Ranching, Sport and Travel | Page 3

sirdars or
overseers, and chowkidars or line watchmen. A sirdar accompanies and
has charge of each gang of coolies on whatever branch of work. One is

also in charge of the factory or tea-house.
Plant growth ceases about the end of October. Then cold-weather work
begins, including the great and important operation of pruning, which
requires a large force and will occupy most of the winter. Also
charcoal-burning for next season's supply; road-making, building and
repairing, jungle-cutting, bridge-building, and nursery-making: that is,
preparing with great care beds in which the seed will be planted early in
spring. Cultivation is also, of course, carried on; it can never be
overdone. In the factory, some men are busy putting together or
manufacturing new tea-boxes, lining them carefully with lead, which
needs close attention, as the smallest hole in the lining of a tea-chest
will cause serious injury to the contents.
When spring opens and the first glorious "flush" is on the bushes, there
is a readjustment of labour. Pluckers begin to gather the leaf, and as the
season advances more pluckers are needed, till possibly every man,
woman and child may be called on for this operation alone, it being so
important that the leaf flush does not get ahead and out of control, so
that the leaf would get tough and hard and less fit for manufacture; but
cultivation is almost equally important, and every available labourer is
kept hard at it.
What a pleasure it is to watch a good expert workman, be he carpenter,
bricklayer, ploughman, blacksmith, or only an Irish navvy. In even the
humblest of these callings the evidence of much training, practice or
long apprenticeship is noticeable. To an amateur who has tried such
work himself it will soon be apparent how crude his efforts are, how
little he knows of the apparently simple operation. The navvy seems to
work slowly; but he knows well, because his task is a day-long one,
that his forces must be economised, that over-exertion must be avoided.
This lesson was brought home to me when exasperated by the seeming
laziness of the coolie cultivators, I would seize a man's hoe and fly at
the work, hoe vigorously for perhaps five minutes, swear at the man for
his lack of strenuousness, then retire and find myself puffing and
blowing and almost in a state of collapse.
If an addition or extension is being made to the garden, the already cut

jungle has to be burnt and the ground cleared in early spring, the soil
broken up and staked: that is, small sticks put in regular rows and
intervals to show where the young plants are to be put. Then when the
rains have properly set in the actual planting begins. This is a work that
requires a lot of labour and close and careful superintendence. Imagine
what it means to plant out 100 acres of ground, the plants set only three
or four feet apart! The right plucking of the leaf calls for equally careful
looking after. The women are paid by the amount or weight they pluck,
so they are very liable to pluck carelessly and so damage the
succeeding flush, or they may gather a lot of old leaf unsuited for
manufacturing purposes. In short, every detail of work, even cultivation,
demands close supervision and the whole attention of the planter.
When the new-plucked leaf is brought home it is spread out to wither in
suitably-built sheds. (Here begins the tea-maker's responsibility.) Then
it must be rolled, by hand or by machinery; fermented, and fired or
dried over charcoal ovens; separated in its different classes, the younger
the leaf bud the more valuable the tea. It is then packed in boxes for
market, and sampled by the planter. He does this by weighing a tiny
quantity of each class or grade of tea into separate cups, pouring boiling
water on them, and then tasting the liquor by sipping a little into the
mouth, not to be swallowed, but ejected again.
[Illustration: PLUCKING TEA LEAF.]
All this will give an idea of the variety of duties of a tea-planter. He has
no time for shooting, polo, or visiting during the busy season. But at
mid-winter the great annual Mela takes place at the station, the local
seat of Government. The Mela lasts a couple of weeks, and it is a
season of fun and jollity with both planters and natives. There were two
or three social clubs in Silchar; horse and pony racing, polo, cricket and
football filled the day, dinner and sociability the night; and what nights!
The amount of liquor consumed at these meetings was almost
incredible.
Nothing can look more beautiful or more gratifying to the eye of the
owner than a tract of tea, pruned level as a