Teatime for the Firefly

by Shona Patel

  Manik laughed, a happy boyish laugh. His gaze lingered on my mouth and I saw the heat rise in his eyes. Charlie’s flirting fueled my husband’s ardor, it seemed.

  Charlie cleared his throat. “Easy now,” he murmured. The man did not miss much.

  A turbaned bearer was holding out a tray with triangular pieces of toast topped with spiced chicken.

  “Nowhere in Calcutta will you find tasty sikkins like here in the tea gardens,” said Larry.

  “Tasty sikkins?” Charlie quirked an eyebrow and gave him a naughty look. “Am I missing something, old chap?”

  “You dirty-minded bastard.” Larry pointed at him with his toast. “Sikkins are appetizers—that’s what they call them in tea lingo. A borchee-khana specialty.”

  “Ah,” said Charlie, looking disappointed.

  “Try these shammi kebabs with the mint chutney,” said Manik, as the second tray came around. “They are my favorite.”

  “My favorite sikkins is not here,” said Larry, looking around. “Where is Debbie Ashton?”

  “The Ashtons may not come today,” said Manik. “Both Ash and Jimmy O’Connor have their hands full with the rhino case.”

  “What rhino case?” asked Charlie, taking a bite of the kebab. “God almighty, this is spicy!”

  “I’m surprised you have not heard about it, old chap, considering you land right on the Dega airstrip,” said Larry.

  “We flew in late this afternoon,” said Charlie. “Mr. Lovelace drove straight to the Gilroys and dropped me off at Flint’s on the way. So no, I’ve not heard about the rhino. Did Jimmy O’Connor shoot one?”

  “It’s not that simple,” said Larry, wiping a greasy finger on his dinner jacket. “There’s a big male rhino creating havoc in Dega. You know the earthquake we just had? It’s common for wild animals to get disoriented and wander into tea plantations after one of those. We just chase them out when that happens.”

  “Dega borders the Kaziranga game sanctuary, doesn’t it?” asked Charlie. “I know Kaziranga is famous for its one-horned rhino. They are an endangered species, I believe.”

  “That’s right. Anyway, this rhino wandered into the tea plantation and instead of chasing it out, the laborers unwittingly drove the rhino deeper. Now it’s wedged between the tea bushes, causing serious damage to that section. It’s a belligerent animal and charges at the slightest provocation.”

  “Maybe I should offer to fly over it with the Cessna and shoo it out? That should be interesting.”

  “It won’t work,” said Manik. “Chances are the rhino will panic and injure itself and cause more damage to the tea bushes. It is in too deep and it can’t get out by itself. This is a very serious problem. Thanks to this mess, tea plucking in Dega has come to a near standstill.”

  “So what is going to happen now?” asked Charlie.

  “The easiest solution is of course to shoot the animal,” said Larry. “Jimmy, as you know, would have wasted no time to do this. But Sircar the Forest Officer meanwhile got wind of the situation and sent him an official notice warning him that killing a one-horned rhino, an endangered species, is a criminal violation. So now the only option Jimmy has is to trap the animal and relocate it back to Kaziranga. But instead of dealing with Sircar he used his company connections to get the trapping permit directly from the Central Forest Department in Calcutta, bypassing Sircar’s authority altogether—giving him the royal snub, so to say.”

  “That worries me,” said Manik, thoughtfully. “I would be very careful dealing with Sircar. He’s a snake in the grass, if there ever was one. Sircar is a petty man with a king-size ego, and he can make endless trouble.”

  Larry shrugged. “There’s not much he can do, can he? Jimmy has his permit. He’s following the law.”

  “So how are they going to trap the rhino?” I asked. All three men turned to look at me in surprise. As usual I had been listening quietly, unobserved.

  “The same way you’d trap any creature, I’d imagine,” purred Charlie, giving me a loaded look. “Stealth and cunning.”

  Larry, oblivious to the undercurrents, piped up earnestly, “Not just stealth and cunning, old chap—there’s a fair amount of planning and logistics involved. You have to dig a pit, camouflage the top and drive the rhino toward it and make sure it falls in. The pit has to be measured and carefully constructed. It can’t be too deep because then rhino might get injured. Also getting it out will be difficult.”

