No Pause that Refreshes

"I don't think I've ever spent such a special three hours in my life,” the woman before me said. Just special! The children! They were so sweet, and their little voices, they were just like chimes. Special little chimes!"

We were at the end of the paved road. Below, the dirt access tracks to the tea plantation fanned out among the horizontal contours of the tea ranges, and vertically down the steep gullies to the tea pickers' barracks-like "line rooms".

The woman was waiting for her driver. I had just arrived with Father V., a Tamil Jesuit priest wearing inconspicuous Western clothes and not a sarong. He was teaching me a few phrases in Tamil, comparing them with the words I knew in Sinhala.

The woman turned to regard the deep-flowing hills molded with the glossy deep green of tea plants, curve after curve high above us and deep into the valleys below where the forests and paddies began. Oddly enough, for a birder's paradise like Sri Lanka, there was hardly a song to be heard, and most of those consisted of caws coming faintly uphill from the line rooms hidden from sight in the hollows and groves below. Later I learned that a tea plantation doesn't support a varied insect population. "Just special! The manager had them sing for us. Twenty little girls and ten little boys. Just dolls! Dressed in white shirts and little red ties—the girls, too!"

It was nearing 6:00. The sun was low and Father V. and I were waiting for dusk. That was half an hour away, so we chatted while she waited for her driver to pick her up for the trip into Nuwara Eliya.

I inquired, "What time was this?"

"Oh, I don't know exactly. I never wear my watch when I travel to places like this. I keep it in my pocket so the, well, you know, they won't get it. But I guess it was about noon or one o'clock." "Gee," I said, "I wonder why they weren't in school at that hour?"

The question didn't have a chance to register, because around one of the tea rows came a group of twenty pickers, all women, ranging in age from teens to seventies. They wore vividly colored scarves wrapped like turbans over their heads. The ends draped over the sides of their heads and upper shoulders like an Arab kaafti. The rest of their garments consisted of a multicolored sari draped over both shoulders Indian style, a chemise that left the upper arms and midriffs bare, and a coarse, ragged, burlap sarong protecting the lower half of the sari from the sharp snags of the pruned tea branches. Many of the women’s noses were pierced on both sides at the base of the nostrils, through which they had attached gold pins in the shape of quarter-inch blossoms. That the blossoms were not lotuses coupled with the vivid colors of their saris marked them as Hindus. "Oh, I must...I must get a picture of them!" the voice gushed. "Look, you can speak a little of their language, can't you? Can you ask them if it's OK to pose for me?"

I told her these women spoke Tamil while my smattering of the local language was Sinhala, and the two resemble each other about like German and English. "No problem, we'll just motion with our hands. They'll get the idea."

Indeed they would, for tourists are one of the few forms of contact tea workers have with the outside world, and tips from tourists snapping photos are one of their chief sources of extracurricular income.

As we threaded through the waist-high tea rows toward them I told the woman, "You know, they're not paid well here, so you might want to make a little gift." "Oh, I'm used to that! I always carry around change with me. I bought a roll of rupees when I cashed my American Express. Funny, they didn't have coins in rolls, so they counted them out for me one by one! One hundred in all! I'm down to thirty-five now."

"That ought to be about right. That's more than any of them earns in a day, less than a dollar." "Yes, but they get free housing, medical care, and education. I read it in the tour guide. And besides, I decided before I came here that my policy was only one rupee per tip."

A rupee is worth two and a half cents. In the State Department they call people who think this way "policy dweebs."

Mrs. Dweeb busied herself arranging the pickers into a convincing "happy workers on the tea estate" pose. They assumed smiles and held them until the shutter clicked. Many had the widegapped bucktoothed smile immediately marking them as low-caste plantation or "Tea Tamil" women.

I'd read about the life of the Tea Tamils during British rule from the early part of the last century up until Independence in 1947. When the British tea planters were rebuffed in their attempts to induce the Kandyan Sinhalese to give up their farms and work for subsistence wages on the tea estates, they turned to low-caste and untouchable Tamils from the rural backwaters of South India. As there were recurring outbreaks of famine in South India at the time, British promises of steady work and free food attracted thousands of Tamils who had no idea of the implications of indentured servitude. The British implemented a social system that rendered plantation workers stateless and all but name and cut them off from associating with other segments of Ceylonese society. Not that they would have much chance to associate anyway, as they worked dawn to dusk seven days a week on isolated estates miles from the nearest towns.

The British were hardly alone in this mentality. The French had sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil, the Americans coffee and bananas in Central America, the British tea in Malaysia, Assam, and Darjeeling. All these relied on semi-slave labor kept in line by ignorance, fear, malnutrition, childbirth, racism, sexism, and exhaustion. Quite a legacy from the people who believe they created representative government. Not to mention their colleagues across the Channel who regard France as the summit of civilization, and across the pond in America where all men are said to be created equal. Perhaps it's the dharma of all this that makes London the most

insufferably tedious city on Earth and will involve America in wars supporting inequality until its resources run out.

