Lily of the Valley
By Sailendra Bhaskar
It was the winter of 1970, the blustery winds bent the tops of the tall eucalyptus trees, the winds howled as they rushed through the valley bringing a strong drizzle which made it feel like a Siberian winter in the tropics. Marge, who was the Matron of Oakshott House hugged her water-proof Macintosh to herself as she made her way down from the dining hall to her two room residence on the south end of the cottage she was in charge of. The boarder children who she was the house mother of were all away for the Christmas holidays but her own two children were with her. Soon they too would arrive from Ooty on their father's scooter; she wondered how they would manage in the rain and made a mental note to start up the wood fire in the living room so that they could warm themselves when they get home.
Sean was seven and Salomi was four when their father Krishnan who worked as a Project Officer with the Indo-German Agricultural Development Project in the Ooty area when he met with this big made, but well proportioned blonde German woman named Chantal who worked for GTZ the German government agency that oversaw the IGADP. Chantal was older than Krishnan but the attraction grew between them when they needed to spend late hours together drafting the weekly reports they had to send back to Germany by telex. She took it upon herself to teach the tall, brown-eyed Badaga boy German and Krishnan on his part enjoyed the female company and loved the new language. Earlier, Krishnan made it a point to get back to the valley and his family atleast by dinner time every day but these days his working late meant that he had to stay back in the project office quite often. It was cold and dreary in the project office, there really was no place to sleep but a hold-all came in handy on such nights. Chantal would order her ayah to bring her dinner, roast chicken and Roesti (pronounced Roshti) made from Nilgiri potato, to the project office for Krishnan and her to share. On some nights there would be German chardonnay imported all the way from the Pfalz. On such nights Chantal would fall asleep at her desk, Krishnan would open up his hold-all which was always tucked away under his office table, lay his bed out and gently wake her and tell her she could sleep in his bed while he would curl up on the office sofa and sleep.
Marge had the living room fire going in a jiffy, she didnt need to work too hard at it because Sean had carefully stashed away quite a bit of eucalyptus wood under the lean-to behind the box-room where it wouldn't get wet. Sean loved to use the wood-cutter's axe and split logs for the home fire when he had nothing else to do. Salomi would sit nearby below the luckote tree and watch her older brother expertly dismember those logs with an axe that was almost as tall as him. Marge, got close up to the fire to take in its warmth and hoped Krishnan would bring the children soon because it was already dark, dreary and wet but she also knew that if that woman boss of his was around it may be very late before Krishnan gets away from work. But this time Krishnan had the children for an excuse to get away early from Chantal, she thought.
Theirs had been a marriage made in school, Krishnan was her classmate in the boarding school that she was now employed in but he was not a boarder. He was a day scholar who lived down in the village of Shantoor where his parents were traditional Badaga farmers. Krishnan's father felt that his boy needed to get a better education than the kind offered by the village school and so he trudged up the hill to the big school where they housed and taught children of Anglo-Indian lineage in English. He had heard that the children there got to learn lots more than in the village school so he approached the tall, swarthy, black-suited Principal of the school and in his broken English requested for admission for his elder son, Krishnan. The Principal seemed taken in by the request of this Badaga potato farmer wearing the traditional white mundu and seelay, a long piece of thick special weave of cotton with distinctive borders in black and zari, and a white turban. Before long the Principal had acquiesced to this request of the native and thus it was that Krishnan got to attend this very English public school. It never ceased to amaze the young Badaga boy how big the school campus was, the beautiful steeple with its clock could be seen even from his home in Shantoor but what he loved most was the peel of the bell in the steeple which echoed all through the valley at all times in the day. It was that bell that signaled the end of a class period or lunch time or dinner time - everything. It was in Standard three, he must have been all of eight years old, when Krishnan was asked to sit next to Marge in class by the Class Teacher Mrs Paul. His classmates made fun of him because he was made to sit near a girl but Marge made up for all that by telling him he should ignore them. Krishnan and Marge soon became the best of friends, he would carry chocolates for her (and nobody else) when he came to school from home and she would save up her bun at break time and slip it into his desk - Krishnan was never keen to run down to the dining hall for break because he preferred to stay on the school flat and play 'alees' (marbles) with his mates.
