It was way back in the mid 70's. We were living in that serenely calm hillside of the Nuwara Eliya district, that drizzled more than rained, over 09 months a year. Our house, was a two room, tin roofed house with a large backyard with tea scrubs and a few Kithul trees. A small cottage type, lonely house with a small front garden, fenced with “Andara” and red “Shoe flowers”, had not been occupied for many years for fear of ghosts residing in it.
Located in front of a tiny patch of terraced paddy field, adjoining the public cemetery, the house had two small lanes, one paved with stones in front and the other gravel, by the East side of the quarter acre plot. Both came together and led straight to the “Lower bazaar” and for us, the more busy “Upper bazaar” was through the de touring foot path, commonly used across the cemetery and over a small empty hillock.
Through the “Upper bazaar” ran the road that had buses plying from “Sangilipaalama” to both Watagoda and Thalawakele. From the Upper bazaar was also a bus that went to Nuwara Eliya, through “Dunsinane” a very well maintained, high grown tea plantation that stretched over two miles on either side of that snaking narrow road, leaving a wafting odour of freshly blended tea, in the misty air.
The stone paved lane in front of our house was a long walk of over an hour to another large tea plantation, people called “Meda kumbura”, while the cement slab at the entrance to the estate road, read “Meddacombra Estate”. The mountain range that always had a sombre looking mist wrapped around, stood tall, far away over the cemetery and was called the “Fernland Estate”. The Lower bazaar was adjoined by what Sinhala villagers called the “Choicey watte”.
Locked by these tea plantations, this was one small community where Tamil language dominated, but included over two dozen Sinhala teachers in the Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya, over a dozen at the adjacent Tamil Vidyalaya, a few Sinhala policemen, Sinhala employees, mostly drivers and conductors at the bus depot, also a Sinhalese visiting government apothecary to the weekly out door dispensary and a Sinhala clerk or two travelling daily to the AGA office at Sangilipaalama and one to the Nuwara Eliya education office. Even the Sinhala villagers in scattered little pockets, were conversant in Tamil. I got into the habit of trying out the little Tamil I had learnt during my childhood, in Colombo.
Most grocery stores, mostly in the Upper bazaar, owned by three or four Tamil traders were small and dark within. The only hardware store in the Upper bazaar, with a small whole sale business on coconut, beetle, tobacco and other small necessities, was owned by a second generation, Sinhala Southerner. So was the only pharmacy, a fairly busy place with patients sent by the RMP – a Sinhala, retired medical practitioner. The peripheral unit hospital for these people was a long wait for a bus that came almost every two hours during the day and rattled along the winding tarred road to Sangilipaalama, for over forty minutes.
The co-operative store was of course, multi purpose. We had to buy our weekly rice, sugar, flour, Mysore dhal and powdered milk from the co-operative store. It was a strictly rationed consumer market, that had nothing of them in any of those grocery stores. For the two rice ration books that we owned, we could buy the rarely available quarter pound of dried sprats, if we were at the co-op in time. Allowed for the two ration books were two small tins of imported sardine once every month that was often in short supply and much in demand, up in the hills that was too distant for fish. The eight ounces of Maldive fish though rationed the same way, was not so much of an issue. Tamil workers who were mostly Hindus, would let go of their ration of maldive fish. It was infant milk powder and bread that really kept us over worked through the month, pressed for the minimum possible consumption. Rice was even more scarce, but was available at a price, smuggled in buses by CTB employees who were on a regular route from the Upper bazaar to Medirigiriya every morning, with the another returning every night, from Medirigiriya. This was one bus route that never had a break down, thanks to the driver and conductor.
It was definitely a starving life for the Tamil estate workers. Their daily salaries were low and their minimum number of working days per month, was not fixed. Parcelling out some of the best tea plantation divisions to settle Sinhala villagers, was meanwhile heavily patronised by the ruling political authority, while Tamil labour roamed around, searching for green leaves (Gahala) along running water paths. They hadn't the money to buy vegetables that Nuwara Eliya made profits from, transporting to Colombo.