In Britain the same plantation tactics were applied to the industrial sector, but that was in a country with good novelists and a strong press. The Labor Movement resulted. In Ceylon, the tea plantations were miles from nowhere. They didn't even receive newspapers, much less attract reporters. The Tea Tamils were born on the plantation, died on the plantation, and worked twelve to eighteen hours every day on the plantation. There was no education to speak of. The pay was little above starvation level. Moneylenders quickly moved in, charging thirty-percent interest rates. Beyond work, there were two other fixed constants in life: hunger and fear. Today, six generations later, those roots run straight down into the core. I had heard that the life of the tea workers was unspeakable. And I certainly knew it was glossed over in travel literature and official government pronouncements. So I came to see for myself.

I asked the woman if she wanted me to take a picture of her standing with the workers. She looked at me glacially. "I'm not one of those people who has to be in the middle of everything," she said.

Then she proceeded to stand in the middle of the workers and gave each a rupee. They barely hid their disappointment; five rupees is the generally conceded minimum. I vowed to supplement such a pittance with a ten-buck note (Kandytown sophisticate for a ten rupee bill, worth a U.S. quarter) for each of them later on.

In a way I was happy to have Mrs. Dweeb around. She was perfect cover for Father V. and I. We were waiting for last light so we could make our way unseen down to the tea workers' line rooms.

I had met him in Kandy while researching the significance of Asian Liberation Theology among the Catholic Sinhalese. I wish the theologians had chosen another name for their theory, because my experience everywhere I've been in the world is that the word "Liberation" means gun-toting bullies who want to be boss without running for office or soiling their knuckles.

Father V. greeted me that day as I entered his library high on a Kandy hill road. He seemed curiously unaffected by my compliments on the huge cage of parakeets outside—at least thirty of them, each with a hollowed-out coconut husk lashed to the ceiling for a nesting

place. To judge from the size of the pile of meal remnants the birds pecked at, I had little doubt where the leftover rice from everyone's lunch found its way.

Father V. heard me out about doing a book on the life in Sri Lanka as it is actually lived by the people, and my desire to get to the bottom of rumors I'd been hearing about conditions among the workers on a tea estate. Then he requested to be called "Father V." from that point on.

He pulled down the book An Asian Theology of Liberation by the Jesuit priest Aloysius Pieris, and then a bound volume of newsletters entitled "Voice of the Voiceless" that stretched back eleven years. "Voice of the Voiceless" was my introduction to the untold story of life on the plantation. I read the entire sheaf of quarterly issues from 1980 to the present at one sitting, then came back with my laptop the next day to copy passages verbatim. Father V. began to regard me as more than a parakeet fancier. Now, two weeks later, we were headed down to live clandestinely among the workers in their line rooms for several days. He, being both a priest and a Tamil, could set people at ease who would be terrified had I shown up alone. Even so there were thought-provoking risks. If we were caught and they found my notebook, I would almost certainly be declared persona non grata and expelled from the country. That in turn would mean the end of my Sri Lanka book. But Father V., I worried about what I'd gotten him into. He changed the subject every time I brought up what might happen to him. I got the impression that a rifle-butt beating would be the least of his problems.

We had concocted a story that I was researching for an article on alcoholism among low-paid workers all over Sri Lanka and that I was interested only in different drinking patterns between men and women plantation workers. But both of us knew that if a kangany—an estate manager—got wind of our presence, he wouldn't care what I was researching. The tea plantations are owned and managed by the Sri Lankan government, in whose interests it is to keep labor costs as low as possible in order to keep cash income from tea as high as possible. Through a vicious cycle of the British legacy, today's indifference to the Tea Tamils' plight, the workers' six-generation ingrained mentality as lowest-of-the-low caste, the treatment of

plantation labor today is virtually unchanged from colonial days. In addition, with tea being the second highest source of foreign exchange after textiles, messing with life on the tea plantations is tantamount to messing with national security. When I asked the priest why the plantation managers were so insistent about keeping the workers' line rooms out of sight he replied, "What does the U.S. Forestry Service do alongside highways in the woods?" "They leave the timber untouched where people can see it, then issue lumber companies permits to clear-cut everything that's out of view." "My point."

