Just Another Glass of Tea

The wear on clothes was understandable as they weren’t washed on the gentle cycle.  How the dhobi ever got our dirty laundry clean was one of those mysteries that would always remain unsolved.

Even though he washed everything in a muddy pond, he still managed to get the whites sparkling, and the grease and oil out of the shirts and shorts that we wore in the workshop. He soaked the clothes first and then rubbed them in with a bar of brown Sunlight soap, swung them high over his head, thrashed them against a granite slab and literally pummeled the dirt and the life out of them. He rinsed them in the same stagnant water that the villagers bathed their animals and themselves in, and then hung them on a line or threw them over a bush to dry under the cloudless sky.

My threadbare shirts, prematurely abraded by the original stonewash method, needed to be replaced. In as much as readymade clothing wasn’t available, that meant buying suitable cloth and then having new ones sewn up. The cloth merchant greeted me with joined fingertips and bowed head. 

“Namaskara”, he said, and as I stepped into his shop he asked, “uta ita?”

 “Namaskara. Yes I had eaten”, I replied in Kannada, and looked up at the garland draped portraits of Nehru, J.F.K, and Mahatma Gandhi.

 “Kutombri - sit, I’ll send out for tea” he said in the tone of a host that didn’t leave any leeway for a no thank you.

His assistant pulled up chairs, hopped down from the shop step onto the street and brought back two scratched and dulled glasses on a battered tin tray accompanied by a small packet of Nilgiri´s biscuits. 

We drank our sweet chai and the merchant barraged me with the familiar questions about America and my work and my family. He was curious because he had heard that Peace Corps Volunteers were CIA agents and even asked me ingenuously if I had a gun.I explained to him that I wasn’t a CIA agent and that of course I didn’t have a gun.

“But all Americans have guns”, he insisted, and I assured him that it was only in the movies.

With an enigmatic smile and switching from Kannada to the charming sing-song cadence of Indian English, he continued:

"I hear that Americans cook their food on fires and eat outside, and then go inside to make their toilet. We Indians go to the toilet outside and eat our food in our bungalows. "

“Yes true,” I agreed, trying not to think of the small piles of excrement that littered the paths and fields every morning before the stray dogs and razorback hogs cleaned up.

Bolts of cloth lay scattered about. After our tea and conversation, he pulled the rolls out one after the other and showed them, proud of their delicate woven patterns and elaborate prints. I ran my fingers over the fabrics as he explained their unique and special qualities, as though they each had a story or a life.

He showed me homespun khadi in cotton and silk and explained the political significance of cottage industries during India's struggle for Home Rule twenty-five years earlier.

When it was time to choose some cloth, he was disappointed when I took only the simplest kaki from among all his treasures. I paid him and thanked him for the lesson in Indian history and tea and more importantly for his hospitality and cycled to the tailor.

Gandhi said that if you went looking for the soul of India you would find it in her villages and towns. I understood that as I made my way through Kolar's milling streets, as usual feeling as though I had fallen through a time warp and had tumbled into another age. I followed a narrow lane that opened onto a mosaic of shops and stands.

I pedaled around and through the crush of bodies, swerving past turbaned men with skin that had the hue of polished mahogany and women in colorful saris, their hair braided or coiled in a tight bun and decorated with a sprig of jasmine.

Sad-eyed cows, past their usefulness and in the Hindu tradition and by local law protected from slaughter, roamed unattended through the warren of dusty lanes foraging for anything edible; the thatch from low hanging roofs or discarded leaf plates that Brahmins ate from would do, or sometimes they were fed by the pious doing a good deed.

Troops of monkeys watched intently from the treetops and eves, waiting for an opportunity to swoop down and snatch a mango or a banana from one of the fruit venders who plied their carts through the crowd.

The tailor's shop was no more than a large shed that opened onto the street. It was decorated with the usual framed portraits draped in garlands of marigolds, almost identical to the cloth merchant’s except that the picture of J.F.K was replaced by one of the venerated local saint Sai Baba and there was a small shrine with sandalwood incense burning under an image of the four armed deity Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and good fortune.

