Malnad Diary: time to stir a bit

The tree with the tresses is the bhaine tree. They make sendhi with it, which is a crude, intoxicant drink. Some nights ago, my son taught me to hold his one-kilometer-beam torch with its base to my forehead, like a miner's lamp, and look into the plantation. Quite soon, I caught a pair of gleaming green eyes from the bhaine—scared eyes, it seemed to me, eyes searching my intentions. The eyes of a dark creature like a bandicoot; it began to slither down the tree, its eyes on the torch on my brow. Then another came after it, and another, and another. Bandicoots up a tree? A crowd of them? Turned out they were civets. During the day you see their excrement on the tracks in the plantation, which you can tell is theirs because they are full of coffee beans. The beans are special when they are processed like this in the civet's bowels, and fetch a goodly sum in foreign markets. Civet coffee sells for the price of wine in gourmet cafés, starting at $30 a cup!

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Hard-working Basavanna owns a model plantation neighboring ours, and another some ten kilometers away. He is a religious man gifted with abundant self-belief, which shows in the manner in which he runs his plantation. He listens to no one, and is impatient when one doesn't listen to him. No matter. The proof of his attitude is in the rich green of the leaves of his coffee, the heavy coffee-filled arms of his plants, and the yield he extracts for each acre of his—said to be the highest in our area. For over three years now, Basavanna also manages our plantation for us, on condition that we give him no instruction, ask him for no plan. We have no complaints, are just happy when he calls on us with an always-friendly half-namaste, pressing a palm to the chest, and other greetings and questions regarding our well being.

This is a new model that is working well in Malnad, with planters taking on the management of the holdings of absentee owners from Bangalore who have bought the plantation, some for the love of nature, some for a an exotic alternate location where to enjoy drink and spicy chicken.

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Mornings are lovely anywhere in the world, but here on the plantation I have a greater urge to rise before dawn so as to wait for the sun's silver rim to take shape behind Parvathammana Betta, high in the distance. Goddess Parvathi's hill. The temple to Parvathi is tiny and white, and is often lost in cloud. When the sky is clear the shrine is a striking white on the hilltop, which is covered in green trees and the gray and brown of stone. The locals have been telling us the elephants that torment them walk through their plantations and climb Parvathamma's hill and then they cannot climb down. The elephants stand stranded there, until they find courage and take first steps downward. In the morning and in the evening we hear the neighboring planters setting off explosions (dadakees, which are bigger, louder patakees) in their estates to scare off the elephants. The more you scare them, the more uncertain their path. You just listen when the planters tell of their woes with the elephant. It sounds preachy to talk of the loss of the pachyderm's habitat, to ask for a concerted effort to provide it a safe corridor. If you are worried for nature, you should only begin the work for it.

It is four years since we have had our plantation, and I still haven't gone up that hill. We have planned to go there next week. I hope to experience something that I can write for you. Let me see.

the fears that accompany leisure

I spent the weekend in Malnad. On Saturday I rose a little before dawn and stood by the floor-to-ceiling window and looked up at the pulsing stars. Dark figures of silver oak loomed before me, their tops level with my eyes. At their feet the coffee were huddled and hunched over like ten-thousand bears.

It was that moment in the morning when the night animals had called it a day, and the other animals were snoozing. There wasn't a sound, except for a solitary fellow whose sound came from everywhere—a cousin of the cicada, to tell from his voice—who cried out to all with the fervor of a revolutionary: “rise, rise, rise, rise.” But the ears of all were deaf to him. They hear him too much, and all the time.

I stepped out from the room and went out the bungalow, toward two lights that were on at the labor-line in the distance—yellow lights diffused on muddy white walls. I stood by the one that lit the cowshed. Ganga the cow returned my gaze from where she lay, and, of her two calves, one stood at the edge of the shed and looked out into the dark of the plantation, and the other lay slouched in the inner dark of the shed. They were brooding as always, but more intensely now. The question that hung frozen in the chill air was: will the effects of the economic boom trickle down also to these cattle? Within the remaining lifetime of the cow? Before these calves have grown? Or would they live always like this, as now in this cold, like drudges from the pages of the great Russian books?

