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A walk across the rusty hanging bridge
to sway from the new to the old.
A magical transformation
from fake to real.
More to revel,
as stories of tea and Munnar wait to be unveiled...
Margaret Bridge, Munnar
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What
colour is the soil in Munnar?
"What colour is the soil on
which tea grows?" my Mother asked as we drove through Munnar, a mountain
range converted to a tea estate by the British colonists in India. The rich
beauty of the carefully arranged tea trees-row after row and plantation after
plantation-overwhelms even the hardest of senses. The crisp, thin air and the
clear water below must infact make your heart skip a beat or two. My Mother
happens to be more of a British adorer-a rung higher than a sympathizer;
perhaps comes with her being a person with a bias-having taken English
literature as her academic pursuit.
My Mother had a reason to ask me
that question this time; for she was a witness during the times the great
whites packed up their stuff to leave the country after 335 glorious years of
their ravishing tenure in India. She has always insisted that the Brits have to
be thanked for signs like the rail tracks and road ways-laid by them that have
fueled economic growth-which if had been done by Indians, thanks to our
bureaucracy, redtapism and corruption connected there-with, we never would have
managed such a feat.
This is where we begin to argue; for
I see the railway tracks and every other monumental feat left behind by the
Brits-the tracks and the cracks-a joint symbolic display of British
(ill)governance and East India Company's dirty game on unsuspecting, innocent and
a careless crowd-the natives of the land. Every rail track that was laid can be
traced from the spot where the Brits found a fancy for something and anything
they considered wealth that could be exploited and looted to the nearest port
from where it could be boxed and shipped to her majesty's service straight to
the white man's shore. All 33 and a half decades of wealth, human lives and
innocence-spotted, looted and packed to be shipped-for which we as natives on
whose back the dirty empire rode, even considered it our obligation to pay for
their stray stay and upkeep while they were here to loot us; we even learnt to
wave and say, "Thank you! please..." like a commission-earning Tourist
Guide.
All of a sudden, to hear this
question of what colour is the soil in Munnar to come from my mother, made me
wonder if she was (finally) beginning to see the substratum buried beneath
these beautiful fields that held stories of horror and barbarism waiting to be
unearthed to let the ghosts of the air howl their stories to fill the misty
mountains... once in a while. Stories the poor Indian labourer might tell of
how the Cha’ips on horsebacks would whip the bare Indian backs to force them to
work, stories of how families would be stolen, lives would be lost, children
would be separated and human dignity suspended to build what the empire wanted,
the company demanded and the white man commanded-with an order to prepare the
ground to grow tea. Tea-even if it meant tunneling out a whole mountain to plant,
pluck, process and pack it to the white man’s wish and supply it along the established
spice route to his friends, family and customers back home. What colour could
the ground be where lives were caught by the throat, suffocated, frozen and
killed-where shouts of violence and cries for help were ignored, unrecorded and
unaddressed? What colour could the colour of the soil of Munnar be anything but
red? A deep red perhaps… like blood that flows-that boils right now at the very
thought of the greatest injustice done to humanity to spread a green carpet of
tea over a red carpet of slavery, bondage and blood.
Today, when one walks past the
little town of Munnar amidst its tea estates in plenty, buses with boards in
the vernacular (Malayalam) that ply tourists who land for guided tours and to
sip their chilled beer in the comforts of a chillier cold, walk past government
buildings with name boards in the vernacular (in Malayalam and Tamil too) with
hoisted red flags that sway with passive aggression. The aggravates of the
tension in the air is smothered by the presence of local commercial
establishments like the wayside eateries, taxi and auto-wallas, lodges and
hotels that depends solely on the influx of the crowd of tourist. Early in the
morning, armouring the heavy chill, a bunch of tourists drip in everyday. They
are feast to the eye for the handicraft shop owners and the masseur and
masseuse in massage parlors who have mastered the art of squeezing someone
(literally) to earn their living. Today every brown man in Munnar owning a
commercial establishment waits for a 'Cha'ip' (a white man) or a 'Madaam'may'
(a white lady)-as he was taught to call-to earn back every penny they looted.
Miles and years to go before that can be done to tally the account. Yet, it
moves...
To be continued...
