Bon Accord
Now as I am sitting with the laptop on my lap, fingers hovering over the red lit keyboard, trying to muster all the details necessary to write a journey description, vertical cursor on my screen waiting for me to type in each blink, it seems like an eternity ago when I visited the sprawling village tucked amidst hills, that is, Bonacaud. The dates on photographs taken there do say “18 July, 2019” but they certainly don’t feel like last year. I remember it was a time when I was allowed to go out (of course, you are reading about that), when people used to hang out not trapped in front of LCD screens and of course a time when “God Bless You!” still followed every sneeze like a shadow. It all seems very distant now.
One Can Canon
So, here it goes:
Long time ago, on a small hill in Valiamala, Arnob Nuchhikatt Patrath, elected as Chief Coordinator for the last Dhanak (supposedly) of IIST, brought a DSLR to help out the media team which had no media.
I had just finished a short voluntary internship that summer break and was getting mentally prepared for the arduous fifth semester ahead when Arnob knocked on my door with a Canon EOS 700D in his hands. “I am giving this to you till Dhanak”. I didn’t ask him questions which later flooded my head, ‘Why me?’, ‘Why are you even giving this to anyone?’, ‘What if something happens to this?’, “Oh, okay… Thanks” a smile stretched across my face. The camera was an unsolicited award. Though I was aware why I was being awarded. Arnob wanted me to click photographs of Dhanak and ‘why me’, because he (like many other batch mates of mine) was under the false impression that I ‘know’ photography. I do not, even today. Maybe it all started when I quested for a master to teach me photography in my first year. People labelled me the ‘’The photography guy”, though I had never touched a DSLR back then. I did meet a seasoned senpai, but wasn’t accepted into tutelage as I didn’t even know the bare minimum of photography theory to qualify as his student. Of course how could I have? I belong to a middle class family who asked me only to study and get into a ‘decent’ college. Also DSLRs have funny prices. Anyway, I did meet a few seniors who gave me the introductory lessons of DSLR. But photography like any art requires practice and it turns out some art is just too expensive.
Holding Arnob’s DSLR in my hand only meant an opportunity for me to practice. As the onset of fifth semester was closer than it appeared, I decided to go outside of campus for my first DSLR photography venture.
Not Ponmudi
“So, where to?”
“Ponmudi?” Arnob suggested.
“Nah, someplace new.”
It was an ordinary Kerala morning when we reached the ISRO junction after grabbing a bite in the mess.
“Why don’t people from our college go to Bonacaud?”
“I don’t know.”
Honestly, I prefer to travel alone while practicing photography but I asked Arnob to accompany me for two obvious reasons. One, he knew Malayalam, I did not. Second, I would rather like his eyes to be present at the time when I drop his camera than confronting him with a shattered lens in my hands later.
We waited for the 10 AM bus to Bonacaud at Vithura Bus Stop. Arnob was proving himself to be quite useful. I didn’t bother myself to leave my seat as he enquired different locals about the directions and the bus timings. I was a carefree child with a Bade Bhaiya to take me around.
I eyed him when he jumped for the window seat. He replied with a grin. The bus, like most KSRTC buses, was crowded with people (which indeed is a nightmare now in 2020). But unlike other KSRTC buses, it was smaller. Arnob explained the smaller size helped these buses at hairpin turns. I wondered why I didn’t notice this, when I visited Ponmudi. The bus eventually was getting bigger as more people reached their destinations and finally, I managed to grab a window seat. At some point of time, everything vanished into darkness as I dozed off.
I was flying, I suppose. I don’t remember. I wasn’t entirely asleep; I could feel the speeding of the bus, growling of the engine, shift of my weight at each turn and the bumps on the road. The periodic banging of my skull onto the iron rail attached to the seat in front kept me in half-awake-half-asleep state. Only when a shower of rain washed my face through the window, I woke up from my trance.
The bus was almost vacant now, only Arnob and a few locals were there, obeying Hund’s Rule while occupying the seats. People were following social distancing even before it was cool.