Write the Sri Lanka State Plantations Corporation or the Tea Propaganda Board or the Janatha Estates Development Board, and you get pamphlets with information like the following:

When the two commonest beverages in the world are compared, there is overwhelming evidence that in every respect, tea is far superior to coffee. Tea has been drunk in China for over 4,000 years. China has the highest tea consumption in the world. While tea has no harmful effects, it has numerous beneficial advantages, which most people are unaware of. Both beverages have a mild stimulating effects due to the presence of the common alkaloid, caffeine, which apart from its other effects relieves fatigue and tension. They contain different aromatic compounds which give tea its distinctive flavor and aroma. While coffee can become habit-forming, tea is not. The nutrients in tea have outstanding health-giving properties. Its carbohydrate content is only 4.5 percent. It has one to two percent protein and there is little or no fat. Tea has many minerals of value— potassium, calcium, manganese, and iron; plus the trace minerals zinc, copper, silicone, and fluorine. Aside from caffeine, tea contains the alkaloids theobromine and theophylline. But the most important constituent of tea are the polyphenols (15 percent), which have major beneficial effects. The polyphenols have a moderating effect on the caffeine in tea, and,

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because of the way caffeine is slowly released, tea does not act in the harmful way of caffeine in coffee, even if six or eight cups are taken per day. The polyphenols also bring about a decrease in blood cholesterol level and reduces the fatty deposits on the inner walls of the arteries. When vitamin C is taken with tea, the reduction is even greater. On the other hand, coffee, because of its caffeine content, inhibits the actions of Vitamins B1 and B2. Coffee increases the cholesterol and fat levels in the blood and gives rise to heart disease....

and:

Modern science has rediscovered an ancient miracle drink that cures everything from heart disease to tooth decay—ordinary tea. According to reports presented to members of the Chinese Society of Medicine recently, a few piping hot cups of tea will do more for most folks than expensive drugs and medical treatments. "Tea is a remarkable, powerful, and effective medicine," says Professor Lou Fuging at Zhejiang Medical University. "My research shows that it can prevent arteriosclerosis." Professor Lou said his work revealed that the incidence of arteriosclerosis for people who take tea as their daily drink is 50 percent less than those who do not. When he prescribed this miracle beverage for 160 heart disease victims, he found that 80 percent showed marked improvement. Tea also has been shown to have an alleviating effect on radiation sickness. Chinese doctors have reduced the side effects of people receiving radiation treatment for cancer. More than 90 percent of people who drank tea after undergoing radiation therapy reported they had less nausea....

and:

... Tea bushes grow to thirty feet high unless they are constantly trimmed back to the meter or so which is the easiest height to pluck. The pickers are expert at choosing only the top two leaves and bud

between them, which produce the best flavor. After the leaves are transported to the processing "shed" (in fact a large four-storied building) they are withered on hessian-fiber mats or blown dry with drafts of warm air. This reduces their moisture content to about sixty-five percent. The leaves are then crushed in metalflanged grinders. This initiates a fermentation process which is complete within a few hours. The fermentation must be stopped at precisely the point where the crushed leaf is flavorful but not acidic. The fermentation is halted by "firing" in a 190°F oven, which reduces the moisture content to about two percent. The many varieties of teas are graded by size, from "dust" to "leaf" tea; and by quality, from "flowery" to "pekoe" to "souchong". Teas are further categorized as low-, mid- or high-grown. Generally, the higher tea is grown, the better its quality....

With this air of unreality pouring through my head, we began our descent. Mrs. Dweeb had departed to my silent vow to forever expunge the word "special" from my vocabulary. The tea rows unreeled past us in a descent so steep it reminded me of an altimeter in a plane headed straight down. Luckily there was a low moon because the dry stream bed was full of ankle-twisting loose round stones.

I recalled the day Father V. sat down and spoke slowly over my shoulder as he watched me recording his relation of Tea Tamil history on my laptop.

Soon after their conquest of the Kandyan kingdom in 1815, the British explored the High Country south and southeast of Kandy to see what might be done with it. The altitude and rain were perfect for coffee, so large tracts of virgin forest were cut down for coffee plantations. As it was too expensive to try to move the huge ebony, teak, mahogany, silkwood, ironwood, and other logs, the British East India Company officials did the only sensible thing: they burned them. The first coffee was planted under Governor Barnes and by 1820 coffee was a large export crop.

Labor, however, wasn't as easily acquired as clear-cut land. At first the British looked to local sources, but the Kandy District farmers were engaged in their own agriculture, had little appetite for British

theories about free movement of labor and capital, and moreover, were so hostile to the British they cheerfully participated in two uprisings, in 1817 and 1848. The British then looked to the povertystricken low-caste villages of Tamil Nadu, the southeastern province of India from Madras to Cape Comorin. These villagers were ideal coffee fodder. After twenty-five centuries of brahmins they had been ingrained with such a low sense of self-esteem that if one of them entered a Hindu temple, saw a Hindu service, or gazed upon a brahmin, the punishment was death. Moreover, they were poor, illiterate, superstitious, malnourished, and spoke a patois of Tamil few Ceylonese Tamils could understand. In short, perfect slaves in all but name.