The years went by and soon it was the final year in school, Marge and Krishnan were a long standing pair and everybody knew they were in it for the long run except Krishnan's parents who had heard about his dalliance with a pretty Anglo Indian girl. They made it clear to him that they don't want to hear anything about marriage to this Christian girl because that would be bad news for the family among the Badaga community. Marge's own family in Podanur, a railway colony not far from Coimbatore were less than pleased about the news they were getting from school that she was going steady with a tribal boy from the hills. How could she associate with a Hindu and that too a tribal, they asked? Her parents decided she would be sent to the Secretarial training college in Madras after school so maybe Marge would forget about the tribal boy when she gets to the big city. But lady luck had other things in mind because Krishnan's parents decided he would do his pre-university course in Christian College, Tambaram on the outskirts of the city of Madras.
Krishnan went on to graduate in Botany (the first graduate Badaga from his village) from the college in Tambaram but way before he had finished his graduation Marge had finished her one-year secretarial course and returned to the hills to seek employment in the old school as a secretary to the Headmaster. Krishnan's visits to his village increased manifold when Marge returned to the valley. His parents had been warning him of his continued association with Marge and even threatened to bodily harm her if he continued to meet and associate with her. Krishnan meanwhile had grown too fond of Marge to take those threats lightly, he warned his parents and relatives that if he heard of any such intimidation happening to his friend he would not take it lightly - relations at home became severely strained almost to the point of breaking. Then one day he heard from Marge that the village sarpanch had gone to meet the Principal of the school to tell him that the community didn't approve of the relationship between this Christian girl and their young lad. Krishnan was summoned by the Principal and told about this meeting with the sarpanch, his reaction was one of absolute anger. He requested the use of the Principal's telephone and made a few calls to Ooty and then asked Marge to come with him to his friend the Sub-registrar's office in Ooty where the two signed the marriage register and pronounced themselves man and wife. Marge got the Principal to give her leave of absence from work for a few weeks and headed to Madras where Krishnan worked with a Pharmaceutical company. It wasn't long before Marge was pregnant with Sean, that was when her parents relented and accepted her back into the family along with Krishnan. His parents however were still smarting from the afront of his marrying without the community's ok but they too were willing to let bygones be bygones when they heard that their daughter-in-law had produced a male child for their son.
It was a hand to mouth existence that Marge and Krishnan led, the pharmaceutical company job simply didn't pay enough and the rents were sky high as also the cost of living in the big city. But it was a happy life together with little Sean and her husband, soon he would be three and could be sent to a kindergarten and maybe Marge could get a job at the kindergarten and supplement their income. That wasn't to be because Marge soon discovered that she was expecting again and this time around she was fraught with violent bouts of morning sickness that made her woozy for most of the day. She could barely manage the chores around the home, she couldn't even iron Krishnan's clothes for him because if she looked down she'd begin to feel woozy. So invariably the clothes would be given to the the local pin-man to iron - he did a good job of ironing but it cost quite a bit. The ironed clothes came back individually placed in between old newspapers so while Sean played about in the yard in front of the house Marge would browse through the old newspaper bits and suddenly one day she saw the advertisement 'Wanted Project Officer for NGO in the Nilgiris' - she showed it to Krishnan when he got home and he seemed hardly interested but she prevailed on him to apply because the qualifications matched with Krishnan's and the salary was more than double what he was currently earning. Reluctantly, Krishnan wrote out his application and Marge waddled to the local post office and posted the application.
Before long they were back in the Nilgiris, Marge's morning sickness had all but disappeared once they got to the hills and Krishnan was enjoying his new job where he had to train Badaga farmers how to grow high yielding potato and other vegetables on the newly terraced Nilgiri hill slopes. Salomi was born without further difficulties and she thrived in the beautiful climate of the Ketti valley. Marge soon resumed working in the school office and would rush home at lunch time to breast feed little Salomi. Sean was in Kindergarten by now and enjoying his time in Smith House where the little ones lived and went to school in the same building. By the time Sean was five the matron of Oakshott cottage, Mrs Hawkins and her family migrated to Australia leaving the post vacant - Marge felt she would enjoy the job of Matron more than the mundane office job she had - besides it paid a little better and she would get a rent-free two bedroom tenement to stay in on campus. She approached the Principal with the idea, he did think twice because Marge was quite young to be managing the senior boys cottage but he liked her work ethic and felt that the family could do with the additional income and accommodation so the boys in Oakshott wound up getting a smart new matron.