They came one day to knock on our door. A small boy outside our gate was holding on to a rope with a black, juvenile goat, tied to it. A frail looking man looking ten years older than he was, pulled out a pair of full grown, brown hens from a dirty looking cloth bag. He was on his way to the Upper bazaar to sell them. Perhaps it was hindsight that made him knock on our door. How much was he going to sell them for ?
The sunken look in the man's eyes and the scary, black ringed eyes of the two hens, worked a chilling, resentment within me. I wanted to close the door on him.
“Sir.....paathu thaanga” He said. I was to tell the price after a look at them. I wouldn't and he left, disappointed for sure.
Our house being the last, before the empty cemetery and the Upper bazaar, we often had Tamil workers making a call on us, before going to the Upper bazaar. Men and women came selling their household ware, for anything that would give them food. An elderly man once stood in front of the wooden gate, a brass lamp and a globular glass shade, held in his shivering hands. He wasn't going to tell me the price, he wanted. I just said ten rupees and he said okay. I looked at him for a while. I thought he would bargain. He didn't. I wondered why, but had no answer. We wanted a lamp bright enough for our dining table, but gave him five rupees and told him to sell it elsewhere. He insisted I take the lamp with the glass shade.
“Sir....bazaarka pona.....idika anji ruva thaan tharawen...” So, he felt he wasn't loosing on it, except that he could get rid of it quick and buy something for certain at the bazaar.
My wife next to me, said we should give him at least another two rupees. She was determined, we were not going to have it, dirt cheap. I knew, we had no money to buy it for ten rupees. My salary then as an English teacher was two hundred and forty nine rupees and ninety cents. Ten cents deducted for the blue stamp that I signed on the face of Late S.W.R.D. The man left, probably thinking what he would buy with that seven rupees.
That was a period the estate Tamil labour produced chronically malnourished children. A period they sold what ever they could. A week later an elderly, partly hunched woman knocked on the door again, to remove her heavy gold earrings that pulled her ear lobes down, for just twenty five rupees. It was a difficult decision to say “no” to her. She wanted to take her ailing two year old grand son to Sangilipaalama. We had just enough money to buy two packets of infant milk powder for our first born. I was to leave to Kandy the next morning to buy them in the “black market”. She wiped a tear, turning round to leave. I wiped mine, after she left.
Life was battered by unusually impracticable small rations, abundant scarcity and ruthlessly networked State vigilance through dedicated “people's committees”. All life in all districts had to live with barricades on consumer essentials, that now and then were sold from the rear door of a grocery, news of it getting carried through soft whisper.
I was justifying all of it, in our trade union forums. We were convinced, the market had to be strictly controlled. We were convinced, luxuries were not necessities in life. We were dreaming of an economically flat society that would not allow one to be taller than the rest. We sacrificed our today, for a far from empirically equitable tomorrow and we thought we were right. We therefore did not ask, why we had to buy the infant milk food, under the counter, at undeclared prices. We never asked, why those estate workers went around selling their life long, precious gold belongings, brass ware and even the poultry one after the other, to buy two “chundus” of rice, a small coconut and four ounces of dried chillies to go with some greenery fetched from the banks of a drying out rivulet, for a scrappy meal.
It took me, another decade, to question myself. It took me to form a dissenting stand in the party and get expelled, to think what our politics meant for others. Not that it had much meaning to us, the way we idealised society. That was too utopian to be true. That was too mechanically brutal and far from life, as well. Life by then had opened up. Life was given a choice in the market. We had to earn enough to compete in that market. That was not easy, though. But people seemed to take it better than what we thought is best.
At least for some time, we had no alternative answer. At least till the ecstasy of revelling in a free market, exhausted all life and incomes. Two decades and more later we are back, trying to find an alternative. All of us, the people and us, now need an answer to this breakdown of decency. Beyond this present, to be saner in life.
That for me is the difference for now.
(A tiny sketch from life in Kotmale)
Kusal Perera
03 December, 2011
0 comments:
Post a Comment