Coffee was a seasonal crop. The Tamil Nadu workers would cross the Palk Straits, walk 200 miles through rugged, malarial arid zones and jungle to the coffee highlands, pick the crop, and make their way back to Tamil Nadu. But in the 1870s the coffee industry collapsed because of a leaf blight fungus which killed virtually every plant on the island. The industrious British turned to tea. Tea, however, is a perennial rather than seasonal bearer, which required a permanent labor force. A permanent labor force meant families and that meant housing. The British did the only sensible thing: they built the line rooms.

Today's line rooms are little changed from British times. Ten to twenty rooms are clustered in several rows of low-roofed buildings with half a dozen latrines at one end. Each barracks-like building is divided into four to six ten-by-twelve-foot "family rooms" in which are packed families ranging from a young couple to a family of six or seven. There is room enough for only a small table, a chair or two, a corner lipa fire pit for cooking, and a bed. In many, running water is available when it rains; other times young girls carry earthen or aluminum water pots on their hips to and from the public pumps, which were installed all over Sri Lanka courtesy of International Monetary Fund financing many years ago.

When the privies clog up, a frequent event during the monsoons, everyone uses the fields. There are few fruit trees or private garden plots; tea, after all, comes first. When a worker dies he or she is buried

among the bushes they spent their lives plucking. When the burial mound is finally washed away, so are the memories.

The British, many of them retired military men, meanwhile built palatial country homes for themselves so the comforts of Sussex wouldn't seem quite so far away. They surrounded these with gardens of flowers and groves of fruit trees. The place where all this is captured in its most loving detail—down to the bay windows, wood beams, race track, and golf course—is Nuwara Eliya.

The itinerant life of coffee pickers meant that social problems went home with the workers. But when the workers became permanent residents the British plantation owners found themselves confronting the sick, the senile, and the elderly unable to work any longer. So they did the only sensible thing: they told their kanganies to get rid of them. The kanganies took their duties so seriously they drove these paupers into cities like Colombo and dropped them, destitute and unable to speak a word of Sinhala, on a street corner. If this sounds barbaric, it's helpful to recall what Ronald Reagan did to the institutionalized insane in the 1980s.

The Colombo municipal government began to notice the steady increase of beggars and did what all good municipal administrations do: they appointed a commission to look into the matter. One February night in 1906 the entire city was cordoned off and the streets systematically searched quarter by quarter. By 3:00 A.M. the chief medical officer W. Marshall Phillip had all he needed to conduct the first Census of the Vagrants of Colombo. Of 675 vagrants, all but twelve were abandoned plantation Tamils. The good city fathers could have saved themselves the operation's expense by simply consulting one Frances L. Daniel. He was the City Coroner.

While it was one thing for useless vagrants to die out of sight in alleys and under bridges, it was quite another to countenance the periodic outbreaks of cholera and tuberculosis that plagued the city, transmitted by paupers excreting and coughing on the streets. The Salvation Army and Friends in Need couldn't possibly cope with a problem of this magnitude, so the British colonial administration did the only sensible thing: they (a) constructed a Detention Center where vagrants swept off the streets could be quarantined, (b) built a hospital at Ragama (a pejorative that translates to "Toddy Town")

where the terminally afflicted could die out of public view, and (c) repatriated those not in imminent danger of death back to India, where, by now two or more generations removed from their forebears' home villages, they hadn't the faintest idea where to go or what to do.

By now Father V. and I were navigating only by the moon. We must have come down five or six hundred feet, yet even at that the nearest non-plantation village at the bottom of the gully twinkled very faintly far down into the valley. I heard voices ahead. Father V. pulled on my elbow in a signal to stop. I cupped my hands to my ears. The voices were all men and children. I looked at my watch: 6:35 and the women hadn't arrived yet. They must have been picking on one of the upper tracts, two miles away and a thousand feet above. Father V. whispered that we shouldn't approach the line rooms until the women arrived. By now the men would be well into their homemade kasippu (arrack) and unpredictable. I made notes by the light of the moon, writing in Dutch. I had learned that language while living in Holland for three years, and still use it whenever I don't want anyone to know what I am saying. The chances of our running afoul a Dutchreading plantation manager were slim.

After Independence in February, 1948, the Sri Lankan social classes which had most identified and cooperated with the British took the reins of power. They could be relied up not to make any major changes; indeed, they retained English as the language of government and spoke it exclusively among themselves. This new governing elite realized that, given the large number of Tea Tamils and the fact that they had a union of sorts which was more powerful in numbers than any other union in the country, they were an obviously unstable voting block. So when plans for universal franchise were implemented, the Tamils were excluded on the grounds that they were South Indian and therefore "stateless". Through intentionally exclusionary ordinances such as a requirement for a "Certificate of Permanent Settlement", fewer than 100,000 Tea Tamils gained the right to vote out of a population of about 685,000.

The Sinhalese leadership further frustrated a Tea Tamil voting bloc by revising electoral registers in such a way that a substantial

number of workers were thrown off the roles. Nonetheless, in the 1947 election the Tea Estate workers won six out of the seven seats allotted to their party, the Ceylon Indian Congress.

