Letter from a Tea Garden by Abi Oliver

Author:Abi Oliver [Oliver, Abi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: TORC Publishing
Published: 2022-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Ginny seemed to pick up a bit once we were outside. We strolled towards the factory, as I always did, then took a side turning along a track between parcels of tea bushes. The ground rose and fell gently, interspersed with low-lying tracts of land which, tending to flood and therefore being no good for tea, were given to the workers as land to cultivate their own rice.

Roderick started explaining this to me, then stopped himself.

‘Of course, you know all this, Auntie.’

The evening air was full of the herby vegetation, with smoke and cooking smells from the workers’ lines and with the richness of scents that makes up the air of India, whether in town or country.

‘Oh look, Pod,’ Ginny said. They stood, arm in arm, and we all watched two lads who, on a rough tract of ground, were trying to round up the family cow for the night. The animal, a brown creature with fine dark eyes and nose, was apparently not enthused by this arrangement and kept skipping smartly away in the wrong direction. The boys, eleven or twelve years old, one with a long bamboo in hand, clicked their tongues and called to her, trying to get round behind her.

‘She’s a real naughty one.’ Ginny giggled.

At last the boys, more skilled than they appeared, circled round the mischievous cow, who trotted past us, nostrils flaring.

‘Namashkar!’ they called, we called.

I wondered what they made of us, the dumpling man, his pale-faced wife and the crop-haired, tweedy old lady who accompanied them. Perhaps they accepted that all Europeans were odd in the extreme.

‘That was lovely!’ This seemed to have made Ginny happy and I realized I felt the same. I smiled at her. I seemed to be doing that a great deal more often. ‘You should write poems about it, Pod! He writes lovely poems,’ she said, turning to me.

‘Your father wrote poetry at one time,’ I told him, as we ambled back along the track. The light was becoming uncertain and one had to watch one’s feet.

‘Really?’ Roderick sounded amazed. ‘Do you have any of them?’

‘I’m afraid not. He started after the war – the first war I mean. I remember reading one that was about the flies that plagued him in Mesopotamia. That was the only thing he ever really talked about.’

‘Did he?’ Roderick’s voice sounded strained. He turned his head to look away across the garden. In a moment I realized he was weeping. Good Lord, was my first thought. The boy seemed to start blubbing at the drop of a hat!

‘Oh Pod, my dearest!’ Ginny put her arm about his back with tenderness; God, what tenderness, such that my own eyes prickled as well. And how vile I was, how hard and derisive in the face of someone who could in fact feel something. Shame on me, I thought, and shame on all those who made me that way.

‘Sorry.’ He broke down for a moment as Ginny caressed his shoulder, then wiped his face. ‘I’ve so little of him.

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