Farm life isn’t always easy, and it’s certainly not lazy. As Americans, we feel the long workdays and the lack of regular weekends acutely. The Indians around us almost always work longer, harder days than we interns do, and we rarely hear them complain. So it came as a surprise to me when Kumar, our closest neighbor and the most happy-go-lucky of all the Indians I know, announced to me that he was leaving the farm for good, today. “Erin acha,” he hollered to me between our open doors. “I’m going to Mysore!” I came out of our room and peered into his, where he stood packing the last of his possessions into one stuffed duffel bag. “When will you come back?” I asked. Not coming back, he told me with a grin, and continued to fold and stow his remaining t-shirts. I was taken aback, not quite believing Kumar but having no reason not to. The last time he went to Mysore, to help his family hang a door on their new house, his 4-day trip turned into a whole month away. The farm struggled while he was gone, shuffling day laborers from the farm to the guesthouse to fill his shoes. When he returned, we were all happy to see him, not just because of the extra set of hands, but because of his energy and positive attitude.
Kumar is a man who runs. He is not a tall man, but he has strength and stamina. One of his tasks on the farm is to ferry the food cooked in the kitchen in big white bags holding big silver tiffins down the hill to the guesthouse dining area. When you’re sitting at the dining area, or walking down the path toward it, you know it’s Kumar coming because you can hear his steps falling fast on the earth before you see him. When you finally do see him, his face is painted with the biggest smile you’ve ever seen, his happy eyes framed by a stylish mop of shiny black hair.
He was smiling even as he told me he was quitting his job. “Too much work,” he said. “Too much problem.” He doesn’t speak flawless English, but I understood enough to make out that he had been cleaning the floor of one of the cottages when his supervisor scolded him for not doing some other job quick enough. As a recourse, he had packed up his bags and intended to march up the hill to the main house and quit. He would catch the evening bus to Mysore, back to his family and the big city. “Talk about giving notice,” I said to Lauren as he started up the stairs.
Kumar is from Mysore, but he’s been working the guesthouse circuit for a few years now. He came to Rainforest Retreat from Turtle Bay, a low-key resort on India’s west coast. I went to Turtle Bay about a month ago, and could picture him jogging lassis out to visitors lounging on the beach. Now, he was dressed in his best city clothes – black jeans and a black t-shirt – and I could tell he was looking forward to a return to the city of his youth. He, the only single man working at the farm, lives a relatively solitary life here at the Retreat. While the other two or three extended families live in a connected house down the path from our place, Kumar lives in a single room adjoining our double intern cottage. He dines in the kitchen after the food goes down for the guests, and otherwise hangs out with the farm staff. He has friends here, certainly, but his family is elsewhere, and word on the farm is he is soon to be married.
Twenty minutes later, Kumar came hopping down the stairs carrying two solar lanterns meant for the guests staying far out in the farm at Plantation Cottage. “Still working?” I said to him. His face, still smiling, belied defeat and satisfaction at the same time. He had been convinced to stay.
Labor is a problem out in rural India. Farmers’ kids are getting good educations, and running off to the city to work in IT or architecture or any number of industries. Their families proudly see them off, and rightly so. But then the farm blanches, and the farming community falls to its knees. There is cardamom left unpicked out in the fields, and tea plantations whose tender green shoots are becoming overgrown, and the tea bitter, for lack of manpower to pick them quick enough. So I can imagine how Kumar’s statement that he would leave the farm evoked dialogue among his employers, and compromise. The new deal, he told me, would give him two or three hours of off time every afternoon. If he didn’t get it, he said, he would go to Mysore, and be gone.
We feel it too, this desire for time off, for personal time and space. But on a farm in India even that feels excessive. As I thought about Kumar’s predicament, I realized how circular the problem is. As more and more farm laborers leave for the cities, the few that remain must carry a growing burden of intensely demanding farm work. This in turn burns people out, stimulating a second exodus away from the farm. We were seeing it on a personal level, but it exists all over India and the developing world, I’m sure.