It was darker now, the sky above me was not the same as it was at ISRO junction. It was pouring down, heavily. Everything green around me was now surrounded by a greyness. The air, cool and wet from taking a bath. Arnob gave me a vague nod from the adjacent window seat through which I guess he conveyed his “Good Morning!”. Peeping down the window, I observed how high I had come. Agasthya hills around me had curled themselves under shawls of spectacular tea gardens to protect their skins from rain. The rain, it seemed a bit unusual that day, aggressive, what it seemed. I figured it was not a very good day to visit a remote hill station.
I felt happy finding the space around me devoid of words. It wasn’t silent, but it was quiet. There was the roaring of the engine, an army of raindrops attacking the metal roof and a constant sonorous noise orchestrated by vibrations of the bus. In a word, it was gloomy. But it was eerily satisfying. Despite heavy downpour, I did not pull the window cover down like the rest but shifted a bit. Soon another familiar sound announced its arrival. It was a brook of the Bona falls. Water crashing into the rocks resonated in the air.
Outlines
We waited for the rain to slow down under the roof of the Bonacaud Bus Stop accompanied by three local older women. They weren’t surprised to find new people in their small village as they must have seen enough alien guests. Later, when they found out one of us knew their tongue, they bombarded Arnob with many words. He seemed to explain something to them with an awkward apologetic smile. And like always, I waited for them to finish, to ask him what was going on. He summarized the five-minute conversation into “We should not have come today!”. But wasn’t that a useless advice now? There were so many things around me that demanded my attention. For starters, there was this whole set of huge abandoned buildings which was once a British tea estate.
Eventually the rain slowed down. I was worried about taking the camera out in the drizzle. As I roamed around, I noticed that the leaves did not have a proper leaf shape, the greenness in their kernel was eventually blurred at the edge and got dissolved into white of mist, it was erasing outlines of anything tangible, everything merging into another.
We were greeted by two enthusiastic dogs, under a shed near one of those buildings. Arnob, not very good with dogs, tried to feed them a packet of biscuits only to nervously drop it in front of one. The building beside us had more windows than bricks and that too were covered with wavy tin sheets. Some panels of windows were strong enough to fight ugly storms for decades and keep their glasses still intact. The bruises left by the flow of time were harshly adorned on every inch of that place. Hundreds of political flyers covered the wall and windows like parasites. Promising smiling faces, hammers and sickles, lotuses, palm facing hands, Jalebis shaped letters I couldn’t understand. Most of them were half torn, mossed, crumpled and soggy in rain. It was a skin that the building certainly didn’t want.
I had never been to any abandoned factory before. The place was a story book. Each sight a chapter, telling its own tale. The estate was established in the 1800s by Britishers who brought some workers to clean the forest for planting tea. Most of the workers brought were Tamilians, which explains the strong Tamilian accents of the locals living there today. The plantation was restarted in 1966 by Mahavir Tea Plantation Company after Independence. The company was doing well up to about 1995, according to respondents. The workers were getting several benefits over their wages, such as festival allowance, medical allowance and housing maintenance allowance. After the owner fell ill, his children took over the ownership and management. They borrowed Rs. 8 crores by pledging the plantation. Due to poor management they were not able to clear their debt which eventually led to a cut-off of electricity supply to the factory.
This was followed by disappearance of the employed managers from the estate in 1996 which left 1200 labourers working there aghast; they were yet to get 34 months of wages owed to them. The company had also not remitted the provident fund amount for a few years collected from them and also had not paid the gratuity. Most of the workers fled to other places in search of work. The population of workers in the plantation dropped by 78%, from 1200 to 264 in 2007. Remaining population continued to pluck tea leaves for a few more years after abandonment, to sell it in the open market which paid them a little. When the place was transiently taken over by union leaders in 2004, they made the workers sell only good quality leaves at Koluchikara at a rate between Rs. 3.5 and Rs 4 per kg! As the staff disappeared in 1996, the medical facility was also deserted. The nearest hospital was not at all near anymore, in case of any emergency, they had to wait for the state transport buses to take them to Vithutra, which resulted in deaths of many ill/injured locals, even today. For years, followed by complete closure of Mahavir Plantation Ltd in 2001, workers struggled to find jobs at various places in Trivandrum and were finally employed under MGNREGA, which gave them 100 days of work a year to eke out a living.
