May 1957 Watakälé
Lakshmi squatted by the water surrounded by a pile of dirty clothes. Her shoulders ached from scrubbing the mud and dirt from her mother’s old cotton sari and her father’s thick trousers. Her hands were sore from the harsh rough soap she used daily.
She glanced up and saw Shiro Chinnamma in the distance. Chinnamma, wearing her favourite purple dress, skipped along the path to the Tea-maker’s house. Her hair hung loose and bounced on her shoulders. The evening sun caught the tiny stone pendant at her neck and sent a spark of light. Even from a distance, Lakshmi could see that she was singing. Lakshmi stood up and waved to her friend but Shiro Chinnamma didn’t look down into the valley.
Holding the wet clothes in her hand, Lakshmi continued to watch Shiro Chinnamma’s figure. She remembered the first time she had gone to the Tea-maker’s house. She had been about ten years old, or so her mother told her. Of course, like the other coolie children, she had no real way of knowing how old she was.
She had been so frightened that day.
‘You are lucky that they want you. You must do anything Periamma tells you,’ her mother had rasped at her. ‘And keep your mouth shut. Don’t talk back. They will hit you if you say anything.’
She hadn’t wanted to go. Her father had twisted her ear. ‘Idiot girl,’ he had yelled at her. ‘You think you can just stay at home like a lady and get me to feed you? Who do you think you are? Go! Work and earn your keep.’ She learned later from Periamma that Tea-maker Aiya had given her father money.
But it had been so different from what she expected.
‘Your job is to play and look after Shiro,’ Periamma had explained. Little 3-year-old Shiro Chinnamma had smiled and held out her chubby arms. At that moment, Lakshmi fell in love with the little girl.
‘We have arranged with your parents.’ Periamma had continued. ‘You will finish your washing and cooking in the line room in the morning and evening and spend the day being a nanny to Shiro.’
Lakshmi didn’t understand what it meant to be a nanny. But she did what she was told and five years on she was still at the Tea-maker’s house daily.
Lakshmi turned back to her washing. She was cold and wet and she hadn’t eaten anything since the afternoon meal at the Tea-maker’s house. But she had to get the washing done before it was too dark. She stepped to the edge of the stream, scraped dried mud off the edge of the sari in her hand, dipped in the water, and then dashed it on the rock to break up the dirt.
The water came from the clear waterfall. But here, downstream in the bottom of the valley, the water was cloudy and had a constant smell of rubbish and worse. It served as washroom, laundry, and rubbish dump for the line rooms where the coolies lived.
‘Kaluthai, kaluthai!’ Lakshmi looked up to see Meena, the coolie girl who lived with her family in the line room next to theirs, slap a stark-naked little boy who had been doing his job at the edge of the stream. The boy, whom Lakshmi recognised as Meena’s little brother, ran howling up the mud path into the line room. Lakshmi sighed as she saw a brown smudge float down the stream. She couldn’t wash the clothes in this dirty water. She would have to come back tomorrow. At least she had finished washing her mother’s sari.
Lakshmi spread out the sari on the rocks to dry. She heard an insistent wail, ‘Acca, Acca, pasikithu.’ Sighing, she picked up her 3-year-old sister, who had been playing in the mud behind her. The little girl grabbed the sleeve of Lakshmi’s faded dress and wiped her nose on it.
Lakshmi perched her sister on her hip. She squatted down and gathered the rest of the half-washed clothes in her other arm. Her mother would yell at her for not finishing washing them. She might even hit her. Blaming Meena’s little brother wouldn’t make any difference. The unwashed clothes would have to be rinsed out later in the night under the single, shared tap at the back of their line rooms.
Lakshmi stopped to watch a car wind its way along the road on the other side of the stream. It was the Periadorai’s black car. There was another person in the car; he looked younger than Periadorai, must be about her age. As she watched, Periadorai reached over the boy and wound up the window, separating their world from hers.
Lakshmi’s eyes met that of the boy as the car drove by. His eyes were the deep blue of the sky after a thunderstorm. He seemed to look right through her. She watched as the car drew away up the hill towards the Tea-maker’s house, and then turned toward her home in the line rooms.
Lakshmi stepped between scrawny chickens and listless goats, deftly avoiding the garbage and animal droppings that lay around in the line room’s common compound. She headed for the single room that she, her mother, father and sister called home. They had one room in a row of five – the coolies’ line rooms. The room was always damp and smelled of smoke, stale sweat and rancid curry. It was all so different from the large, sweet-smelling rooms in the Tea-maker’s house where her friend Shiro Chinnamma lived.
