The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (12 page)

It was still raining heavily as we checked out of our hotel in Kandy, and a troupe of monkeys had taken refuge in the roof of the reception hall. Employees of the hotel tried to drive them away by enthusiastically bashing the corrugated metal roof with long plastic poles. The monkeys were very good at appearing utterly unabashed.

Shortly after 7 a.m., we arrived at the Sri Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Tooth. The tooth, an incisor, was taken from the Buddha’s funeral pyre in 543 BCE. Nine centuries later, during a period of unrest in India, the tooth was secreted to Sri Lanka. Surviving periodic attempts to destroy it, the tooth remains a revered object.
For reasons not fully explored, the receipt for our admission bore the expression, “May triple gem bless you.” In the endlessly ornate temple, Lincoln proved indispensable, pointing out things that we could not possibly have noticed otherwise and keeping us from making some unholy faux pas at the sacred site. First we passed through portals—one for Lisa and one for Lincoln and me—for a really good frisking. We then deposited our sandals, a necessity before entering any holy site. As we had been instructed, we were dressed respectfully in long-legged trousers and covered upper arms.

Lincoln then showed us the spot where, in 1998, a bomb was detonated in an attempt to disrupt celebrations marking the anniversary of Sri Lankan independence from Britain. We were shown the site where an elaborately decorated elephant was led at times of celebration. We saw examples of long-forgotten artwork revealed from under plaster by the bomb’s blast. We visited a room with many representations of Buddha, gifts from Buddhist nations around the world. We passed the vault in which the most holy relic resides; at this point we spoke in hushed voices so as not to disturb the prayers of the reverent. Even so, seeing us, the faithful gently pushed Lisa and me to the front for an unobstructed view of the vault. I felt humbled by the generosity of spirit.

As we drove to our next stop in Kandy, Lisa spotted a large plastic Spider-Man on the side of a building under construction. Lincoln explained that this was a dummy figure designed to divert the evil eye from the building during its construction. I had to wonder what Stan Lee would think. The night before we had seen a sign at the cinema in Kegalla advertising
Spider-Man 2
and
Night Call Nurses,
“Strictly for Adults!” I hadn’t realized that
Spider-Man 2
was such a naughty film.

Heavy rains continued, but we felt that we could not possibly miss the Peradeniya Botanic Gardens, established shortly after the occupation of the region by the British. There were two reasons why we needed to visit the site. First, recent research by Philip Hulme of Lincoln University in New Zealand had shown that botanic gardens were responsible for half of the world’s nastiest
plant invasions. It seems that botanic gardens are poorly guarded vaults. Indeed, Peradeniya was responsible for the invasion of five of the world’s thirty-four most obnoxious introduced plant species.

Second, the site had played a big role in the introduction of tea to Sri Lanka. Writing in 1905, Henry Cave explained that the Peradeniya Gardens had been involved in the testing of many agricultural possibilities and was intimately tied to Sri Lanka’s agricultural prosperity. The country’s first documented shipment of tea seeds arrived at Peradeniya in December 1839. A field in the Rambodde Pass was planted with tea in 1842, but the first commercially successful tea operations appeared about forty years later.

Lincoln explained that the gardens were one of the few places where he was not licensed to be a guide, as they had their own specially trained guides available for hire. Having taught university-level botany, I explained that Lisa and I would manage on our own.

Among the most fabulous imports under cultivation was the sandbox tree, native to tropical America, whose sign indicated “Latex is poisonous; may cause blindness.” We spied the candle tree, native to Central America. We had already seen this plant in several places on our travels around Sri Lanka, and with its very long and robust seed pods, it was an easy spot.

One of the gardens’ most outstanding residents was a Java fig. Native to India and the Solomon Islands, it was first introduced to Sri Lanka in 1861. This particular specimen was a little over 100 years old and had a massive spread of branches looking something like a giant squid. A plaque explained that the total spread of branches was 2,420 square metres.

At this point, an eager employee of the gardens trotted across the grass to join us.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” we responded.

“Java fig,” he continued.

“Yes. So we gather.”

