empty.

“Another cup of tea, Sen Babu?”

“Yes, thank you, I would like that very much,” said Mr. Sen. He decided to change the subject. “So how is everything going with the English school project? James Lovelace was very keen to know the details, but unfortunately I did not have much information. I told him I would give you his telephone number and you would contact him.”

“The school project is most challenging, Sen Babu. We have an acute shortage of funds as you can understand. Perhaps you would consider making a small donation? We have sixty students and only two classrooms. How can the poor girls concentrate on their studies when they are sitting four or five to a bench butting elbows, with no place to write?”

Mr. Sen waved his hands as if brushing off a gnat. “My dear Rai Bahadur, whose fault is that? Young girls were not meant to go through such hardships. They should stay at home and prepare for marriage. The importance of cooking and sewing for girls should not be undermined. Besides, what are the girls going to do with all this education? It is a cart with no horse!”

I could see Dadamoshai stiffening. “Mr. Sen, is not dignity and self-confidence in a young woman worth anything? Our society treats women like they came floating down the Ganges. Should they not be given a choice in their future?”

When Dadamoshai got riled up, his eyebrows bristled. He leaned forward, tapping the coffee table with his forefinger. “Tell me, Mr. Sen, how is a woman supposed to fend for herself if things go wrong? Young girls are married off to men twice their age! We have too many child brides and too many young widows in our society, Mr. Sen, too many widows! And you know how our society treats widows.”

“Rai Bahadur, sir, I agree it is unfortunate if a young wife loses her husband, but at least she still has her in-laws. Who does a spinster have? No one. I still believe marriage is the best solution for girls. At least it grants them an honorable place in society.” Then he waved a heavy ringed hand dismissively in the air. “But forget all that, getting my daughter married will put me in the poorhouse. I will not have even one anna to spare. You cannot imagine the exorbitant price of rui fish these days. I was speaking to the fishmonger only yesterday...”

But I was not listening anymore. Something told me unseen forces were shaping my future in mysterious ways. I was getting pulled into the flow, not exactly as flotsam, but a buoyant, eager participant, fully trusting the tide. And who knew? Maybe with the right “breeje” I would catch a current and float right into Manik Deb’s life.

CHAPTER 9

Manik Deb had vanished from my life into a tea plantation, swallowed by the roiling, steamy jungles of Assam, a territory so remote and forbidden that it was deemed inaccessible to common man.

Nobody knew much about tea plantations. It was an esoteric, colonial world barricaded by a cultural divide, so far removed from the life in our teeming Indian subcontinent that it may as well have been several stratospheres away.

Now that one of our local boys had disappeared into this rarefied atmosphere, our small town tittered with gossip. The question on most people’s mind was, why? Why would Manik Deb throw away a good job, jeopardize a marriage alliance of seven years and strain relations with his family to become a tea planter? To what end? A tea planter’s job had little merit or security.

And what sort of life would his wife have? There were no temples, no cultural functions, no like-minded Indians to socialize with. Forget about the Europeans. They were a different ilk. They stuck to their own. With their promiscuous women in short skirts, shamelessly exposing their legs, their uncontrolled whiskey drinking and wild dancing in the clubs, how would an Indian boy fit into this society? But anybody could see, Manik Deb was hardly a typical Indian boy. In many ways he was more like them. Yet, cynics would argue, Manik Deb may have buffed his fur with fine English education and manners, but he could never change his spots. He was an Indian and would always be one. The Europeans looked down on the likes of him: he was coconut-brown on the outside and white on the inside. Manik Deb would never be accepted into a white man’s world.

I, more than anybody else, itched to know the answers. I kept my ears pricked for news and clutched at motes of information floating in the air around me. I decided to look for the book Dadamoshai was talking about. And there it was, in his library—a slim green volume on the history of Assam. It was a 1917 research publication and it had a whole section detailing the tea industry in Assam.

I could hardly contain my excitement. I raced through lunch that day so that I could curl up on the veranda sofa to devour its contents. It was a mine full of information. I had always been an obsessive fact finder. Dadamoshai said I had a researcher’s brain that allowed me to sift through mountains of material and distill information. This was true. I learned more about Assam tea in one rainy afternoon than all the heads of our entire town put together.

