Bean picking time in N'Eliya

By Aditha Dissanayake

Back from nine days of revelry in the cool climes of Nuwara Eliya, the heat in Colombo seems unbearable. But one is grateful for the spate of holidays that enabled one to enjoy the best days of April in the misty mountains, basking in the warm hospitality of a friend on a tea estate. The result was a revealing glimpse of the lives of those who live behind the stone walls of sprawling bungalows, amidst heavy teak furniture, Charles Dickens-type fireplaces, green lawns, roses and plots of cabbages.

Nine days were long enough to find out that life in a tea-estate could be fun, could be lonely, could be boring. It could mean hard-work like growing vegetables in your backyard, or using your imagination to find out ways to kill time on a Poya day, in a house which is out of reach of all television signals and has a phone that is never "alive".

So goes the first click in my camera. I am standing in the middle of a vegetable plot holding a bag full of beans! They talk about bean picking in American novels. It's a big event over there. Here, in the backwoods of Nuwara Eliya things are different. It is less strenuous and more fun.

If one begins early in the morning, one could see the sunlight, still in its infant stages, flicker through the beanstalks and draw cartoons on the withering leaves. Picking the right bean is not easy. Some are too tender. Some, over-ripe. The latter is plucked any way, even though the Mudalai might refuse them later. The best are the once in which the shape of the beans inside are visible through the green skin. It is important to scrutinize each creeper from the ground to the top, from head to toe, so as not to miss a single ripe bean.

There are three of us. Myself Appu the butler, and the Thotakaran, who being deaf is named after Prof. Calculus (shortened to Cally) of Tintin cartoon fame. Appu keeps accusing Cally for picking the tender ones in high decibels. Cally keeps grinning and refuses to hear. As the tender beans weigh less, Appu is worried that plucking them would mean a loss to his Dorai, the Assistant Manger whose hospitality I was enjoying, and a profit to the Mudalali.

Sucking my sore thumb now and then, for beanstalks are strong to break, I listen as Appu narrates how the two of them had ploughed the field and planted the seeds together. How they had waited for rain, and how on almost every evening that they had watered the entire field with three leaking buckets, it had rained during the night. The weather gods had teased them. But the masters of heaven had been kind as well. There was nothing to complain about the harvest. Within the first few weeks the cost had been recovered and from then on all was profit.

Bean-picking soon becomes a ritual conducted almost everyday. Appu would take the two bags of beans to the Mudalali at the junction. The profits rarely increased to more than two hundred rupees a day.

But this is more than enough. Considering how many enjoyed them. Ourselves. The neighbours. The butterflies and the parrots, for my host believed his harvest belonged more to the birds than to him.

During the middle of the week I pick up the telephone bursting to speak to somebody, anybody, in the outside world and hear no sound. The phone is dead, yet again. My host sends the factory odd-job man to find out if one of the lines have fallen off. No, nothing is wrong with them. It is the del. The del is out.

Del is what is called the tower seen often enough from the bungalow, which belongs to the Telecom and which is almost always "out". It is a white iron structure in the distance during the daytime. At night, a bright red light.

When we discover the del is out yet again and the television could show only a mass of black dots, there seems nothing better to do than to go explore this all important del tower of Bambarakelle. The distance, as the crow would have told us would not have been less than 10 kilometres. But on the CD 200 motorbike, on a road, which twisted and turned like an earthworm in a freshly ploughed field, it takes more than one hour.

One of the first villages that we go through, having turned off from Lindula, has the strange name of Nagasena. The name suits more a village in Anuradhapura than this small town with the names of shops and billboards and posters appearing in Tamil.

There are mostly tea bushes, wild Chrysanthemums and giant ferns. The frowning clouds overhead does nothing to improve the atmosphere. The road stretches on. Now and then we would see a tea field covered in white specks - the tea pluckers. From the road, only the white polythene bags on their backs are visible.

"There it is, it is not far," we assure each other as we keep turning our heads to look at the tower and try to pretend we are not fooling our selves. Finally, when, after having climbed ever so many feet, we lose sight of it, we knew we had reached our destination.

We park the bike near the brown gate, but do not think we would be able to enter the compound warded off from the neglected tea fields by the barbed wire fence. Yet to our surprise the gate yields to a gentle touch. A thin footpath is visible through the weeds. The security hut is empty. The whole place speaks of desolation.

Gingerly we make our way towards the main building. The newly painted walls and the sealed windows with A/C machines underneath them show that the buildings had been constructed recently. Orange coloured daisies grow in abundance right round the main office. The place is deserted. We are the only human beings around. It is easy to imagine the loneliness of Adam and Eve in Paradise.

We walk towards the tower and stand underneath it. It's white iron structure stretches on and on towards the sky. In some strange way I feel as though I am standing underneath a giant fowl with four legs.

We are so high up in the land that where ever we look we see valleys, hillocks, tea factories, roads spread before us forming a picture more clear than what one would see from a plane or a helicopter. "That must be Horton Plains, that must be Nuwara Eliya, the factory over there must surely be 'Great Western', we speculate freely, not really bothering about the accuracy of our statements. The view is breathtaking and reveling in its splendour is more than enough.

A drop of rain! As cold as ice. As sharp as the nib of a pen. It is time to pack up, to close the gates of heaven and head for home.

There in the distance stands the giant fowl with its four legs. We are back in the bungalow. "So we stood underneath the del, we tell each other proudly.

We spend the evenings watching the sun set. But often there are too many clouds in the sky to see the red ball of fire roll home. Instead we observe how the white del tower in the distance turns into a small red light shining fiercely in the darkness. Before long Appu announces dinner. And before all the stars would appear in the dark sky, before the owl would begin to hoot in the palm tree, before the clock would strike half past eight, the lights of the bungalow are switched off. Only Kawal, the watcher is awake, guarding the bean cultivation from invading wild boars.

Another day in this year's unusually long, unbelievably relaxed "season" in Nuwara Eliya, comes to an end.

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