When Kumar came down the hill, I was sitting on our front porch pulling cardamom off the cut panicles that make up the very last of this year’s harvest. I was doing this because we don’t have enough labor on the farm. Five or six burlap sacks full of these panicles, severed a dozen each from the base of every cardamom plant on the farm -and there are hundreds- sat waiting for someone to sort through them and pull off their fruits. Two women who work on the farm, and one guesthouse volunteer, had been sitting for two days pinching the fruits from their stems. I sat down to get a little more done before the sun went down. Kumar came and sat with me, grabbing a bundle of panicles himself, and then Muttu joined in. The three of us sat for an hour, chatting and pinching the shiny green fruits into a wooden basket. Kumar and Muttu went back and forth in Kannada, gossiping about farm work, and the need for rest (I caught that much), and the pros and cons of working here (I guessed). I interjected now and then, but mostly just marveled in the moment. And in that dialogue I let go of my desire for more time to myself, solid weekends to revel in, and free time to read, write, and relax. I’m in India after all, and with such a labor problem, it’s just as important to keep busy as it is to relax.
15 December 2009
09 December 2009
Celebrations of Thanks and Harvest
Matt and I celebrated our anniversary about a month ago, and because we couldn’t remember the exact date that we met, and because we had to work on what we thought was the actual special day, we decided instead to celebrate Anniversa-week. This took the pressure off a bit, a good thing when you’re living in India. Holidays are tough; they require creativity and dedication, or else they’ll likely float by half a world away and a day behind.
So when Thanksgiving rolled around, the holiday surprised me by stretching itself into a week of harvest celebrations. It began with our own small American way of celebrating, with pumpkin pie and stuffing, and then six days later took on the form of Huthari, a local holiday in praise of the coming rice harvest.
We three Americans had a hard time explaining our coming holiday. “It began back when the European colonists had just arrived on the shores of America. They were starving, and the Native Americans took pity on them and shared their food with them. They had a big feast, and Thanksgiving was born.” One of us interjects – “And then the next day, the colonists forgot all about it and started killing the Native Americans.”
But it’s about family, we would say, and relaxing, cooking together, and sharing food. We called it a harvest festival, and that got across, because India is a country of harvests and festivals, and soon enough the local Coorgs would be celebrating their own version of the same thing.
We were a bit wary of what our beloved holiday would look like in India. We already knew there would be no turkey, even though our farm is home to two very ornery turkeys. We would have to be creative to make pie happen, and without a random assortment of family, what use is Thanksgiving anyway? Despite all of this, I couldn’t let the last Thursday in November pass without at least spending some time in the kitchen.
In an attempt to discourage a twinge of homesickness, I spent the day in the field. I wasn’t doing just any kind of farm work, but focused on digging sweet potatoes out of the ground. It’s not quite sweet potato season around here, and because the sweet potatoes were an afterthought last year, allowed to grow between a thick planting of mango ginger, they were long and skinny, and buried between a bountiful crop of ginger. We got three baskets of mango ginger out that day, and about 20 scrawny sweet potatoes. But the satisfaction of harvesting our own Thanksgiving meal overcame the quantity.
Later on, Matt helped pluck a plump pumpkin off an overhanging vine, and I used my mom’s recipe, with a bit of improvisation, to make a pie. In the absence of evaporated milk, I stirred a thick chunk of jaggery (unrefined sugarcane juice) into a saucepan of warm milk. The pie went into the toaster oven, and I prayed that the electric current wouldn’t switch off, which it did. Still, after two hours of attempted baking, out emerged a beautiful representation of home. Lauren whipped up some tasty sweet potatoes and stuffing, and we brought our version of Thanksgiving down to the dining area to share. Along with Anurag, Sujata, and Maya, we ate with a mother-daughter pair from Holland, and a pair of Indian guests. Matt toasted to Thanksgiving, and we all tucked in, ending our holiday around a roaring bonfire.
A few days later, Sujata started telling us about Huthari. Linked to the lunar calendar, Huthari marks the beginning of the rice harvest in Coorg, and like most festivals in India, it involves all kinds of firecrackers and fireworks. Because we don’t grow rice paddy here at Mojo, Sujata arranged for us to visit some friends of theirs who do. Lauren, Matt, Maya, and I set off after dinner, walking the kilometer to Vimmaiah and Meenakshi’s in the startling moonlight. When we arrived, two little girls greeted us with a show of sparklers, and we settled into a spread of snacks and sweets – milk halwa, pakora, and banana chips.
