Cardamom Cloud over Coffee

After some more time under the tree, Rohan and I moved towards Mangalore, and the gathering storm of green soon diffused into more layered greenery. That evening, the sun was threatened to be engulfed quicker than usual. The foliage was getting thicker, and the greenery richer. The road was also more and more lonely. We rarely sighted vehicles on National Highway 48.

We had hit hilly terrain. The air cooled. A coolth that was more pronounced than the mere concession of sun to moon. The road started to veer and twist, without losing its width though. The vegetation, by now, had turned thick and threatening on both sides of the road. In fact, it had ceased to be vegetation. Vegetation, the word suggests a kind of domesticity at best, and a degree of tameableness at worst. What we were travelling on was merely a wanton trickle of black that flowed out of an almost imperceptible crack in the face of the thick, impenetrable forests of Saklespur. For that was the name of the town we glided into.

Saklespur, it turned out, had all symptoms that suggested a much favoured and unusually beautiful retreat of the colonial satraps, neatly arranged along the arterial highway that cut through town. Planters’ club, estate managers’ club. I later discovered, that the place, the quaint town in the middle of one of the lushest woods in South India, was a major minor post among coffee plantations in India.

Saklespur is not a place many travellers in India will connect to immediately. It is also not in the home to the exotic warrior clan of Coorgis, in the rich tribal belt of Coorg. It is the at the tail-end of the western ghats, a conglomeration of coffee plantations that, like so many south Indian businesses, remained low profile and unobtrusive for the rest of the country. It is, however, a popular spot for amateur picnickers and trekkers from colleges in Bangalore, and Mangalore.

Saklespur reminded me of the hill stations of North India. Nainital. Mussourie. Shimla, even Darjeeling and Shillong in the North East India. These hill stations, more renowned than tiny Saklespur, always had these grandiose clubs, reminiscent of the Raj. They had their billiards room, a bar with wood panelled walls and old ebony furniture, a fireplace. And often, one saw old men smoking pipes, while nursing their drinks. Somehow, I never connected that kind of a life with the south of India, and always thought it suitable only to the mountains and hills closer to the Himalayas.

But it was not difficult to imagine that Saklespur might be cold at least during winters, by South India’s equatorial standards. We were passing through the town in March. And yet, as the evening grew, the forests rushed onto the roads, and the temperature dipped palpably. And like so many hill stations of North India, Saklespur too had only one road, or so I thought. And that ubiquitous Mall Road in Saklespur was National Highway 48.

I was to later find out that Saklespur’s coffee estates were being gradually replaced by a new cash crop, cardamom. In India cardamom is cultivated mainly in Kerala, Karnataka and Tamilnadu and there are about 72,429 hectares under this crop. Of this, about 30 per cent is in Karnataka state. Of the remaining 70%, the major part lies in Kerala state, while the remainder is grown in Tamilnadu.

In and around Saklespur, cardamom has been usurping the coffee plantation areas in the last three to four years because of the good prices for the spice. Besides, coffee has not been getting the prices it used to.

Indians have so many divisions, and one of the divisions between North and South India is the preference in beverages. Tea is the preferred drink in the North of India, while South Indians love coffee. Interestingly, in my travels in North India I had often found a peculiar habit. The tea shops and small dairies that dot highways and roads along the entire Northern sub-continent, almost always served coffee when asked. The era of Instant coffee had arrived even in small towns. But there was always a smell of cardamom in it.

When these shops got their day’s supply of milk in the morning, they always dunked a few crushed cardamoms into the entire supply while boiling it. The cardamom flavoured milk was pleasant in the milky tea they served most of the day. Conversely, it killed the flavour of the instant coffee they served the occasional drinker of coffee. The flavour of cardamom violated the very purity of the simple and elegant act of smelling one’s coffee.

When I discovered that cardamom was displacing coffee in Saklespur, that revulsion to cardamom flavoured coffee was reinforced. There was definitely a very North Indian cardamom cloud over South Indian coffee.

As we moved away from Saklespur, riding the hilly road to Mangalore, there was nothing other than the dense forest on either side of the road. And, surprisingly, our tires started to make an odd noise intermittently. The reason, we soon realised, was the bitumen used on almost every curve of the highway throughout the hilly stretch. Something more popular tourist hill towns in North of India did not have. That this small town should have such reinforced safety on the Highway was not surprising.

Karnataka, at the forefront of the Information Technology revolution in India, along with Andhra Pradesh, was readying to complete the computerization of the state’s land records and making them available online.

Compaq had devised a unique fingerprint identification system that would make the network among the toughest to hack into. Called the Bio-Matrix Fingerprint Device and perfected in October 2001, the device is the most essential part of the state revenue department’s computerisation of land records programme. Saklespur was the first taluka where the computerised Land Records Office became operational in October 2001.

We rode through the thickly forested road, leaving Saklespur far behind. We descended the hills, and rode through the plains once again. The forest slowly started to thaw, but the sweeps, soars and dips of green that were the woods in the day, was now more a menacing, vast universe of solid darkness with its leaf point edges crackling without noise. But the thaw in that vast darkness, the cracking up of dense foliage was accompanied by the emergence of towns. The wayward rays from lightbulbs, far and near, from houses and shops, tinkling in consonance, communicating to each other through a network of light rays were the more clear indication that inhabited places surrounded us now. We rode through clusters of shops, and houses on either side of the road. The towns which became more and more crowded places were the satellite towns of Mangalore. And we had reached India’s west coast again, from where had started the roadtrip.