While I took pictures of them my ankles and my shin twitched, revealing my constant fear that a snake might rise up on the ground and have a go at me. I've never been afraid when I have encountered the snake; each time, I’ve been stunned into a cold fascination, and I have gazed at them, admiring their bright and brilliant reticulations. But there is ever the fear of how the next snake might present itself. And I have a horror of their hiss—even if no snake has hissed at me until now.

A short while later, I crouched by the plantation's lake, keeping a fearful distance from the hedge, feeling foolish about still worrying about the reptile, worrying that one could be lurking in the green thicket, ready to lunge at me. There was a fast-moving smoky mist over the water, but the mist sailed away by the time I set the controls on my camera. Then the sun reached in and twisted his long yellow hand upon the lake, and there was no more even the memory of a mist.

Over at the edge of the plantation, where the earth had been dug for new coffee, frost had gathered on the webs which the spiders had woven flat on the ground in the gaps between . They glittered in the morning light, and they were dozens and dozens of them: small flat webs like mirrors, scattered on the ground. The worms and insects had stayed clear of them, so the frost seemed to have foiled the scheme of the spiders.

Seeing the spiders I remembered the birds. Are there worms that are evolved, which start out late and outwit the early bird?

The birds had been such noisy busybodies in the morning, but had now fallen silent, and most had flown away to hunt elsewhere. Tiny yellow butterflies played at my feet over the grass. I urged them to go find the flowers, but they ignored me to my face. A lone gray butterfly crashed into my blue jeans and suffered a moment's disorientation before it recovered and fluttered about, not leaving my leg by too much. All life was fair game for a meal in the morning, except me, it appeared, but none seemed perturbed by their circumstance.

I hurried toward the bungalow, suddenly hungry for the “medium-spicy” vegetarian breakfast that my wife would be waiting with. I sucked air with each spoon of the uppittu—so hot it was. “Did you see the turtles?” my wife asked me when I described to her how the mist had swayed as it sailed away upon the lake. I didn't have the courage to tell her—she was born in the coffee belt—that I'd been too absorbed in watching out for snakes in the grass at my feet.

The lake at Nandi Thota

of God and small things

Coffee blossoms at Nandi Thota

Last week a colleague told me how Bhagwan Sai Baba revealed himself to him. The colleague had been doubting if the Baba could really be Bhagwan, whereas his wife has always been devoted to the Baba. One day they'd just come home after travel, and his wife called out in excitement from their bedroom on top where she has Baba's picture on an altar. My colleague ran up; the picture was covered in ash. "Baba must have done it while we were returning," he said to me, faith clouding his eyes as he spoke. I listened with matching intensity, because I am chastened after reading regarding how Ramakrishna Paramahamsa chided a man who was taunting another who was bathing a tiny deity: "Is that a god in your hand?" I cannot recall the words, but to repeat roughly, Paramahamsa said: "What is it to you? Allow the man to exercise his faith according to his choosing."

Today I went to another colleague's marriage in Hassan district, in a tiny village which has a much-visited temple. The Adichunchanagiri math manages the temple. Other colleagues who had traveled to the marriage told me of the mahimé of the place. The Adichunchanagiri math cannot remove the earnings of this temple, they told me, and if they try, serpents will block the carriers. Also, you can have your future told and your pressing questions answered in the temple: the deity will bend and write for you using the front tip of its jeweled crown. I didn't ask, but a fee is surely payable for the consultation.

The place is a kshetra. "A kshetra is a place where a miracle has happened," my wife told me twice as we drove out from the marriage hall into the plains of Hassan district, taking pleasure from seeing acres and acres of coconut palms, and the sudden surprise of a runaway growth of thistle upon which there was not a leaf, but numerous bright purple flowers.