“Two-thousand-square-metre spread.”

“Or perhaps 2,420 square metres.”

It was a slow tourist day at the gardens, and he was clearly keen to be engaged as our guide, but we were more interested in a quiet, contemplative stroll with an opportunity to gawk. I didn’t need to stand in front of a tree whose plaque told me that it was a cinnamon tree, only to be told “This is cinnamon!”

“You go under fig!” we were told.

“Well, yes, perhaps we will just a little later. Thank you. Goodbye.” I suppose that the proper thing would have been to slip him a 100-rupee note and ask him politely to leave us, but I made the mistake of assuming that he would just get tired of us. Five minutes later, Lisa and I found ourselves staring at a group of seventy-five sleeping flying foxes hanging from the branches of a tall and nearly naked tree. I spied our guide-wannabe racing toward us, on an intercept path.

“Bats!” he shouted. “You go this way now!” he said, gesturing down a path to the left.

“No, thank you. We are going to go this way,” gesturing down the path he had just walked, for which he could not possibly have a reason to accidentally bump into us.

Half a century earlier, Cuban royal palm trees had been planted to create a majestic row known as Royal Palm Avenue. This took us to a Guinean cannonball tree, whose fruit looked suspiciously like cannonballs. My absolute favourite specimen in the collection was a stunted, anaemic little tree, a yellow saraca from the Malay Peninsula. Despite being planted on December 9, 1961, it had gained no height whatsoever. It probably does much better in Malaya. It was my favourite because it had been planted by Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, just seven months after he became the first human to be launched into space.

W
RITING IN
1905, Henry Cave described the harvest of tea. “To such an extent does practice accelerate the action of eye, brain, and the march of nimble fingers, that it is difficult for the uninitiated to believe how carefully chosen is each leaf or shoot. Plucking is the most important branch of the tea-planter’s business, and requires careful teaching and constant supervision.”

Only the youngest and most succulent of the leaves are used in the manufacture of tea. The younger the leaf, the better the beverage, such that harvest for a particularly delicate batch may involve only the shoot’s two youngest leaves. As many as four leaves can be plucked, but it will result in a coarser beverage. Each plant rests for only eight or nine days before being plucked again. After a year or two, the tree is subjected to a merciless dismemberment, with branches lopped until the plant appears beyond hope. And yet, in just a few weeks, it will recover to the point that it is ready for additional harvest. The harvested leaves are dried, rolled, fermented, dried again, and then sorted into grades by the use of giant meshes. More than three-quarters of the product’s initial mass is lost in the process.

But who was actually responsible for all of the work? In 1931, Elliott and Whitehead estimated that 800 Europeans supervised the work of at least 300,000 Tamils and 50,000 Sinhalese. They went on to explain that, at the time, eighty-five tea estates were owned by Sinhalese interests, thirty-eight by Tamils and Mohammedans, and 1,175 by Europeans. The vast majority of land under cultivation for tea was owned by Europeans.

For many years, Tamil workers did not receive a formal wage for their efforts on the plantations, securing only indirect benefits such as food and housing, medical treatment, and a measure of education for their youngest children. On January 1, 1929, minimum wages for immigrant Indian workers were established by the government of Ceylon. Men over sixteen years of age were to earn the equivalent of 54 cents US per day; women over fifteen received 43 cents. Each child over ten earned 32 cents. Overtime earned a factory worker an additional 7 to 10 cents per hour, and those plucking tea leaves beyond the required ten hours received 1 or 2 cents per pound of leaf.

In all, a man working as a tea-plant pruner six days a week, with his wife and their two young children all plucking leaves, could earn as much as 38 rupees in a month. At the current exchange rate, that is about 40 cents. Even allowing for inflation, is seems like a lot of work for not a lot of cash. If the wife picked an additional
345 pounds of tea by working overtime, and the older child 115 pounds, the family earnings might be as high as 45 rupees. Yippee.

The wages board also established prices that could not be exceeded for the sale of rice to the workers. Deducting the cost of rice issued to the family of four would reduce the 45 rupees to 27. Additional food, clothing, cooking utensils, and oil could be expected to drain an additional 13 rupees per month, leaving about 15 cents—what amounted to less than $2 per family per year.