Getting to the line room, Lakshmi dumped the half-washed clothes in a corner. She slipped her sister into a homemade cloth swing hanging from a metal hook on the rafter and gave her a piece of dried bread to chew on. Ignoring her continued whimpers and sniffs, she went out to the back veranda, which doubled as their kitchen. She needed to get started on the evening meal of rice and dried fish. First, she had to wash and clean the uncooked rice of stones. She lugged the heavy pan to the tap in the garden that the families in the line rooms shared. Squatting down by the tap, she rinsed the rice and picked out the stones and sundry weevils.
Her sister started wailing again. ‘Vayapothu!’ Lakshmi yelled back. Her sister howled louder. Lakshmi ignored the screams.
Carrying the heavy pan of washed rice on her hip, she walked back to the veranda. She set the pan on the open fireplace and turned to the sticks she had collected last night. Lakshmi chose a couple and broke them into pieces. She groaned and cursed. They were damp from last night’s rain. Picking up the newspaper she had brought from the Tea-maker’s’ house yesterday she shoved it into the fireplace. Thank God that was dry. She would have to use it to light the fire. Now to find the box of matches. Her mother hid the matches in the box with her clothes. That way her father could not find it when he wanted to light his ganja. Lakshmi rummaged through the tea crate that contained her mother’s clothes and found the box of matches.
With the fire finally going, she squatted by it and stirred the pot of rice. Impatient, she blew on the fire. She had to finish the cooking before her father got back from his work in the factory. Yesterday, she had been late coming home from playing with Shiro Chinnamma. The rice had not been ready when her father wanted it. He had called her a lazy cow and had hit her.
Smoke swirled up from the damp wood and drifted into the line room. Her little sister coughed and screamed louder.
Lakshmi saw her mother in the distance, walking down the mud path with the other women, returning from her day’s work as a tea plucker. Her mother was younger than Periamma. And yet with her greying hair and stooped walk, she looked so much older. Her mother never smiled, while Periamma sang and laughed all the time. As she looked at that lined face, Lakshmi saw herself in twenty years’ time. She suppressed a shudder and quickly dashed a tear from her eye with the back of her hand.
Reaching the line room, Lakshmi’s mother dropped her tea plucker’s basket at the door and came through to the back veranda. ‘I saw Shiro Chinnamma today. She tried to talk to me, but Kangani wouldn’t let her. You tell her that she will have to behave. It is wrong for her to talk with us.’
‘What did she do wrong?’ Lakshmi stirred the rice. ‘She likes to be friendly.’
She ducked to avoid the blow her mother directed at her head. ‘What are you talking about, idiot! Staff and coolies can’t be friends! You think that just because Periamma teaches you English and sews you dresses out of left over pieces of cloth, you’re better than the rest of us? You think I don’t notice that you are trying to speak Jaffna Tamil like they do? You’re a coolie, you fool! An Indian labourer! You may be fairer than me, but that is nothing. You will never ever be anything other than a coolie! The staff and Periadorai are all alike. They will use you, and then throw you in the drain when they are done.’ She hawked and spat into the back garden. ‘Tea-maker Aiya doesn’t care for you. You are a servant there. A servant, that’s all. Remember that when you’re playing big sister to that spoiled brat!’
Lakshmi’s vision blurred. Hot tears filled her eyes. Leaping up from her squatting position at the open fire, she left the half-cooked meal, ran out of the room, and scrambled up the hill towards the Tea-maker’s house. Behind her, she heard her little sister’s familiar loud wail. Her mother yelled, ‘Lakshmi, come back here at once, kaluthai!’
Lakshmi ducked into the tea bushes, hiding in them as she climbed up the hill. Her mother’s foul curses and her sister’s loud screams followed her.
Someday, Lakshmi told herself, somehow, she would have a better life. Periamma would teach her to read and write English, and to sing and sew. She would learn to live and speak like they did. She would get away from the ugly, dirty life in the line room.
She thought of Shiro Chinnamma’s parting words yesterday evening. ‘Lakshmi, there will be a day when you won’t have to go back to the line room, when you and I live together in a little house that we will build in my own special place on the rock by the stream.’
Shiro Chinnamma was, as usual, making things up. Imagining and playing, she called it. But maybe … just maybe.
Lakshmi heard the hoarse, drunken laughter of the men returning from the tea factory. Today was payday, and that meant many of them, including her father, would be drunk on the cheap alcoholic drink, arak, sold at the little local shop. She cringed into the tea bushes and lay there till the raucous voices and crude language faded into the distance.
Clambering up the hill, she popped out of the tea bushes across from the Tea-maker’s house. She ran around the back, through a little gate, and into their garden.
By the time she reached the back door of the Tea-maker’s house, Lakshmi was smiling.