  “So how do you get it out, anyway? The damn thing probably weighs as much as the Cessna,” said Charlie.

  “We use trained elephants,” said Manik. “Once the rhino is in the pit, we let down a bamboo ramp and use ropes and elephants to guide it out. It’s a complicated and tricky procedure, but it has been done before. Rupali, our Aynakhal elephant, is very experienced in this kind of thing. She will lead the whole operation.”

  “It sounds bloody complicated, if you ask me,” said Charlie.

  “Put it that way...it’s not simple,” said Manik. “Things can go wrong.”

  Who knew how complicated it would be? You can plan an operation down to the minutest detail, get all the manpower, permits, tractors and elephants you need, but all it takes is a tiny shift in the universe to make things go wrong. Very, very wrong, as we would soon find out.

  * * *

  Three weeks passed. It was close to midnight when we got home from the Mariani Club. The full moon cast a waxy glow in the bedroom through the translucent sari curtains. We were still sleeping in the spare room. It would take another week for the roof repair in the master bedroom to be complete.

  For some reason, I slept uneasily in that guest room. There was that dreadful hole in the floorboard, for one, temporarily patched up with a thin piece of plywood with the white chalk square clearly visible in the dark. Sometimes at night I imagined I heard dull thudding sounds coming from below. There was also the cloying smell of some oily chemical Manik used to clean his guns that bothered me. The bed was smaller, too: cozy to make love in, but some nights I would wake to find Manik spread-eagled, hogging the entire bed, and me pushed to one skinny corner like a discarded chicken bone on a dinner plate. This was one of those nights. Once awake, I found I could not go back to sleep. The gossip I heard at the Mariani Club that evening kept going through my mind. The latest news about Jimmy O’Connor was very disturbing. From what I could gather, a chain of rather bizarre events had catapulted the rhino case into a full-blown catastrophe, and Jimmy O’Connor had inadvertently walked into his own trap.

  At first everything was going nicely according to plan, it seems. The trapping permit procured, the rhino was temporarily barricaded and the pitfall trap measured and dug out. Tea bushes were cleared to create a straight path leading up to it. All three neighboring gardens—Chulsa, Aynakhal and Kotalgoorie—pitched in with tractors, manpower and elephants. Manik was over at Dega most days and kept me updated on the operation.

  On the day before the trapping, a group of laborers led by the Headman of Dega Tea Estate approached Jimmy O’Connor and begged him to reschedule the operation. It was unlucky Tuesday, they said, and that portended a disaster. Jimmy, of course, had little time for cosmic portents and hocus-pocus. The planets had never stood in his way; he usually pushed past them. But it did not happen this time.

  The main problem was the size of the pit: it had been miscalculated. It was three feet too short in length, so when the rhino fell in, it got stuck halfway. The sheer weight of its body broke the rhino’s neck and it died. It was a gruesome sight. The Forest Department led by Sircar came to assess the case. By the time they got there, crows had pecked out the rhino’s eyes. At long last, Sircar had his revenge. He immediately filed a report that Jimmy O’Connor had willfully shot and killed the rhino and stuck it in the pit to make it look like an accident. Sircar identified the rhino’s empty eye sockets as bullet holes.
The next thing we heard was the Mariani police had slapped criminal charges on Jimmy, who now had to appear in state court.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a dull thudding from under the floorboard. I peered over the side of my bed, listening. Was it a snake? The plywood was nailed to the floor and I prayed it would not come loose. It was unnerving. Manik murmured in his sleep and folded over, leaving me room to stretch out. Pillowing my head on crossed arms, I returned to Jimmy’s dilemma.

  So even though it was unlucky Tuesday and things had gone terribly wrong, nobody imagined any sensible judge would believe Sircar’s ridiculous report. The “bullet holes” were obviously eye sockets. The rhino had died as a result of an accident. There was no malicious intent or cover-up. The case should have been dismissed with a fine. But this is not what happened, thanks to Jimmy O’Connor, who decided to go on one of his legendary benders.

