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