The horrified government retaliated by further restricting the franchise and adding a "Proof of Domicile" requirement to the Certificate of Permanent Settlement. And who was to certify this Proof of Domicile? Why, those prudent fellows the plantation kangenies—after all, weren't they the ones most likely to know?

In addition, the Tamils also had to show proof of Ceylonese citizenship. To make this difficult if not impossible to obtain, the Citizenship Acts of 1948 and 1949 created a class of "stateless persons" and the Parliamentary Elections Act of 1949 mandated that no one who wasn't a citizen could vote. Independence won the Tea Tamils neither citizenship nor state; they were in effect locked out of the government.

In 1964 and 1974 pacts were made with India that provided for the "repatriation" (a euphemism for forced deportation) of 600,000 Tea Tamils back to India—an India where they wouldn't even have tea picking for income. In 1972 the tea plantations were further destabilized during the most militant phase of Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike's political career. At the time she was still smarting from an attempted overthrow of her regime by a group of educated young people who couldn't get jobs because of the flight of businesses out of the country in response to her socialist administration. The Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) were somewhere to the left of Chairman Mao and had tried to take power with an odd assortment of slogans reinforced with pipe bombs.

Mrs. Bandaranaike's response was virulently anti-Tamil and antiWest. She accelerated state control of every part of the economy, which included nationalizing the tea plantations. The former colonials decided life was really better in Sussex after all—not to mention Australia. They were replaced by government bureaucrats who were almost to a man Sinhalese in a period of Bandaranaikeinspired Sinhalese racism. In the north the "old" Tamils whose blood lines ran back 2,000 years saw their share of government vanish. The demand for a separate Tamil state called Eelam ("Precious Land")

began as a whisper during Mrs. Bandaranaike's 1970-77 government and is an intractable battle cry today.

The new plantation bosses had never seen a tea plantation. They also had plenty of relatives who could use a job, especially a job that had the virtue of adding to the family coffers without burdening anyone unduly with work. Government bureaucrats made decisions in Colombo and rarely visited the plantations they administered. Their pay and promotions were related to their connections rather than their efficiency.

In addition, local politicians now had their hands in the plantation voting bloc till, and in Sri Lanka local politicians have a reputation for ruthlessness that makes a Republican fundraising tract seem positively brimming with virtue. These pols served their masters well. In the 1982 election the Nuwera Eliya voting district numbered 652,114 people of voting age, of whom only 289,890 were eligible to vote. The rest, 362,224 Tea Tamils, were not "citizens", even though they had lived there three to four generations and were the workhorses behind Sri Lanka's foreign exchange income.

Down on the plantation, nationalization had a far more direct effect: it meant the end of subsidized food. Ration coupons were abolished. Tea Tamils suddenly had to pay as much as ten times what they previously paid for sugar, flour, and rice. The price of kerosene to light the line rooms went out of sight. Subsistence became starvation. When the food ran out by the 20th or 22nd of the month, the men were forced to go to the moneylenders and their thirty percent interest.

I was mulling over these historical tidbits as Father V. parted the cloth door at one end of the line room and we walked in. A more fetid, musty odor I don't think I have ever smelled. It literally contained generations of diaperless children, kerosene lamps, earth floors, molds, damp, smoldering cooking fires, unwashed clothes, and the sickly smell of drinking. The thrice-breathed air of a seedy pool hall was an alpine meadow in spring compared to the thousand-times breathed air of this place. Its soundscape was if anything even more complex than the air—lids clanking on pots, belches, crying children, shouting, barking dogs, an off-tune radio sputtering a song from

India, someone breaking wind, someone else uncorking a jug. I began to think my putative research project on alcoholism rates wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Someone saw us and screamed and instantly the place fell unearthly silent except for the growling dogs. Not one head peered from out of its cubicle. Clearly everyone thought we were a kangany barging in a sullen arrack mood and looking for a woman for the night.

Father V. began speaking in Tamil and a few eyes edged out from behind cloth curtains and door jams. If the silence was profound before, after they got a good look at me it was utter. My very existence there could mean deportation for them and there was nothing they could do.

Father V. must have spoken for ten minutes before a single person ventured out to face us. It was a man. I assumed he was the line room's sub-kangany, delegated with keeping things in line on the home front for an extra twenty rupees (50 cents) a day. I had to force myself to remember that this was but a few years short of the year 2000 and that nearly all my European and American friends had a computer, took daily hot showers, and ate what they wanted when they wanted it.

It was another hour before life returned to the cooking pots and crying children. The sub-kangany gathered a few other men and heard Father V. out. There was a fierce argument among them and I seriously considered taking the impressions I had so far and leaving these people alone.