  Jimmy appeared in court completely drunk. He yelled at the Indian judge using unpardonable language and was held in contempt of court, dismissed and asked to reappear. Meanwhile, the rhino carcass rotted in the plantation, creating an unholy stink. It was unlawful to remove the body because the case was now under criminal investigation. Meanwhile, Jimmy O’Connor simply disappeared. It was rumored he was holed up in some Khasi village, steeped to his gills in rice toddy. Work at Dega Tea Estate came to a crashing halt. Crowds descended from all over to see the rotting rhino. The Fertility Hill miscreants wandered around the tea garden and pilfered from the factory, and things began to get completely out of hand.

  There were two more hearings, and both times Jimmy O’Connor appeared drunk and in worse shape. At the last hearing he showed up with his Magnum rifle and threatened to blow up the court. Things started to snowball and before we knew it the unthinkable happened: Jimmy O’Connor, the General Manager of Dega Tea Estate and one of the most respected and senior tea planters in Assam, was slapped with a ten-year sentence in an Indian jail—an unimaginable predicament for a white man. He had boxed himself in so tightly nobody could get him out. The rhino case typified the complexities of intercultural relations of our time. It was an indication of the subtle shift of power taking place in Indian politics. Tea companies no longer had the influence to bail their planters out.

  I sat up in bed. I had an idea. I would write to Dadamoshai and tell him the facts of this case. Who knew, maybe he could help.

  * * *

  It must have been close to 1:00 a.m. when I finished my letter to Dadamoshai. I turned off the kerosene lantern and let my eyes adjust to the moonlight before groping my way back to the guest bedroom. I stood at the door and was about to enter when I felt every hair freeze on my scalp. There was a man standing by the window on my side of the bed. I could see him clearly. He was tall and thin, with a long sorrowful face and lank hair that fell over his eyes. He just stood there without moving, turned slightly toward the bathroom door to his left. I was not sure if he had noticed me as I stood in the shadows, clutching my nightie to my chest and choking back a scream. I don’t know how long I stood there, but I remember Manik mumbling in his sleep and turning over. The man scarcely looked in his direction. He then turned and walked through the open door into the bathroom.

  I ran inside the bedroom and threw myself on the bed.

  “Manik! Manik!” I whispered hoarsely. I shook him violently. “Get up! GET UP! There’s a man in the room!” I was trembling uncontrollably.

  I shook him again. He sat up in bed, and I immediately clamped my hand over his mouth.

  “There’s a man in the room,” I whispered in his ear. “He’s in the bathroom.”

  Before I could stop him, Manik grabbed the flashlight from the bed table, swung his legs off the bed and with all the stupidity in the world, marched right into the bathroom wearing nothing but his underwear. This is it, I thought. I have a dead husband.

  “There’s nobody here, Layla,” he called. I heard him open and close the laundry bin in the bathroom. “Are you sure?”

  He came into the bedroom, swung the flashlight around, switched it off and sat on the bed rubbing his eyes. He put his arms around me and drooped with sleep on my shoulder. I could not believe his apathy.

  “Manik! He must be somewhere in the room.” I was almost crying.

  “Come to bed, sweetheart. I will explain everything in the morning.”

  “Explain what? I saw this man. With my own eyes.”

  “It’s only Clive Robertson,” Manik said. “He’s nothing to worry about. He won’t harm you.”

  Manik lay down. In five minutes he was snoring and fast asleep.

  CHAPTER 27

  Assam is no place for pretty boys. Planters are a scuffed, nicked lot, who live on the edge and survive by grit and guns. Tea jobs attract a certain kind of personality. You have to be drawn to it, rather like being an explorer.

  It’s a grueling existence any way you look at it. Every summer planters bemoan their lot in life and question what they are doing in Assam. It’s only the memory of Assam’s winter playground that makes it all worthwhile. Winter in Assam is like the mild and pleasant spring in the British Isles. There is plenty of game hunting and adventure fishing for the avid outdoorsman. That’s the main reason why Brits were drawn to Assam in the first place. That and the chance to run away from the stoic, ordered world to which they are doomed.

