Adam's Peak (16 page)

“What happens during the withering, Alec?” the Tea Maker would ask.

“All of the water evaporates from the leaves,” his son would reply, too well rehearsed in this unchanging script.

“And how many hours for the withering?”

“About twelve.”

“What happens next?”

“Rolling, fermenting, heating, sifting, tasting, packing, shipping,” Alec would recite—to which the reply could be any combination of “There's a good chap,” “You've got a fine brain,” “Keep it up,” or “Wits, principles, and discipline: they'll take you far in this life, son.”

From the withering troughs they would descend to the dim ground floor rooms, where machines loomed like beasts of war. Alec liked the rollers best. With a secret thrill he imagined evil Nazi officers feeding their prisoners through such contraptions then transporting the flattened bodies by conveyor belt into ovens like the ones used to arrest fermentation of the tea leaves. Of course, he knew better than to share these thoughts with his father, a man for whom tea making was sacred. Rollers were used for crushing withered tea leaves into small particles, breaking the cell walls to begin the process of fermentation. Conveyor belts carried the particles during fermentation, a delicate process, which would decide the flavour and colour of the finished tea. And factory ovens were operated not by hard-faced German soldiers but by placid labourers who followed the instructions of their superiors without question.

The status of labourers was one of the countless sources of conflict between Alec's brother, Ernie, and the Tea Maker. Gazing out over the green monotony, Alec recalled the lunch, a day or two earlier, when his father and Ernie had exchanged words on that very subject.

“Since the labourers actually
do
the work that produces the tea,” Ernie had mused in his slow, contemplative manner, “wouldn't it be a good thing to involve them more fully in the cerebral side of things?”

Alec had understood little of his elder brother's comment, but his father's response, punctuated by a snort, was quite clear.

“You're not to involve yourself with those people or their concerns,” he said. “I won't have you jeopardizing my career with your misplaced affections. Don't think such things go unnoticed, Ernie. At any rate, labour has no interest in the thinking side of this business. You'd only be putting ideas into their heads.”

For the first time ever, Alec noticed in the set of his father's lips a tightness of worry, perhaps even fear.

“I'm telling you, Ernie,” he went on, “one day you'll have sons of your own and then, I assure you, you'll understand my point of view. You're eighteen years old, almost a man. As long as you're living in my home, you'll respect the values and reputation of this family.”

Ernie cleaned his plate with a stringhopper, said “Yes, Dada,” and filled his mouth. The Tea Maker simmered through the remainder of the meal, speaking only once, to his wife, to demand how it was that her children had forgotten how to use cutlery.

That evening, he summoned Ernie to the sitting room for a talking-to. Alec and his sister hovered in the corridor, listening—Alec measuring the possibility of a
real
battle; Mary, diplomatic middle child, nervously chewing the end of her long plait in anticipation of the usual stalemate.

The voices behind the door were low but audible.

“I'll never understand you, Ernie,” was the Tea Maker's opening remark, though the acid of his tone gave the impression that he indeed did understand Ernie. He just didn't approve. “You've been given every opportunity to make a damn fine life for yourself. Schooled at Trinity, introduced to important men. I'm telling you, you've got a planter's life being handed to you on a silver platter.”

“I know, Dada. I'm grateful for the things you've given me.”

“Then tell me, Ernie, why is it that you seem virtually indifferent to these opportunities? Go on, you're a clever fellow. Tell me why it is that when you've been brought up like the best of the English, you choose to behave like a simple labourer or a low-country Sinhalese?”

On previous occasions Ernie had been known to say that the English were no better than the Tamils or the Sinhalese, and that one
day the country would be ruled by those very people his father so often criticized. But his response on this particular evening was, quite simply, that he chose to behave like Ernie Van Twest.

“And who the hell is Ernie Van Twest, then?” the Tea Maker goaded, his frustration at boiling point. “Is he someone who cares to make a decent life for himself ?”

“Yes, Dada.”

To the ears in the hallway, Ernie's reply was barely discernible through the closed door. The Tea Maker, however, boomed.

“Yes Dada, yes Dada! You nod your head and agree with me, but where will you be next time the P.D.'s sons come around to invite you to the club? No doubt, you'll be loafing about with your low-life friends, or hidden away painting pictures like a child.”

“Yes, Dada. I mean, no. If you'd like me to go to the club, I'll go.”

“That isn't the point, Ernie! Do you not see the problem with your attitude?”

The problem, as Alec saw it, was that there were two Ernies living in the bungalow beside the tea factory: the dapper, up-and-coming Ernie of the Tea Maker's imagination, and the real Ernie. In some ways, the former was more of a presence in the house than the latter. Listening to this lopsided battle of the Ernies, bored by a script he knew as well as the tea making scripts, Alec willed his brother to erupt, vowed silently to defend him even. But the real Ernie said nothing. In the silence that followed, Mary spat out her hair and opened the sitting room door.

There had been no mention of the matter since.

Wilting in the fierce April sun, Alec felt a familiar resentment toward his brother. Ernie's strangeness—his musings, his paintings, his chumminess with servants and villagers—served only to increase the Tea Maker's expectation that he, Alec, be a normal chap. Not that he wasn't normal. He was—a good cricketer, a reasonable student, a boy's boy, as adults sometimes called him. But the extra watchfulness weighed heavily on his shoulders. The presence of his sister was little consolation. One day she would marry, and her responsibilities to the Van Twest family would come to an end.

Alec kicked at the dirt pathway and turned to his father. “Dada,”
he ventured, interrupting the Tea Maker's briefing on soil fertilizers, “could a labourer ever become a manager? A P.D.?”

His father emitted a sound, part snort, part laugh, that told Alec his question was a stupid one.