Which reminded of yesterday, when I saw white blossoms that have sprung up on coffee plants in Malnad, teased out somewhat early by an errant early shower. The flower-strings are long ornaments on the limbs of the plants—man's toil justly rewarded. Swamy Chinmayananda says a miracle is an effect without a cause, so the blossoms wouldn't qualify as a miracle, though when I saw them they seemed a lot like one. They are all over the plantation, up and down the slopes, and they will fall, all together, after their seven-day lifetime.

Also this week, an uncle has written to me from the United States, referring to research he has done with fellow scientists regarding neutron stars. Their research suggests the formation of a superfluid in a star's core when it dies. I don't understand the importance of it, but the matter seems to be greatly significant, and is receiving tremendous attention over the Internet. These are happenings far, far away—are they not a miracle? I don't know, but the great distances in which the events are happening surely constitute a miracle.

I have no need for ash on a picture, or the writings of a deity. I pray every day, though, as often as any believing man. I have a question that nags me. Did the prophets think big when they revealed to us our gods? Not being so sure, I have begun to take notice of God outside of temples, in the open, in vast places such as in the starry sky, and in the infinity that can be seen only with eyes closed.

the Western Ghats in their bad hair days

Kadumane Tea Estate in January

I went again to Kadumane Estate Saturday this week, and went up to the high peak to see the mountains of the Western Ghats that surround it. The green I saw during the monsoons two years ago is gone on a good number of these low mountains, and in place of green, sandy dry lemon-grass stand straight out, giving the impression that the mountains have been subjected to a military haircut. In the crotches where the mountains fold unto themselves, and where the mountains nestle into one another, there green persists—like pubes on the human. Now at home, with that image not leaving my mind, I am wondering if man is shaping nature in the manner in which nature shaped him, and I am telling myself—rubbish!

I was with colleagues—first time visitors in Kadumane—for whom I had painted a terrific sight the night before, of the view from the high point, and I had told them about champion trekkers who have perished in the jungles that cover the ghats. While I withered in embarrassment in the morning, before great size shorn of beauty, my companions began to describe the similars they have seen that are better. One has been in a twelve-kilometer drive through Mont Blanc, while another has stood on a high precipice and bent over the sheer drop somewhere near Ooty. I was silent, not wishing to make further descriptions, not sharing my realization that the glory of these ghats is during the monsoons. In these cool dry months, under a bright sun, the ghats should go through the part of their cycle that holds no allure for the eyes of man, and afterward, they should endure the harsh part that will come in summer, when, even as they swelter they wait to be created anew by the monsoons.

But the gift of time that these environs give, that blessing is never denied, and down in the valley which is still a dazzling green in man's capable hands, there among the perennial tea, I wandered without aim and arrived where children were playing in a yard. A boy and a girl came over and the girl asked me to take a picture of the boy and the boy recoiled and said no, but she insisted, all in Tamil, which language I don't have, so when I raised my camera and urged them in their language to laugh a little, even the boy, who'd been so grim, couldn't help laughing at me and my Tamil. When I had finished, the girl was still laughing, but the boy had gone back into himself.

After I left them, I thought maybe I could've tried Kannada, maybe they had Kannada, and I could have gone a little into their world. I envied Rasheed who came to my mind, and who can enter anyone's mind, any home, in any community, and find humor there, and if he should encounter tragedy, Rasheed knows to tease humor out of the core of suffering. I feel sorry for those who love reading but do not know Kannada, because they cannot enjoy Rasheed's account of life in Malnad, which is the home of Kadumane, and Rasheed's home, and also the home of all Indian coffee.

