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I have a friend who is a manager in a big Tea Estate. He invited me to come and stay for a couple of days in the guest house of the Tea Estate. I jumped at the opportunity because there are some places where you cannot go even if you are ready to pay for it. Such breaks do not come your way everyday.

On the crest of the Annamalai Ghats in Tamilnadu, at a height of about 3500 feet are situated many Tea Estates owned by big names in the tea industry. From Coimbatore, you have to go there by road via a town called Pollachi. After negotiating 40 hairpin bends over a 40 kms drive up you arrive at a small quiet town called Valparai, about 90 kms from Coimbatore. This town has nothing to boast of, as it exists only because of the tea estates surrounding it. The sights during the drive up, some through dense forest, just takes your breath away. There are some lookout spots where you can stop your vehicle and enjoy the scenery. The view of the hairpin bends from above is like nothing you have seen before.

If you are lucky, you will get to see some wild animals. During the drive up we saw a small pack of Nilgiri Tahr (mountain goats) strolling sure-footedly on the incredibly steep hillside. You have to be careful of the fearless monkeys abounding the slopes. If you leave your vehicle open or unguarded even for a moment, they will jump in and run away with your eatables, which we found out the hard way. However, I managed to grab some of it back from one monkey which was stupid enough to sit near the “scene of the crime” trying to open the food bag. The driver told me I was lucky the monkey did not attack me as I grabbed for the bag.

When we entered the Tea Estate, we were not prepared for what greeted us. The Deafening Silence! We are so used to the sounds of civilization like sounds of vehicles, blaring horns, music, sounds of the fan or AC, ring tones of the mobiles etc. that the total absence of sound makes us uncomfortable. In the Tea Estate the silence is so complete that it is unnerving. I did not realize it while driving into the estate because of the sound of the car engine, but as soon as I got out of the car the total absence of sound made me think that my ears were blocked. I tried to pop them open by pinching my nose and trying to exhale from a closed mouth. It didn’t help. Then I became aware of the heavy silence all around. The silence broken only by the sound of an occasional vehicle passing through. In the evenings and until dawn, the sweet sound of birds, insects and nocturnal animals would break the monotony of silence. After about 4 - 5 hours of being in the estate you become aware of another all pervading presence, the moist fresh aroma of tea from the millions of tea bushes dotting the landscape around you.

I had grown up with romantic images of singing female workers plucking tea leaves and tossing them into baskets hung on their backs. I was disillusioned when I watched them here at work. The traditional hand - woven basket had been discarded and replaced by the ubiquitous plastic bag. The pluckers hung large plastic net bags behind their backs into which fistfuls of plucked leaves would be stuffed. There was also a new method of tea leaf gathering, i.e. by shears. These shears had a sort of a pan attached to them for collecting the leaves during cutting. When the pan became full, the plucker would empty it into her bag. The staccato sounds of about a dozen shearers at work would be the only sounds that could be heard in the area. Of course, there was no singing. The pluckers were in fact grumbling at the distraction from us who had come to watch and film them at work. When I tried to film their work, some of them promptly turned their back on me. I guess that it must be some phobia about their faces being captured on film. Since the pluckers are paid by weight of the tea leaves collected by them, they cannot afford to waste time on gawking visitors from the city. You can watch the plucking of the tea leaves in this video I had filmed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbLZ2BD8TGU

We were taken on a tour of the Tea factory. I was not allowed to film the manufacturing process, which was very interesting. We watched the withering, fermenting, drying and the final sorting into different sizes.

Life in the Tea Estate is not without danger. Bordering the tea estates are clusters of dense forests which are home to different species of wild animals and plant life. Leopards, Panthers and wild Elephants have killed local people traveling at night. Some people have been attacked by panthers but have escaped with injuries. Chandra, the cook of the company guest house where we were staying, was attacked by a pair of panthers when riding his motorbike at night. When he fell down from his bike, the panthers inexplicably ran away. Since that day he is called “Tiger Chandra” by his friends. Sometimes wild Indian Gaur (Bison) wander into the tea plucking area. At times they have been known to attack the pluckers too, but most of the time they are harmless. When a herd of wild elephants stray into the estate foraging for banana trees and other food, mostly at night, the inhabitants are warned to stay indoors.

We had visited the tea estate in the fourth week of April, at a time when the summer was on in full blast in my coastal home town. The first thing I noticed in the guest house was be absence of fans in the rooms. The caretaker proudly told us that we would not need fans at the estate. I found the day warm though and went to bed cursing the management for not installing fans. However, the chill in the morning was biting enough to make me shiver, even under a heavy blanket.

After a couple of days of a very memorable stay, we said our goodbyes and slowly drove down the ghats to the familiar sounds and smells of civilization.

U. V. Kini
uvksat@yahoo.com