“It won't happen during my time,” the Tea Maker said. “These people are ignorant, Alec. A different breed. They're not suitable for education and social advancement the way we are. The British did well to go shopping for their labour in India. Provided you treat these people decently, they'll work for you and won't cause trouble.” His eyes travelled to the distant hills of the neighbouring plantation. “But one must treat them decently.”

Alec understood his father's allusion. Though just turned twelve, he knew something of the unmentionable scandal that had caused the labourers of the neighbouring plantation to descend upon the manager's bungalow with the intention of killing him. The man escaped, but his reputation was ruined—an upheaval that Alec found deliciously exciting. If his older brother wished for the estate labour to have more power as a matter of fairness, Alec wished it for the turmoil of it all. The idea of a lowly Tamil labourer bucking fate and rising to a position reserved exclusively for the British tickled him in a way he would have found difficult to explain. But his father's reply had dismissed the possibility, so he altered his course.

“Dada?”

“Yes?”

“Could a Tea Maker ever become a manager?”

Alec took pleasure in the slow smile that spread across his father's face. His father, the Tea Maker, was lord of the factory, the brain behind the labour. In his starched white shirt and dark pleated trousers, he answered with a dignity befitting his refined presence in the field.

“I have every intention of becoming a Peria Doray, Alec. These British won't be staying here forever. And when they go, the country will need reliable men to take their places. Educated Burghers, like us, Alec. In the British eyes, we're the next best thing.” He mopped his face with a limp handkerchief. “But you and I know we're even better, don't we? We have their standard of education and upbringing, but we're part of this land. We know it better than any Englishman ever will.”

Alec followed his father back to the factory along the red dirt path, gauging his pace to remain within the shelter of the Tea Maker's long shadow. At the weighing station next to the factory's front entrance, his father left him with directions to go home and check the short-wave for any news of the war. Alec watched the Tea Maker mount the iron staircase to the withering room, then he drifted around to the tasting room at the side of the factory, hoping to find Amitha.

Tea tasting was very serious work, and Amitha was no less serious about it than the other tasters. But unlike the others, he had a sense of humour. In the spartan white room where teas were assessed like fine wines, Amitha made faces. Examining the twist and cleanliness of the dry leaves, the brightness of the infusions, he would contort his lips like a chimpanzee. Or, after testing a steaming liquor with the vigorous slurps and swishes of a good taster, he might puff his round cheeks and cross his eyes before spitting into the tall refuse urn, while Alec, convulsed with laughter, would shrink to a quivering lump in the doorway.

At moments of such conspicuous silliness, Alec would laugh without hesitation. But he had to be cautious. Amitha was a clown, true, but his facial contortions and stark gestures didn't always signify humour. More often than not they were critical comments on the tea, questions or instructions for the other tasters. In the three years he'd been at the estate, Amitha had conveyed his undisputed expertise without ever uttering an intelligible word. The tea jargons of Sinhala, Tamil, and English were unknown to him. And so, in the little time it had taken for his reputation to blossom, the tasting room had become an almost wordless place, and the assessment of leaf, infusion, and liquor using hand signs and facial expressions became an accepted practice. Left index finger scratched across the right palm: too much stalk. Eyebrows raised: a sufficiently bright infusion. Right fist drawn across the left palm then stopped with a chopping motion: fermentation too short.

Virtually everyone on the plantation knew about Amitha's handicap, though they rarely acknowledged it. Alec, for his part, understood that his favourite taster couldn't hear properly. But he wasn't bothered by it—unlike Ernie, who once pointed out that deaf people in places like England and America could actually go to school and learn to have regular conversations using their hands. Ernie listened to
Amitha's strange animal grunts and felt pity; Alec didn't. As he saw it, Amitha was perfectly content with his lot in life. The fact that he couldn't carry on a conversation seemed of little consequence.

Alec stuck his head through the tasting room door, but Amitha wasn't there. The two tasters hovering over the refuse urn were sullen-faced and serious, and the frowns they projected in the direction of the door were not, Alec was quite certain, comments on the quality of the tea.

He considered going home to listen to the short-wave. Alec liked wars, and over the past three or four years he'd spent hours next to the radio, digesting tantalizing reports of air raids and dogfights, the D-Day invasion, and, best of all, the Allies' thrilling run-ins with the Japanese air force and navy, close enough to home to present a genuine and serious danger. But the war was growing old and flat. The Nazis had been all but trounced, and reports on the Japanese no longer prickled with the possibility of a comeback. Alec wished he were in England or France; at least they'd been bombed. He kicked the red dirt of his maddeningly tranquil homeland then followed the shade of the factory's wall to the backside of the building, searching for something of interest.

I
N HIS DREAM
, Rudy is back on Morgan Hill Road. He's crouching in the bushes, watching Clare Fraser and her friends run through the sprinkler on the Frasers' front lawn. They're playing a complicated sort of cricket game. Clare is wearing a skirted swimsuit the colour of the sea, and the water curls over her as she bats. Rudy's mother, enormously pregnant with the brother he's been waiting for forever, is vacuuming the lawn.

“Rudy, don't be shy,” she says. “Go and play with the other children. I'll be close, close.”

He shakes his head, not simply because he's a grown man but rather because he has forgotten how to play cricket. He'll make a fool of himself.

The day is boiling, however, and the fan of water surging from the sprinkler suddenly doubles in size and cascades like a fountain. No longer intimidated, Rudy gets up and crosses the street. Clare greets him at the edge of her lawn. She's an adult now, and the neckline of her swimsuit plunges extravagantly between her breasts. She's dark, like a Sri Lankan, but Rudy knows she is Clare.