The matron's job was quite demanding, she had to manage the accounting of clothes that the dhobis took to wash, she had to arrange the washed and ironed clothes in specific cubby holes in the larder when the dhobi came back with the clothes. Then there was the supervising of the boys' doing their house work and sweeping of the area around the cottage. On Wednesdays she had to ensure the boys all wrote letters home and on Fridays the boys got to withdraw small amounts of money to use in the school tuck shop or sometimes slightly larger sums of money to go out to Ooty on Ooty Saturdays. She made sure the dorm beds were made well and the dorm was maintained in an clean and orderly fashion.It was only when the boys went home for the holidays that things got quite boring because there was not much to do. During those days she fussed over her two children and made them special food. She even walked them down to Shantoor to spend time with their paternal grandparents who would dote on the kids. Their only crib being that the children couldn't understand their Badaga language.
Krishnan meanwhile immersed himself in his work and because he was Badaga he had no trouble at all getting his kinsfolk to adopt the modern agricultural techniques that the Germans were advocating. The weekly reports that he helped Chantal send out to Germany showed considerable progress and the German Agricultural Development Agency GTZ was most gratified by the progress being made in the far away hills of South India. They found the work done by Chantal in India excellent and wanted her to head a similar GTZ team in Ghana
where they were attempting to get the local tribespeople to adopt cultivation of Jatropha in their arid lands. The seeds of this perrenial shrub could be used to extract oils that could light up their nomadic villages and provide the tribes a sustainable livelihood. Chantal, however was most comfortable in her current job and was enjoying her personal and professional life in the Nilgiris and a change of job to Team Leader in Ghana didn't seem so inviting. Besides there was Krishnan, she had become so fond of him and his two children that she couldn't think of leaving them and going to Africa. She spoke with Krishnan about what the GTZ wanted from her and she saw his face go ashen. She reached out and pulled him to her and hugged him and told him she wouldn’t go anywhere without him and his children.
The rain on that evening was torrential, how was he to take the two little ones on his scooter all the way down to Ketti from Ooty he wondered. The telephones were not working and there was no power - the generator kicked in and could hardly be heard because it rained so hard. Chantal walked over to the telex machine and there was a four line message from Germany which had obviously arrived some time ago. She tore off the message from the machine and read it, all the while shaking her head from side to side and looking up at Krishnan. She had to leave immediately; she had been ordered to take up the job in Ghana and needed to go to Bonn before she headed out to Accra.
Marge, stoked the fire in the living room, the chimney coughed into life on that wet evening, the initial smoke in the room made her cough so she hastened to open the windows just a wee bit so the smoke would go out. She knew it was going to be difficult for Krishnan to bring the kids on his scooter in the pouring rain but she was sure he will come as soon as the rain subsides. She put the radio on and tuned it to Radio Ceylon and there was The Drifters with her all time favourite hit ‘Save the last dance for me’. She was reminded of the Anglo Indian dances back in her home town of Podanur, a faint smile came across her pretty face as she thought of how long it has been since she went to a dance because Krishnan had no interest in dancing. She promised herself that next holidays she will take the children and spend some time with her parents in the Railway Colony and will make it a point to go for the Christmas Ball. She wondered who she would dance with; it had been so long since she ventured on to the dance floor. It was dark and dreary outside and the rain was not letting up - it looked like she would have to spend the night alone because there was no way Krishnan and the children could make it in this torrent. She sat by the fire and fell asleep, the fire crackled as eucalyptus oil emanated from the hot wood and suddenly she awoke to the sound of the bursting of an oil bubble in the fireplace. She had been dreaming, a most weird dream in which she saw Sean and Salomi waving to her as they climbed the steps leading up to an airplane door and there was Krishnan bringing up the rear and waving her goodbye with the most beatific of smiles. He blew kisses to her as he disappeared into the Lufthansa aircraft.
The rain subsided early morning, Marge grabbed an umbrella just in case and headed to the school office from where she hoped to call Krishnan's office to find out what happened to her husband and her kids. The phone in the Indo-German project office wouldn't ring, she realised it must be out of order what with that godawful rain last night. She made her way back to her cottage and wondered how she could find out whats happening with her husband and children. It was noon when she heard the ringing of the postman's cycle bell outside, he had a telegram to deliver, she wondered who would send her a telegram - she used her index finger to tear open the telegram which read ' We had to go sweetheart, will see you when we can, Love Krish'.
January 2010