Certainly there were impressions enough: The "rooms" were separated by moldy, peeling whitewashed wattle-and-mud walls and the "doors" were coarse cloth draped over a string. Inside was a bed made of a piece of burlap stuffed with straw and dry leaves, a chair, a table covered with orange plastic, a couple of faded images of Hindu deities cut from a magazine, a small hand mirror, and the red glow of a hearth in a corner wafting eye-stinging wood smoke into the air. The rooms where the children slept were crowded with bodies under a blanket. Body heat is all they have through the interminably cold rainy nights of the monsoons. Even in the dim light of kerosene lamps on low settings I could see the sallow faces of diets with little

protein or iron, the stick legs and swollen bellies of undernourished children, and the drawn, irritable, fatalistic looks of people pushed over the edge. From these people, whose nourishment often contains less than eighty percent of their daily calorie needs, comes a large portion of Sri Lanka's national earned income.

They let us sleep in the corridor. My pillow was my notebook; Father V. used his breviary. Next morning we were awakened at 5:30 by the women getting up to make breakfast.

It is the woman's life on the plantation that is the harshest. They work from the time they wake until they go to sleep. They are the first to go without, the first to make sacrifices, and the last to eat after the men and children are taken care of. The child mortality rate of 150 per 1000 live births is an educated guess, because no statistics are kept on Tea Tamils. They pick the tea while their men dig, plant, and prune. The men are as thin as their wives as they grunt at their mattocks, chop back underbrush, or open up clogged drainage ditches.

As we arose and combed our hair with our fingers, the women edged past without looking at us. They carried water pots with flared spouts out the tops. I didn't know where the village pump was, but it must have been a good walk because the women didn't return for ten minutes. Luckily this dry season was one in which there had been a rain shower almost every day; otherwise the woman would have had to walk to the only pump in the area with a cistern attached, twothirds of a mile away.

When they returned the women threw straw onto the embers of last night's fire. Twigs and then sticks went on after it had flared. Smoke curled up into the room and hovered in thick layers under the eaves. Onto trivets over the flames went rice pots and bread dough on a tin sheet. Sons chopped chilis and manioc plant while daughters swaddled the babies and prepared Nestle to accompany them to the crèche (day nursery). The men waited for breakfast. They smoked beedi, a leafy nicotine-containing cigarette substitute which is rolled and smoked like a cigarillo. Beedi reeks to high heaven and is smoked only by the poor. I could only imagine its tar and carbon monoxide content. One man still had the shakes from the drunk of last night. I'd read that it was the women who turned to alcohol out of sheer

desperation. Now I saw the drinkers were those who had so arranged their lives they did nothing while others served them.

The women fed the children on chipped mel-mac plates so old the original glossy sheen remained only along the underside of the rims. The average portion would slightly overfill a teacup. While everyone was eating the women wrapped lunches in newspapers for the children at school. At 7:00 A.M. the women left as a group, first to the crèche, then the mile and a half to the muster room. The men departed a little later in another direction, to the kangany's office. If any of them was late for the 7:30 muster, even by a few minutes, they could be sent home without pay.

Father V. and I, of course, didn't accompany them. In fact, we decamped as soon as they left and angled off along a tea range until we were two hills out of sight. No telling if someone might need a few extra rupees and inform the kangany. We spent the day in a grove of trees while we watched through binoculars the nearby slopes where other women were plucking.

After muster the women walk as many as three miles up and down steep terraces and across cols and ridges to the rows they will pick today. As they pick they sing "Poliyo poli, poliyo poli,"—"May the baskets be full, be full soon." They hump their loads at 9:00 back to the muster shed, where they weigh man enters their basket weights in a ledger, deducting a kilo for the basket. It begins to rain, drumming on the corrugated roof. The weigh man thereupon deducts another two kilos from each basket for the weight of the rain in the leaves.

Weighing is done on the women's own time. The long minutes in line eat into the time the woman have for their children. A mother nursing her child is allowed to feed the child at weighing times, but that means a trip to the crèche, and the time she takes for it is deducted from her daily hours, which she must make up at the end of the day.

The weigh master pins a slip to each woman's blouse. The women dump the leaves into hoppers, loosen the tumpline on their foreheads, set the baskets down, and catch their breath. The young girls chat and giggle; the older women sit staring. A few minutes of rest, then it's back to the tea a mile or two away.

At noon they weigh in again. They have an hour for lunch. The women pick up their children at the crèche, take them to the line room, prepare lunch for their men, eat what is left after the men and children are done, return the children to the crèche, and are back at the weigh station at 1:00.

The optimal tea pluck is a tea bud and the upper two leaves below it. If a picker allows twigs or the tougher leaves lower on the branch to fall into her basket, she is "blaggarded" (blackguarded) by the weigh master and may be reported to the Senior Officer. The overseers are all men. They are fond of pointing out, "Strict supervision is necessary so workers bring in only good leaves." Their own bosses they rarely see.

By the third day Father V. and I were enough of the line room landscape that the women returning at 6:30 went about their chores without paying us much mind. They did not, however, look in our direction, not even furtively.