At the time when I was putting the lens into broken window panels of the building to capture the mysterious abandonment, I wasn’t aware of what that place had witnessed. Though I figured that the place was deserted overnight — the scattered registers on the floor, stack of files in the cupboard and keys of rusted typewriter frozen in time told me this. It seemed like a place that had been hit by an earthquake and people never returned. Thick layers of dust have hidden the secrets that these buildings lamented over years. The place reeked of tragic stories. Huge forlorn metallic wheels- decaying slowly into oblivion, blackened soil beneath machines impregnated by leaked oil, gaping holes in the roof and the deafening bleak silence were crying the sufferings of the Bonacaud residents.
For a moment I tried to imagine that time, same place but decades earlier. I felt the spinning of the giant wheel, first an obscure creek and then the wheel spinning faster, thud thud, I felt the revival of the engine, the heat that surrounded the factory, the fragrant smell of fresh tea and pepper, people grinding and packing and talking loud in order to get heard over roaring engine, I felt the vibration in the ground due to heavy machines and felt the whole Bonacaud breathing again.
After experimenting with ISO, shutter speed and aperture, we moved deeper into the village where we reached on top of a small bridge over a stream of Bona falls. At one side of the bridge, big stone walls were covered with white curtains of flowing water and the other side was just as beautiful, a stream vanishing into green somewhere down the hill. Arnob cuffed his pants, he was super excited. An old man passing by the bridge warned us about slippery rocks due to heavy rain. Arnob dipped his feet in water anyway at the edge of the stream. I felt stupid for not wearing sandals that day. He tried to move onto the bigger rocks in the water but the old man proved to be right.
When we ascended in the village, we discovered more abandoned buildings, not just some buildings but whole ghost colonies in which the erstwhile staff members used to live. We saw a few more people and their unconventionally small houses. The village ended quickly and there were narrow passages that led into the woods. I wanted to explore more, especially the famous ‘haunted house’, but it was uphill and we could not go there without a guide. And no guide was going to agree after such a heavy rain. For once, I considered the idea of traveling on my own to the haunted house until Arnob informed me about the wildlife in the forest. Over the past one decade, 200 human lives were lost in the state in man-animal conflict. Around 1000 people were crippled and incapacitated due to wildlife attacks. Psychological trauma and physical injuries have taken a heavy toll on more than 2000 families. As walking amidst a jungle full of bloodthirsty animals was haunting enough, we dropped the idea for next time.
Both the dogs who greeted us initially, joined us again to bid us farewell.
Neethu Teashop
On our way back, Arnob got very excited again spotting a peacock nearby. My North Indian ignorance doubted his ‘’Malayality” as I thought these sights should have been quite common for him. He asked me for his own camera to shoot the bird. It was starting to rain again. We finally reached the bus stop and waited for the evening bus to take us back to Vithura. Arnob found a dingy looking tea shop and entered. I followed him. It was a very dark place where an old couple and their adult son were doing their chores. Arnob had a lengthy conversation about something I obviously didn’t understand. Maybe just a general introduction, as he gestured towards me telling them I don’t speak Malayalam. Despite having clicked many photographs, I wasn’t still feeling satisfied. Seeing a conventional tea making pot of Kerala over a clay stone, I thought of taking a snap. I asked Arnob for the same who asked the older woman. I needed no translation to understand that she was vexed by us prying into her home/shop. We both were embarrassed. But after some angry words she allowed us. By now, I got too awkward to do anything, but not clicking photographs now would just infuriate them further, so I took some photographs. Every second after that crept very slowly as we quietly sipped our tea and waited for the bus.
Veendum eppol?
No amount of words could ever explain the alluring beauty for those hills or the motion of my thoughts while I stood there addressing it. Now, trapped in my own home, I can only long for the cool aromatic breeze of hills or for now, even the college cafeteria seems like a treat. Perhaps I could’ve never appreciated these tiny weekend trips which, though did not make a benchmark in my life but filled up the little pockets of memories, I didn’t know existed in me. As we all spend the golden days of our lives stuck in four walls, this little bunch of memories is what breathes life into me everyday, in a hope for all this to end and I shall finally get to hate the mess food again!
All Photographs are by Digvijay.