Once we entered Mangalore, I called up Rashmi. I had asked her mother in Mysore, Jaya Viswamurty to warn her of our arrival. I called Jaya aunty Durga aunty because of her mock ferocity that she loved to use on me. Rashmi, elder sister of Rajani, was married to the city’s eminent maxillofacial surgeon Krishna Rao. Though I had met Rashmi intermittently, through Rajani, we had struck a more easy friendship during Rajani’s wedding in Mysore. The quickening of intimacy during the hectic arrangements for the wedding was now an event already buried beneath the sepia of two separate, busy, lives. Rashmi moved to Mangalore, I and other friends of Rajani moved back to Bombay. We never ever corresponded. In fact, the only correspondence was the bulk mail during the annual Divali festival from Dr Krishna Rao, and I always wrote a profuse thank you. That was all.
On the telephone, I told Rashmi we would drop in. Would it be too late? And was Krishna home?

Krishna was not home. Though it was not too late to drop in. I thought I detected a slight hesitance. Or was it apprehension. After all, I am her younger sister’s friend, not hers. And neither was I Krishna’s friend. Krishna was not at home. And I was also not alone. Did Rashmi mull over her wisdom to call us home?

“Did Durga aunty call?” I asked.

Rashmi said her mother had not called. Maybe the abruptness of our arrival disrupted her routine, cozy night. She was probably planning to put the children to bed, and retire herself, another lonely night for the wife of a busy doctor. Krishna was away in another city. I told Rohan that we had a place to go to. I told him though, that staying the night was still an open question. I told him that Rashmi had sounded a wee bit apprehensive.

“No problem. We will check into a hotel for the night.”

That was exactly what I expected of Rohan.

Somewhere, throughout our trip, we were on separate trips. His trip was almost always the landscape, it if changed enough to register as dramatic in his mind’s eye. He had brought along an expensive camera. And, the equipment bore, rather gracefully, the titanic photographic ambitions of a very incompetent amateur.

While he had not unsheathed the fancy camera till we reached Orissa, there, the majestic temples had aroused the demon in him. He clicked away, roll after photo roll, the same façade first framed in vertical, and then horizontal, and then the two stock frames multiplied by frenzy. I stayed away from the equipment, partly because the fearsome thing intimidated me.

The other signficance for Rohan, was always the value of the trip, back home among his friends. He kept marvelling, how well his bike had weathered the tough ride. How, we had maintained a scorching pace of travel.

I was mostly doing mind travel. Rohan’s was almost entirely a physical travel. He measured the differences in geography; distance in kilometers, dramatic structures like the Hirakud Dam, or the temples of Bhubaneswar in photographs, and Usha Koti, the forest range where we failed to see animals was the big disappointment for him. But he had already converted our night-long fight with mosquitoes into a heroic tale by the next day. He kept measuring everything that happened in terms of how his friends would envy him, or would not believe his adventures.

He measured the people we met, mostly in terms of a graduated scale of what he called personality. And at the ends of that spectrum of personality was Al Pacino or a Robin Williams. He obviously liked the Pacino kind of presences. So, among the people we met he had an almost fawning admiration for the rough, tough, silent-male type Suresh in Vapi. He was also charmed by Anupam in Bhubaneswar. But, it was obvious who was going to star, if he ever made an action thriller or gangland movie, from among the people we had met on our road trip.

But that was the more superficial aspect of his personality others saw in him. There was another Rohan too. A Rohan, who felt that taking risks is not a fancy he can afford anymore. He said he would make sure his child, soon to arrive in December, would study more seriously than he had, because the value of education had become more and more clear and starkly etched as he grew up.

He was also a hardball reality man. He often told me how he had been refusing his rich friends’ invites. He had broken away from them, and developed his love of the outdoors into a more serious affair than anybody else he knew. While he played up their envy, his own love of travel and the outdoors was maturing. He did not go out to tell his friends what he did, but always played up their predictable reactions.

Rohan was also an excellent team man. He almost always helped without the slightest hesitation. He was a very observant man. His education from life was always sensory. Despite the big talk he made of small adventures, he constantly drew little lessons from small instances to fit his tight little world.

His talks often sounded naïve to those exposed to a larger world, but conversely he was himself entering that big world, and travelling, reading and understanding, using the only tools he had, his sensory perceptions and his instinctive grasp. And so strong were his senses, that he never could, nor would, allow books to interfere with his education of the larger world through his individual forays.

It was this Rohan who was the least perturbed about whether we could stay at Rashmi’s house. He did not ask questions. Caught in an awkward moment of my own mind’s vacillation, what Rohan did was offer the most honourable solution; which was the most practicable too. Somehow, I realised this young man’s instinct was not only the most elementary. It was sophisticated to an extent where I felt he personally honoured by his suggestion of the most obviously practical. The medium is so often the message.