Their evening began with cleaning their cubicle while the fire heated water for the children’s baths. Then rice chatties went on the fire and the women left for the cistern to wash the day's clothes. When they returned they added curry, chilis, and a few vegetables to the rice, and covered it to simmer. Then they washed the breakfast and lunch dishes. When the food was cooked they served the men and children. While the others ate the woman tidied the children’s' rooms and made their beds. When the men finished and left for their kasippu and cards, the women told the children stories and sang to them. When the children were finally to bed the women at last took the time to eat what was left over after the men and children. At 10:30 or 11:00 they sank onto their dusty straw mattresses. Whispers and rustles in the dark told of a few whose day wasn't over yet as their men came to them and now wanted them not wives but women.

I thought about Mrs. Dweeb and her comment about "free housing, medical care, and schools." I had seen the housing, but what about the schools and medical care?

The next day Father V. and I broke cover and wandered about the estate like tourists. He knew it well. It was such an irony that the tea country of Sri Lanka is so beautiful to behold, yet its beauty conceals

all that we were seeing. As we headed toward the estate's school, I reviewed my notes on the typical statistical plantation:

The average estate comprises 1500 acres of tea. The median population is 2423, of which 1200 are workers (570 males, 630 females) in 532 families. There are 595 children under the age of fifteen. The resident population, children included since they pick tea as well, is 1795 Tea Tamils and 628 Sinhalese workers, managers, and overseers. There is little social interaction between these groups and virtually no marriages between them. Their pay compares as follows with the rest of the Sri Lankan labor force:

Urban Rural

Tea Estate Mean income in rupees/mo. 823 617 300 Average workers per household 1.6 1.5 2.4 Household income in rupees/mo. 1341 950 722

There are two trade unions which take up Tea Tamil issues, the Ceylon Workers Congress and Lanka Jathika Estate Workers' Union. The latter is sponsored by the government; the former is headed by a government minister. The one friend the Tea Tamils have in high office is Sri Lanka's Minister of Tourism and Industrial Development, S. Thondaman. He is a Tamil himself, and like President Premadasa, has lived "bare feet on the ground." Thondaman probably has the most unenviable job in Sri Lanka. He is constrained on one side by certain Sinhalese ministers who yearn for the good old days of Bandaranaike nationalism (a euphemism for racism), and on the other side by a suffocatingly indifferent and implacable management on the tea estates.

Coupled with the ignorance and fear of the tea workers themselves, this management system perpetuates a virtually insoluble problem that is a causus belli for the Tamil Tiger revolutionaries in the North. Sri Lanka today is paying in Tamil Tiger dollars for the penny-level thinking of the Bandaranaike era. Thondaman is an enlightened men navigating the minefield of a business-as-usual-where's-my-paycheck bureaucracy, ministers with

their fingers in the till, bottom-feeder local politicians, and a budget that will be gutted if he steps on the wrong toes.

We arrived at the "free schooling". The classroom was a forty-byseventy-foot ten-foot-high fading-whitewash mud-and-wattle hut with open-air windows, a corrugated tin roof, and no door. Inside was one blackboard, one teacher, and 182 students in grades one through five—the only grades taught on the tea plantations. There were only a handful of well-thumbed pamphlets in a rack on the wall and a single tattered, faded map of "Ceylon". The students were seated by hierarchy of age. First and second graders sat on the floor and got no teacher attention at all. They learned their one-two-threes and A-B-Cs from the third graders. The third and fourth graders sat twelve to a bench with nothing to write on. The fifth graders got four to a bench with a rough-sawn plank nailed across the front to write on. One lucky student selected by the teacher to be monitor had the status symbol of a desk entirely to himself. There wasn't a pencil or sheet of paper on or in it. His education was keeping others in line, a future sub-kangany in the rough.

This was one of two schools; the other had 210 students. The teachers are appointed by the Education Department of the Government. They work only with the students who are sent to them; over 100,000 children of school age get no schooling at all because their parents would starve without the extra income they bring in. Child labor is paid at about 40 percent of adult. Of the children who do attend school, attendance is 50 percent. Any visitor to a line room is immediately mobbed by children clamoring, "Bonbon?", "School pen?", "Money?" In addition to the showcase necktie choirs warbling for the edification of the Mrs. Dweebs and their cameras, many other students are turned into a free personal labor force by the teachers. Students clean and cook for the teacher, wash clothes, weed the garden, fetch the mail, buy necessities at the village market, and do whatever else the teacher orders. The teachers' gardens are for more than subsistence: they sell whatever they can to the local markets in town. If the plantation workers want food from the teacher, they have to pay for it. Hence able-bodied students of use to the teacher are not promoted beyond Grade 4 until the teacher trains replacements. Father V. told me that once he had asked why the teachers were so

unconcerned with the fate of their charges. The reply: "What's the use of study? They're all going to be pickers."

