Coffee Berries

Susheela glanced at the group of tourists flocked around her supervisor, Ranjith. ‘Quite a big crowd,’ she thought to herself as she returned her concentration to the coffee plants in front of her. Her hands kept plucking the round,red, coffee beans and dropping them into the basket on her back. Her ears were glued to his words.

“These are the Silver Oak trees. We plant them among the coffee plants as insurance. In case, we face a loss in the coffee market, we can sell these trees to tide us over the bad times,” he said. For a change, he was speaking in Kannada today and Susheela could understand him.

Initially, they used to have only foreigners visiting their plantation and Susheela was always amazed at their fair skin and skimpy clothes. Ranjith used to try and impress them with his English skills. Nowadays, they had visitors from the neighbouring towns too, and they insisted Ranjith speak to them in Kannada. They said they found it hard to understand his ‘broken’ English and this pissed him off. “Those who invented the language can understand me and these fools tell me my English is bad. Idiots,” he used to say. Still, he did his job, as commanded; he had no other choice.

“The Silver Oak trees are cut when they around 15 years old. Any longer and they get old and hollow, and their value diminishes,” he said.

‘Just like us,’ Susheela thought to herself. She was getting old; already, the manager was complaining how she was not proving worthy of her hourly wages. She had given the last twenty years of her life to this place. The old man, who owned the plantation, had loved her as if she was his own daughter but he was no more. His son wanted money and he wanted it quick. He had no time or energy or money to waste on values and emotions. ‘The Oak is their insurance. What do we have for us?’ She wondered.

Ranjith’s voice droned on. “We have equal hourly wages for men and women. We do not differentiate between the men and women who work on our farm. During harvest season, we pay based on harvesting done by a person.”

“Bah!” The words escaped Susheela’s mouth and the tourists turned to look at her. She avoided their prying eyes and turned it into a cough and a hiccup. She could sense Ranjith glaring at her. He must have understood what she meant.

Women could never be equal to men, not here at this plantation. Firstly, they never hired a woman if she was above eighteen years of age. Picking the right berries was an art and they didn’t want to train a person who will spend hardly a year at the plantation. The managers calculated that they could at least get a few years of labour, unencumbered by marriage and pregnancy if they caught them that young. Ranjith had told her that they don’t hire anyone younger than that. It was not permitted by law. Else, they would have snatched them at the cradle itself! Secondly, a woman is never paid for the days she needs to take off from work. Susheela’s sister was denied pay for the week she had to take off to give birth to her son; she did not have any more children—how will she feed her son if they don’t pay her while she gave birth to her next one?

Susheela had no such worries. She never got married. She had always been too busy among the coffee plants to have a family of her own. She hoped to breathe her last on the plantation before they turn her out. She sighed to herself when she heard Ranjith call out to her.

“Susheelamma, give a pose—as if you are picking berries. They want to capture your picture,” he said.

She quelled her worries and pasted on a smile. Tomorrow is another day. For now, she was ready to be immortalized among her favourite coffee beans.