The tailor sat in the middle of a once elegant, but worse for wear Victorian dining table, a relic of the British Empire, and the room’s only piece of furniture. His legs were tucked into his dhoti and were folded under him lotus style, his slender arms swinging in graceful arches as he stitched.His helper sat at a treadle sewing machine, pumping up and down, keeping a soothing, steady rhythm as he moved the cloth under the needle.

Once again as I entered the shop, I was greeted in the traditional South Indian manner with clasped hands and bowed head, “Namaskara, uta ita?” The tailor asked me if I had eaten just as the cloth seller had done an hour earlier.

I replied, “Yes” and put my cloth on his table.

"Kutombri, sit I will send for tea”, and his helper ran out to the same tea stall and came back with two glasses on the same battered tray. We talked about America and my work and my family.

While we drank our tea, a young woman approached us with her hand outstretched. She had a thick row of cheap plastic bangles on her thin wrist, a silver ring piercing one nostril and a freshly painted red and yellow bindi on her forehead that was a contrast to her otherwise disheveled appearance. She wore a stained and tattered sari and carried a runny-nosed, sleeping infant on her hip. She pleaded in a whining nasal voice:

“Appa, appa, bakshis, appa - father, alms please.”

The tailor, instead of shooing her away, took out several copper coins from the pocket of his kurtha, and in a display of empathy that suited his gentle nature, placed them in her palm.

“Here sister take these”.

He turned to me and said:

“It is our duty to be mindful of the poor and give them alms. It is our responsibility to help them and in return they teach us humility. If she could choose, this woman would prefer to sit and drink tea like you and I, rather than go clothed in rags and beg. Those coins are the small price we pay to be reminded of our good fortune."

After a while we spoke of my shirts and as he measured me, I asked when they would be ready. Closing his eyes and nodding his head from side to side in the South Indian gesture of affirmation and acquiescence he said "come in a few days and they will be finished.”

I came back as we had agreed. The tailor greeted me with a gracious "Namaskara” and his assistant brought a chair from the neighboring shop. He said “kutombri", and once again we went through the polite formalities of greeting. Again, I answered his questions about my health and family while his assistant went after tea.

We sat and chatted and when I saw my cloth exactly where I had left it, I asked again about my shirts. “Oh yes, come in two days.”

I came back as agreed upon, drank more tea and found my cloth still untouched. I was yet to learn that tomorrow or soon couldn´t be defined relative to my clock or calendar.

When I returned the third time and saw my bundle in the same place, I told the tailor that it might be best to have my shirts sewn someplace else because it seemed as though he had too much to do, but he replied without hesitation,:

“Sit I will send for tea and we will sew them while you wait.”

We were surprised by a precursor to the short monsoon that was a welcome change to the long dry season, a brief rain period that gave hope to the farmers of the perennially drought prone district and brought renewed life to its arid plains. There was a flash of white light and a crack of thunder. Roiling dark clouds rolled over the jagged hills that bordered the town. The wind-whipped rain came without any warning, diagonally, as though it was being cast from buckets.

The tailor quickly closed the doors, lit kerosene lamps and worked on in the shadows. There was a quiet intimacy in the room despite the violence and suddenness of the storm and the staccato pelting of the heavy drops on the tin roof. As the tailor pressed his needle through the double folds of fabric to sew on a button, stressed by my impatience and perhaps working a bit too hurriedly, he pricked a finger and a drop of blood appeared. Without looking up or missing another stitch he continued in silence.

The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The shutters were opened and life returned to the lanes. I watched as a young boy prodded a herd of buffalo past the shop, their hides still wet and glistening. Barefoot men and women stepped gingerly around the puddles as the sun broke through the clouds and quickly transformed the sky from a smudged grey, to burnished silver, and then to a luminous blue.

Kolar, Karnataka 1970