The "free medical care" was hardly an improvement. There were two dispensaries, each staffed by an Estate Medical Assistant and a Welfare Supervisor, for a grand total of four paramedic-level medics to handle 2,400 or so people, of whom the needs of the Sinhalese staff came before all others. Hospitalization is available in the nearest city, but the worker has to pay for it. There's no budget to buy imported drugs. I looked into the wire-fronted medicine locker: aspirin, iodine, bandages, a thermometer, several plastic bottles filled with herbs in capsules, and a crutch. "Free child care" consisted of five faded yellow crèches for children under five, totaling 82 children in all. Each was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. The playground was an expanse of mud. UNICEF provides two packages of Thriposha nutritional powder for each child per month. Thriposha is a precooked protein-fortified food supplement that feeds some 600,000 poverty-line Sri Lankan children. When a child's allotment runs out crèches do not provide further rations. That's why the mothers prepared Nestle at the line room in the morning. They have to feed their children during their breaks and lunch hour, since the crèche managers won't do it. Of the five crèche managers, only two had any training in pediatrics or child illnesses.

To these amenities add the nonexistence of cultural outlets such as halls to enjoy music, song, dance, or movies; no playgrounds; no handicraft centers; no religious instruction in the Hindu faith; rampant superstition; and the predictable alcoholism, gambling, and spousal abuse. The Tea Tamils cannot vote for their own representative in government; one is appointed for them.

By the time we left we had become accepted to the point where I could conduct oral history interviews, with Father V. translating. Here is the story of one 70-year-old woman: "I do not know when or where I was born. I worked for one year at X Estate. My first salary was forty-three cents a day. [The rupee is divided into one hundred cents; fifty years ago the monetary equivalent of her income would have been about ten U.S. cents per day.]

"Then I came to Y Estate. I married here and this is where I have been ever since. The head kangany is powerful here. The superintendents do what he tells them to do. They are afraid he will got to another estate and take the workers with him. This kangany enters the names of new workers on the rolls only after they have worked three days. That's how he keeps their first three days' pay. "We are made to feel our caste all the time. Once when I went to see my uncle in Badulla, I stopped at a boutique for tea. The owner asked me casually to which caste I belonged. I asked why he wanted to know. He told me that he served tea to Paraiyar or Pallar tea worker castes only in a coconut shell. I went to another shop. [Ed. Note: The Paraiyar caste was considered so low in Hindu India that it gave the English language the word "pariah".] "In the days of the British, we got no education, but they fed us well. Now the estate managers cheat us terribly. We know they're doing it but they have such complex regulations none of us can understand them. They have been taught more than we have. "In those days we did our work without fearing anybody. When we celebrated a festival on the estate, if other villagers came to disturb us, we would chase them off the plantation. We can't do that now. If we did they would retaliate with violence and no one would help us. In British days we didn't know the meaning of the words violence, shooting, murder, rape. Now every three-year-old knows them. Today if a girl is raped, the family hushes it up. Otherwise she could never find a husband. "We began the school day by reciting the Theravam songs to the gods. Then the attendance was taken. Two or three boys who knew the routine were sent to clean up the teacher's cow shed. Two girls cleaned the teacher's kitchen and washed the dishes. These were always "high" caste girls; the children of Paraiyars or Chakkilians weren't allowed in because their presence would foul the kitchen. "After the work the children were given tea or buttermilk. We were served in coconut shells instead of cups because we were the children of tea pickers. We had to drink the buttermilk outside the kitchen, even if it was raining. Children who didn't work got no buttermilk, but the teacher's cow always got buttermilk.

"About ten o'clock the teacher would send two groups of boys to cut grass for the cows. If they didn't bring enough grass they were punished. Usually they came back about one o'clock, but sometimes much later because they had to go far for the grass. They got tea and buttermilk when they got back before one o'clock, but nothing if they were late. "My brother was the teacher's postman. He had to go to the village six miles away to get the mail. He had to return on time. If he was delayed the teacher would accuse him of going for a cup of tea or a bite. He had no right to go home for tea or a bite while on duty. Sometimes at the end of the school day he would have to go back to the post office to mail letters the teacher had written. "My friend was chosen to go marketing for the teacher. One day he was sick so I said I would go for him. He told me I could take half a rupee from the amount I was given in consideration for the work I did. I took the half rupee [one-and-a-quarter U.S. cents]. The next day the teacher came to me and demanded it back. I gave it to her and then she beat me."

When I was doing my initial research on life on the estates I came across a poem by Rachel Kurian in her landmark study, gem-cutters. I had jotted it down and now turned to that page in my notebook:

Withered roses Days remembered in thorns Unchanged in each detail. Days like other days, So have the years gone One by one. Twelve hours a day, Seven days a week; Thus their lifeblood flows To fashion this land, A paradise for some.