By the school at Kadumane Estate

Read also: A Giant Theater: from my last visit there

A Giant Theater

Kadamane Tea Estate, Karnataka, India

In such a vast panorama only a fifth—maybe tenth—of the land is filled with trees. The rest is taken by thigh-high, chest-high cones of the shrub. The shrubs in a given patch are all trimmed to the same height and, seen level, seeing the height they have climbed and the depths they’ve plunged, they are a rollicking green ocean, especially choppy now during the monsoons. It is a flat-topped shrub, deep green, whose stem-branches are twisted and covered in green moss. There are hundreds of acres of them, falling away before me, rising on the hills on my left, on the hills on my right, up the hills ahead, and everywhere behind me. Only a few gaunt trees stand among the shrub, planted to a plan for just-so-much shade—the stubborn strands on pates gone bald. On the crests of hills the trees are lush and thick, like hair on the punk’s head.

I have spent an hour and a half walking in the creases between tea patches and then I have climbed back up to the bungalow and am sitting on the ledge that frames the front steps. I am wet: my large sturdy umbrella was blown out several times while I worked the camera and I failed to manage the two and yet remain dry. Behind me the bungalow is in darkness: the power-supply has been halted by rain. The wind is whistling and hissing in and around the bungalow, and on the hilltops it is taking the trees every way, pushing and pulling them, ravishing them, and they grind together, and heave, and reach a crescendo of movement and a voluptuous roar erupts from them that shakes this world, after which the wind collapses, and the trees with it, and they rest a while before the next bout.

The rain comes pouring and stays and comes back again. Ganesh (the General Manager of Kadamane Estate) was confident when he told me that Agumbe has lost its status to Kadamane, that it now receives the highest rainfall, four-hundred inches last year.

In a cusp between the farthest hills there is a silver glow that is now covered, now uncovered. Columns of flat cloud the height of hills move stealthily on the right, as though wishing not to interrupt the lovemaking all round. Each column is like a diaphanous side-screen in a giant theater: they flutter as they move one behind the other in a long line in which the start and the end are merged with the hills in front and the hills behind. They walk on the tea without being a weight on them. I expect that they will tear up when the next rain comes, but no, they are there, their line unbroken, walking on, now seeming like thin tall furtive ghosts.

When the rain commences it is a patter on the roof, then a beating on it, and soon a lashing everywhere. The pouring is intense and blinding in the distance on the hills—the wind, the rain, and their insistent sound move with pressing urgency, curving round and away, traveling far, curling quickly back, touching the tea and the trees and the hills and everything between them, making up for all the time they’ve been away. The pouring ends abruptly and silence takes its place—the tea sparkle, the trees lift, and the hills sizzle. But there is a sound now, which does not rob the silence, the sound of water gushing everywhere, in grooves and gutters, falling from the roof, gurgling down the steep slopes, gaining volume, growing louder and louder as it goes. I think of the water-falls in the bends of the tracks, and the muscular streams, and the swollen red river that I saw earlier when Ganesh took me on a tour of the plantation.

Darkness has begun to fall, and I take a last look at the glowing mist that has filled the trees and capped the hills. It is as though a cold white heat has rimmed the world. Abruptly, darkness falls. There is no moon, there are no stars—only sound, but I haven’t heard a single bird all evening. The lights have come on in the bungalow; it is time to go in.

The fire before me has been burning since five. I read Kapuscinski’s account of the civil war in Angola in 1975. The FNLA and UNITA have converged on Luanda in multiple columns from the north and the south. The MPLA have begun to mobilize the whole population for the decisive battle for the newborn nation. A chapter remains, to know who won, and the reportage is terrific, and I finish the book and learn that everyone lost in the Angolan War even if the MPLA won it that November. The play of rain and wind is unabated outside, but it settles in a quiet corner in my mind. Later, when I pull the sheets over me, the sounds come back to the fore: the continual whoosh outside, the roaring in the far woods that won’t stop. The thought comes to me that this building where I’m sleeping might be blown away tonight, but in a few seconds deep sleep has engulfed me and my fears. I’ve breathed so much fresh air, no dreams come.