Lured by romanticised accounts of a planter’s life, in the 1950s many young Brits were disillusioned to find themselves isolated, quite literally, in Munnar’s remote tea estates, struggling to cope with an unfamiliar lifestyle and environment. To spice up their drab lives, many were the pranks they played on their hard-boiled bosses.
One indolent recruit seldom visited the fields during the monsoon. To fool his boss in case he came checking, he used to hang a dripping raincoat and soggy hat in the portico of his bungalow with a pair of suitably muddied boots kept nearby. This ruse enabled him to spend the better part of the day relaxing at home.
Another resourceful assistant used to trick his boss—living across the valley—into believing he was turning out for work early when he was actually still home. At 7 each morning he got his butler to don his work clothes and sombrero and rev up his motorcycle repeatedly to mislead the boss. His undoing came when the suspicious old-timer once spied on him—with a pair of binoculars! Assistants couldn’t leave the estate, even on a holiday, without permission.
One weekend two youngsters audaciously slipped out of their ‘concentration camps’ and headed for Coimbatore in a borrowed car—only to run into the formidable general manager returning to Munnar in his chauffeured Plymouth. As the two cars sped past each other, the petrified lads instinctively ducked under the dashboard—prompting the GM to wonder aloud whether he’d passed a driverless car! One burly assistant had a fearsome, palm-crushing handshake.
He once greeted his new butler over-exuberantly—only to see the skinny bloke with his arm in a sling next morning. It was then that the assistant’s boss bluntly told him that he had a handshake that ought never to be used except as a tourniquet!
Learning Tamil was a stumbling block for many young Brits. One bright spark decided to do so by conversing with the workers, from whom he unwittingly picked up a smattering of profanity as well. One day he shocked his elderly tutor with his ‘proficiency’ in Tamil, leaving him wringing his hands in despair and plugging his ears against the flow of expletives!
Forced by his domineering boss to join a wild pig hunt, an unenthusiastic assistant claimed to have killed a young boar. “But I didn’t hear a single shot,” remarked the boss, perplexed. The youngster then bashfully explained that, not knowing how to work the bolt of the rifle, he’d clubbed the fleeing pig to death with the firearm! He was never invited to a hunt again.