  When young tea-garden assistants return to the foggy shores of their homeland on furlough, they have become real men. They tell stories of Assam—so colorful, so outrageous, so exotic and wild that it leaves their fellow men gasping. Of course life in Assam is not quite so rosy. They don’t speak about the isolation, the uncertainty, the backbreaking work, the tyrant boss. The watertight contract companies make planters sign makes defecting from the job near impossible. It’s sink or swim. Only planters who survive Assam go on to become the legendary iron men in wooden ships.

  What Clive Robertson was doing in Assam as a tea planter is anyone’s guess. He was a pale, sickly young man who aspired to become the curator of an art museum. Clive Robertson had no taste for blood sport, abhorred guns and preferred instead to sketch scenery and listen to Bach. Assam was not what he had expected. He had imagined an idyllic life of simple pleasures with fine dining, cerebral conversation and some light plantation-management duties thrown in. Instead, he found himself in a brutal environment, hobnobbing with a bunch of ruffians who rattled around in their dirty jeeps and shot every creature in sight. Planters poked fun at his tidy clothes and the effeminate way he waved his hands. His manager, Mr. Peterson, picked on him constantly. He felt hounded and humiliated. Yet Clive Robertson could not be sacked. He had important connections that guaranteed him sanctity. His uncle, John Robertson, was the Director of Jardines in London.

  On the third of June, 1932, Clive Robertson, the twenty-six-year-old assistant of Aynakhal Tea Estate, came home at midnight from the Planters Club. It was the cusp of the monsoons, and dark clouds covered the sky, breaking occasionally to unveil a full and brilliant moon. He drank four pegs of Chivas Regal, sitting on his veranda in the dark surrounded by the sounds of the night. He then went to his bedroom, secured the door by pushing a heavy dresser against it, loaded his 12-bore shotgun, put the muzzle in his mouth and blew a bullet through his brain.

  The chowkidar later said he had heard a sound, but thought it was thunder. That night the worst monsoon of the decade broke, bringing torrential rain that slashed through the open window of Clive Robertson’s bedroom as he lay dead in rivulets of blood. Nobody knew why Clive Robertson had taken his own life but many understood. The loneliness and desperation that many planters faced in those early days was legendary. Maybe he had nothing to live for and nowhere to go. This was not uncommon for young men of his time who came to Assam to become tea planters. Assam had a way of digging her creepers into a man’s soul. Many would become strangers unto themselves, and be doomed to wander forever
the forgotten wastelands of their minds. Maybe Clive Robertson was one of them.

  Clive Robertson chose to die on the rainiest day of the year. Giving him a proper burial posed the biggest headache of all. Even in fine weather, organizing a Christian burial in Assam had its challenges. The body had to be buried the same day, usually by afternoon, because the warm, humid weather caused it to decompose quickly. Telephones were nonexistent at the time, so a boy on a bicycle was sent to the neighboring gardens with a message imprinted on his wrist with indelible ink. Quite often, planters got the news too late because of bad roads and mishaps on the way.

  So tea-garden folks just took care of their dead the best way they could. The factory carpenter was ordered to build a coffin of green teak, still oozing sap, which made it atrociously heavy. The Factory Assistant supervised the digging of the grave, usually in some remote corner of the plantation, and a few planters stood around with bowed heads with their sola topees in their hands as the body was lowered to the ground. There were no prayers, no priests, no eulogies, and barely a tear shed for the departed.

  Hundreds of scattered graves dot tea plantations in Assam. Most of the dead were abysmally young, in their twenties and thirties, killed by disease, drowning, wild animals or self-inflicted wounds. The company then followed official procedures and sent a telegram to the family notifying them of the person’s death. A few months later all the belongings would be stuffed into tea chests and shipped back home.

  The week Clive Robertson died the rains did not abate for a single minute. It poured in torrents and turned Aynakhal into a rolling, lurching river. Where and how could one begin to even think of digging a grave? Finally, four laborers held a tarp, while another four dug and scooped out buckets of muddy water that kept rapidly filling the grave. When Clive Robertson’s teak coffin was lowered, it looked as if he was being lowered into a bathtub of muddy water. Several weeks later when the rains let up, Clive Robertson’s coffin had floated up from the ground. It was found by a woodcutter, a quarter mile out in the jungle and bumped up against a log. The coffin was open and the body was missing.