India 10

We’ve made the long trip to Kalpetta, a hill station in the Western Ghats. It rained a bit as we got higher into the mountains but it’s warm and the air is gentle. It is green, green, green. There are tea plantations, coffee plants, trees and vines. We are staying in a guest house that is clean and simple and the loudest sound tonight is the cricket’s song.  

We followed that with an absolutely wonderful day in the countryside. We started at a beautifully kept tea plantation where we toured the factory and tasted some really good black tea. Type? Orthodox roll. Maybe even the tea is religious here.  - And they are religious and traditional here. There are churches, mosques and temples, mostly churches in this area. The tea plantation had a sign indicating that it was part of the Roman Catholic Diocese, and pictures of Jesus abounded. The Last Supper has overlooked a few of our meals. Once darkness falls, early - around 6pm -it is rather unsettling to realize that there virtually no women to be seen. We drive past shops where every clerk, worker, server and customer is a man; pass groups of people on the street - all male. On occasion, you spot a woman but it is rare. I thought this was different from the North, where we saw women out and about but it may have been because of Diwali. Other group members said tonight that they’d found a dearth or women at night in Delhi too. 

We stopped at a bamboo factory, an NGO where women work; then took a village walk. Our guide was fantastic-himself a country boy who knew every plant, tree and trick associated with each. For example, he used a tattoo fern to make an imprint of the fern leaf on dark clothing by slapping his hand firmly on the leaf. He showed us how to blow bubbles with the sap of another plant, and how to make a loud snap or bang (today kids blow up and smash plastic bags to the same effect) with yet another type of leaf. We stopped by the homes of a group of tribal people of what seems to be a peasant cast. They work the farms and live in bamboo and palm leaf huts; the government gives them sturdy concrete homes which they don’t like very much. They were painfully thin and their skin dark as night. They marry only within the tribe and some of their faces were quite misshapen, whether by birth or accident, I don’t know. They appear to have been left behind in this wealthy and most highly educated of states. Parallels with Canada’s indigenous population come to mind. 

I can understand the historical European madness for the spices here; it’s a virtual garden of Eden where they grow every spice and herb imaginable, from allspice to ginger to pepper corns to turmeric. Rice. And trees such as coconut palm, eucalyptus, teak, banana, mango and every delicious fruit I can think of. Vanilla is grown by some but has to be hand pollinated here, daily, because the right kind of bee is not native to the area. A woman whose garden we visited gave me one of these precious beans. As we waited for our bus an elderly, dignified woman approached and solemnly shook our hands and welcomed us. She worn an old, stained everyday sari of white with a blue print trim and a magnificent gold necklace. It was a moment.