Bungalow Bill

                To be perfectly honest,                 I was a little apprehensive about our stay in the tea plantation manager’s bungalow – playing the Memsahib in an Anglo-Indian Manor house was precisely the antithesis of why I came out to India in the first place. But our foray into the jungles of Assam was intended to give a sneak peek into my grandparents life there, which was certainly not squat loos and eating with one’s hands. But despite my reservations, it was actually rather fab. Eerily quiet, without the howling dogs of Rajasthan and the incessant honking of Delhi, but I can’t deny that it did feel good to see a formally laid table and to sink into a proper bath after five months of washing from a bucket. I do have serious issues with letting people things for me, though – believe it or not I actually am capable of rolling my own suitcase 10 metres down the path. But playing the game means living a part of history which, even though I don’t like it, all helps in the process of understanding.

                We did the requisite stroll round the tea gardens, a slightly surreal, undulating Alice in Wonderland-esque carpet of dense bushes, shrouded in mist punctuated by the hunched figures of the tea pickers (though there’s nothing to pick at this time of year, they were pruning). Now, if I spent my life waist-deep in tea leaves, the last thing I’d want to do is drink the stuff, but these women were quaffing it from tankards an alcoholic German would be proud of. The strange thing was that I could understand them again; it only took minutes after our arrival in Dibrugarh for me to ascertain that my Hindi was going to be fairly useless here, where Assamese is the official language. But the Hindi tea community workers were imported along with the bushes and have remained fairly isolated from the local community. In theory this is a good thing, they have their food and homes provided by the tea estate (and it is a beautiful little community that the inhabitants obviously take great pride in, judging by their flower gardens), but this strikes me as being a fairly deliberate ploy to give them absolutely no reason to stray into the local town.

                After a couple of days around Dibrugarh, we drove up to Digboi, where my grandparents lived in the 1950s and early 60s and where my mother was born. If I’m honest, I’m about as interested in Digboi’s oil industry as I am in growing tea, but nonetheless, it’s been interesting to visit places I’ve only seen in flickering films and grainy photos. We tracked down the remaining bungalows that they have lived in, now inhabited by Indian families in the same industry, and checked out the clubs where they socialised. The art deco Clubhouse can hardly have changed since its foundation in 1927, it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to picture cigar smoke filling the cards room or raucous laughter and the pungent smell of whiskey in the bar. Though I somehow doubt that my 27 year old grandparents would have ever imagined their 23 year old granddaughter propping up the same golf club bar dressed like a Punjabi, debating with a drunken elderly Rajput about the anti-feminist implications of sati.