Warm memories brewed in a teacup

Nothing is more soothing to my eyes than the panorama of vast expanses of manicured tea fields, interspersed with stately silver oaks, carpeting (nay, warmly hugging) the hillsides of Munnar.

Nothing is more soothing to my eyes than the panorama of vast expanses of manicured tea fields, interspersed with stately silver oaks, carpeting (nay, warmly hugging) the hillsides of Munnar. It’s a sight I’ve grown up with compatibly since childhood. Few realise that the tea bush with its lateral spread does more to shelter small species of wildlife than anything else.  

Junglefowls, hares, porcupines, jackals, wild pigs, barking deer and even leopards find its low dense canopy ideal cover under which to forage. As children, we used to pick tender tea seeds off the bushes for use as ‘ammo’ in our bamboo pea-shooters, stealthily potting at each other from behind the cover of the tea bushes.

The bushes also provided us with well-shaped catapult sticks which we furtively cut, covering up all traces of having done so lest the autocratic British manager turned up unexpectedly and raised Cain!
Once we kids heard an odd, persistent rustling in a tea field.   Intrigued, we peered under the canopy—to find a beady-eyed and spiky porcupine waddling resolutely towards us, its quills rattling against the branches.   Having heard the myth that porcupines shoot out their spines in self-defence, we fled, not wanting to become ‘dart boards’!

Somehow, the sight of a pruned tea field shorn of foliage puts me off, reminding me as it does of a colossal coop of plucked chickens sans their feathers. We kids seldom ventured into one, knowing full well from painful experience that the sharp-ended pruned branches could inflict serious injury if one were to slip and fall. Indeed even wildlife prudently gives pruned tea fields a wide berth.

Once, our enthusiasm surpassing our ‘expertise’, my brothers and I tried to ‘produce’ some tea. We plucked tender tea leaves and, following the basic procedures seen in the estate’s factory, crudely ‘withered’ the lot overnight, then repeatedly ‘rolled’ the wilted leaves in our grubby palms and ‘fired’ the mushy mess in the kitchen oven when Mum was napping.

The end-product, unsurprisingly, was a far cry from the aromatic tea that the estate’s factory produced. Indeed it would’ve made a professional tea-taster throw up. Yet we decided to test it on an unsuspecting guinea-pig—a teenaged friend. He took a generous gulp of the potion—and promptly spat it out in undisguised disgust, irately demanding to know whether we’d served him a laxative!

George N Netto

Email: gnettomunnar@rediffmail.com

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