Beyond working conditions and wages, life on the tea plantations must have been vile. Among Tamil labourers, upwards of 50 percent of infants died. According to Elliott and Whitehead, sources of mortality included poor nutrition and improper clothing of newborns, failure to thrive because of ill health during pregnancy (particularly caused by hookworm and sexually transmitted infections), and insufficient care provided by the mother because of illegitimacy or the demands of a family already large.

T
HE PREVIOUS DAY
we had been climbing out of Colombo for Kandy. Now we continued to climb out of Kandy. A great deal of rain had caused waterfalls to flood and had hacked up the road badly. Given the country over which the road ran, I suspect that the engineer who had agreed to oversee construction from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya had fallen into deep despair when he first arrived on site. A new and massive project to widen the road seemed to be proceeding mainly under human toil without any heavy machinery. Lincoln suggested that the project would take forever to complete.

At one of many hairpin turns, Lincoln slid to a stop and used one of his favourite expressions: “Oh yeah!” He had spotted a coucal, a beautiful bronze-backed bird. Foraging beside it was a Common Bulbul, both common and rather drab. I hit the jackpot when I spotted, just a few metres away, a type of red-capped woodpecker known as a Greater Flameback. It was the sort of bird that children draw using all of their crayons.

At an elevation of 1,160 metres, we stopped at Ramboda Falls, where someone with great faith in architecture had created a restaurant
that clung to the hillside by its fingernails. The establishment had a great view of two waterfalls and undulating green hillsides. Over lunch, we swapped stories and jokes. Lisa spotted a lovely sensitive plant, probably
Mimosa puidca,
whose leaves fold up when touched, proving a favourite among children. Lincoln explained that a newly introduced species,
Mimosa pigra,
was proving to a nasty invasive pest in Sri Lanka.

Having achieved sufficient altitude, we were now in the region of finest tea cultivation. Lincoln stopped the car at a tea plantation so that Lisa and I could follow a small trail through the plants, over a steep hilltop, and down the other side. The tea plants were knee-high. Although plants are given no opportunity to get taller, their trunks get thicker and thicker over the years, and they reminded me of bonsai. Tea leaves are picked by women only. Most of them are barefoot, and their back-mounted collection bags seemed incredibly heavy. We were told that men do even heavier work like pruning the plants and fertilizing the fields.

A little further along the track, Lisa and I took a tour of the Mackwoods/Labookellie Tea Estates. This was one of the earliest commercially successful tea operations in Sri Lanka; brothers Solomon and Gabriel de Worms planted tea seeds here in 1867. A teeny woman with a matching voice told us about the stages involved in processing tea. I was hoping to get the gory details about the history of tea harvest in Sri Lanka, but instead we heard about times and temperatures required to process the leaves. We were told that the word “pekoe” is derived from “Peking.” We heard that plucked leaves are subject to drying, rolling, fermenting, drying, and sorting. A couple of Australian lads on the tour joked that their favourite three-step process involved drying, rolling, and smoking. Four neatly stencilled signs told us that

We arrived in Nuwara Eliya in mid-afternoon, leaving us about three hours of daylight to explore the community of 25,000 residents. From the car, many of the buildings seemed more suited to an English seaside town, presumably a hangover from Sri Lanka’s colonial period. Unfortunately, the heavens were attempting to drown the unwary, so we had an excuse to sit quietly in our magnificent hotel, relaxing, dining, and digesting all that we had seen. For me, the highlight of the day had been the sense of honour at being admitted into the Temple of the Tooth. I asked Lisa for her favourite impression of the day. She replied: “The monkeys were fun.” You have to love a childlike enthusiasm that never dies.

T
HE MORE I INVESTIGATED
the history of tea in Sri Lanka, the more I was shocked by the blatantly racist comments that older books contained. My shock probably has more to say about my naïveté than anything else, but it was abundantly clear that the people who worked the tea plantations in the early days did not get a lot of respect from their managers.