In the 1940s, an era of the fading Raj, tea plantations in India remained the last stronghold of the British Empire. Owned by Sterling companies, they produced the finest teas on earth. Assam tea was grown exclusively for export and shipped from the plantations directly to London to be sold at the Mincing Lane tea auction for exorbitant prices. From there it was distributed to the rest of Europe and the world.

I stopped my reading to think. People in India drank a lot of tea, too. It seemed pretty ordinary stuff. So where did our tea come from? Here we were right in the middle of Assam, so surely it was Assam tea?

I got up from the sofa and went to the kitchen. I took down the container of loose tea and poked around the contents with my finger. It looked like fine granules, almost a powder. It smelled like tea. Nothing exceptional.

I decided to make myself a cup. I filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove. I leaned against the counter to continue reading in the dim light of the kitchen as I waited for the water to boil.

The next section was an eye-opener. Little wonder why we poor Indians never got a whiff of quality Assam tea. All the fine tea grown in the plantations, 100 percent, was shipped overseas. What was sold in the Indian market was the lowest grade, or what was commonly known as tea dust.

I closed the book, marking my page with a teaspoon. As I poured the tea through a strainer, I noticed it had a nice strong color and good aroma, but my newfound knowledge now told me I was drinking bottom-of-the-barrel quality. I would never have known that.

I carried my tea back to the veranda. The rain had stopped. The cat, all stealth and muscle, was creeping along the garden wall, stalking a sparrow, which was busy fluffing its feathers. The sun peeked through the parting clouds, and raindrops hung from the jasmine trellis like translucent pearls.

I returned to the sofa and stirred my tea as I read on.

The tea-growing belt in Assam was cradled in the fertile, silt-rich valley between two mighty rivers—the Surma and the Bhramaputra. The picturesque Khasi and Jaintia hills cut a green swath in between. This region was remote and largely unexplored. Tea plantations were located in far-flung areas, across bridgeless rivers, beyond the boundaries of any trodden path and in the middle of dense, malaria-infested rain forests surrounded by wild game and hostile head-hunting Naga tribes.

In 1823 an intrepid Scottish adventurer who went by the name of Robert Bruce tramped through the leech-infested jungles along the Assam-Burmese border, encountering unexpected mishaps and every manner of blight and misery along the way. He had barely recovered from a potentially lethal snakebite when he found himself spending a night up a tree, bone-rattled by a rogue elephant he had unwittingly enraged by misfiring his gun. As if that wasn’t enough, he was constantly being stalked by the hostile head-hunting Nagas, who lurked in the brush with their black-painted faces and poison-tipped spears.

Robert Bruce was beginning to regret this whole mission. He was harried and at the end of his tether when he spied a thin curl of blue smoke spiraling over the treetops. He approached warily, gun drawn, and came across a tribal settlement deep in the forest.

He’d feared his intrusion would provoke hostility, and was surprised to find the gnomelike natives were a cheerful and friendly lot. They were the Burmese Singpo tribe, undoubtedly the sweetest, most benign people on earth! The Singpos welcomed him and escorted him with the beating of tom-toms to their moonfaced, lotus-eyed chief, who went by the grand name of Bessagaum Ningrual.

Bruce was seated on an elevated platform, fanned by palm fronds and offered a swig of steaming brew from a bamboo cup. Not wanting to offend his host, he took a few hesitant sips of this strange concoction. To his amazement, he felt immediately relaxed and all his cares and woes floated away. After downing the last drop, Bruce was so invigorated that he wanted to scale a tree and shout at the sky. What was this strange drink? He was told it was Cha, a beverage made by steeping the tender leaves of an unknown plant in boiling water. The plant grew wild in the forest, and when he was taken to see it, he found it was the size of a poplar tree and had deep green serrated leaves and pale waxy flowers.

Robert Bruce could not get over the remarkable rejuvenating properties of Cha. As he bade farewell to his friendly hosts, he carried the seeds of the plant in his pocket and turned them over to the Botanical Society in Calcutta for research and development. The plant was subsequently named the Camellia assamica. Research showed that when this plant was pruned tight like a privet hedge it flushed with a profusion of tender leaf tips. These tips, handpicked and processed, yielded the finest tea in the world.