After some time, we were ushered into the family’s shrine room for a puja, and given our first-ever bindis – that little dot between the eyes. As it often happens in a foreign country, we were swept into the ritual without knowing what exactly was going on. Vimmaiah’s family left the shrine room in a small procession, and we followed along, all the way across the farm’s drying yard, over a small stream, and into the edge of the rice paddy. With limited flashlights, random fireworks, and the full moon sending off light overhead, we picked our way to the paddy and into a kind of magic. The Indians ahead of us started hollering, shouting boisterous “Polydeva”s to the gods of rice and harvest, and waving thin machetes over their heads. By the light of a small oil flame, Vimmaiah then reached into the paddy, grasped a large handful of the dried-out rice crop, and cut it at its base. After gathering an armload of the holy stuff, we all turned and walked back to the house. The young men of the family continued to set of fireworks, and small explosions of light and sound burst around us and the cut rice. The short ritual was over, the offering of rice was divided up, and we went home with ten stalks of rice wrapped in mango leaves to hang on all the doorways of our homes. Though quite different from our own feast of thanks, Huthari closed our week of thanks-giving with a bang, and with a nice memento to hang over our door.
So when Thanksgiving rolled around, the holiday surprised me by stretching itself into a week of harvest celebrations. It began with our own small American way of celebrating, with pumpkin pie and stuffing, and then six days later took on the form of Huthari, a local holiday in praise of the coming rice harvest.
We three Americans had a hard time explaining our coming holiday. “It began back when the European colonists had just arrived on the shores of America. They were starving, and the Native Americans took pity on them and shared their food with them. They had a big feast, and Thanksgiving was born.” One of us interjects – “And then the next day, the colonists forgot all about it and started killing the Native Americans.”
But it’s about family, we would say, and relaxing, cooking together, and sharing food. We called it a harvest festival, and that got across, because India is a country of harvests and festivals, and soon enough the local Coorgs would be celebrating their own version of the same thing.
We were a bit wary of what our beloved holiday would look like in India. We already knew there would be no turkey, even though our farm is home to two very ornery turkeys. We would have to be creative to make pie happen, and without a random assortment of family, what use is Thanksgiving anyway? Despite all of this, I couldn’t let the last Thursday in November pass without at least spending some time in the kitchen.
In an attempt to discourage a twinge of homesickness, I spent the day in the field. I wasn’t doing just any kind of farm work, but focused on digging sweet potatoes out of the ground. It’s not quite sweet potato season around here, and because the sweet potatoes were an afterthought last year, allowed to grow between a thick planting of mango ginger, they were long and skinny, and buried between a bountiful crop of ginger. We got three baskets of mango ginger out that day, and about 20 scrawny sweet potatoes. But the satisfaction of harvesting our own Thanksgiving meal overcame the quantity.
Later on, Matt helped pluck a plump pumpkin off an overhanging vine, and I used my mom’s recipe, with a bit of improvisation, to make a pie. In the absence of evaporated milk, I stirred a thick chunk of jaggery (unrefined sugarcane juice) into a saucepan of warm milk. The pie went into the toaster oven, and I prayed that the electric current wouldn’t switch off, which it did. Still, after two hours of attempted baking, out emerged a beautiful representation of home. Lauren whipped up some tasty sweet potatoes and stuffing, and we brought our version of Thanksgiving down to the dining area to share. Along with Anurag, Sujata, and Maya, we ate with a mother-daughter pair from Holland, and a pair of Indian guests. Matt toasted to Thanksgiving, and we all tucked in, ending our holiday around a roaring bonfire.
After some time, we were ushered into the family’s shrine room for a puja, and given our first-ever bindis – that little dot between the eyes. As it often happens in a foreign country, we were swept into the ritual without knowing what exactly was going on. Vimmaiah’s family left the shrine room in a small procession, and we followed along, all the way across the farm’s drying yard, over a small stream, and into the edge of the rice paddy. With limited flashlights, random fireworks, and the full moon sending off light overhead, we picked our way to the paddy and into a kind of magic. The Indians ahead of us started hollering, shouting boisterous “Polydeva”s to the gods of rice and harvest, and waving thin machetes over their heads. By the light of a small oil flame, Vimmaiah then reached into the paddy, grasped a large handful of the dried-out rice crop, and cut it at its base. After gathering an armload of the holy stuff, we all turned and walked back to the house. The young men of the family continued to set of fireworks, and small explosions of light and sound burst around us and the cut rice. The short ritual was over, the offering of rice was divided up, and we went home with ten stalks of rice wrapped in mango leaves to hang on all the doorways of our homes. Though quite different from our own feast of thanks, Huthari closed our week of thanks-giving with a bang, and with a nice memento to hang over our door.
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