Chapter Title: The Tamarind Tree

Book Title: Levelling Wind

Book Subtitle: Remembering Fiji
Book Author(s): BRIJ V. LAL
Published by: ANU Press

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 3
The Tamarind Tree1

Jalā hai jism jahāñ dil bhī jal gayā hogā

kuredte ho jo ab raakh justujū kyā hai.

If the body is burnt, so must have been the heart

Why rake the ashes now, what is the search for?

— Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib2

How indentured men and women lived on the sugar estates, the myriad ways
in which they devised strategies to deal with the demands made on them, the
plots and intrigues, are lost to us except in the fraying memories of the older
generation now rapidly passing from view. How, then, do we write about
that past? We do so through the imaginative reconstruction of events and
episodes based on stories that have passed down the generations. The following
piece of creative nonfiction, or faction as I have called it, is an attempt in
that direction.
May 1962. The Tamarind Tree was struck by lightning and razed. Father
cried inconsolably. His indentured father had died a few weeks earlier, and
now the Tree was gone. We children had no idea about the cause or the
depth of his grief. It was not until many decades later that I discovered,

1 Originally appeared in Fijian Studies: A Journal of Contemporary Fiji 14(1) (2016): 35–49.
2 Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) was a prominent Urdu and Persian poet during
the last years of the Mughal Empire. These lines appear in films, poetry and in cultural conversation.
I learnt the lines in my Hindi class in primary school, and am quoting from memory. The best
source I can find is: ‘ilm majaalisii, p. 106. There are no further details.

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 Levelling Wind

through a circuitous route of conjectures, assumptions and reflections,

that the Tamarind Tree ground was terra sacra for Father, a place of special
memories linking him to another past and time. Father was not much of
a talker, parsimonious with his emotions like most men of his generation,
except when angry. Our conversations, if any, were perfunctory, more in
the nature of brisk instructions from him about household chores to be
completed before and after school. But that sight of a grown-up man
crying like a child remained with me through all the many long years of
research and writing about our past. I can still recall father’s tattered wet
khaki clothes clinging to his body as he stood in the drenching rain in the
middle of the compound muttering words of loss and regret that I have
now forgotten. He was having his head shaved and a well-tended luxuriant
moustache reduced permanently to stubble in bereavement; village old-
timers gathering at our place for a week-long period of Ramayan recital
and devotional singing followed at the end by a communal vegetarian
feast. The details welled up whenever the subject of indenture arose.
The Tamarind Tree was on the banks of the Wailevu River, about a mile
down the hill from the headquarters of Labasa’s Tua Tua Sector Office
of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), the main employer
of Indian indentured labour in Fiji. My very vague memory is of a tall,
gnarled tree, vine-wrapped, standing forlornly in overgrown grass,
abandoned. But I saw it when its glory days as the adda (the gathering
place) of the girmitiyas had long been over. For Father, it was different.
The Tree had been there for as long as he could remember. It took him
back to his own childhood in the immediate postindenture days of the
1920s. How the Tree came to Tua Tua no one really knew. People said it
was brought by the early girmitiyas sometime in the mid-1890s when cane
came to Labasa. Others thought it arrived with the South Indians much
later. Tamarind is an essential ingredient in many South Indian dishes.
But the question of origin was moot now. Who brought the tree, when,
or how did not really matter much to people of father’s generation. What
mattered was that it was a mulki tree, a plant from the original homeland
and, therefore, special.
Tua Tua was one of the CSR’s earliest sectors in Labasa, and one of the
largest and the most prosperous, so people said, full of sturdy thatched
homes, solid all-weather roads and rich red soil. Aja, my grandfather,
completed his indenture there as a stable hand for the company’s draught
horses. When it ended in 1913, he moved to Tabia some 5 miles away.
But since there was nothing in Tabia then, he continued to walk to Tua
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 3. The Tamarind Tree

Tua to harvest cane and work as a general labourer on the CSR estates,
keeping the connection alive to the place where it had all started for him,
the first leg of his Fijian journey. The Tamarind Tree was his touchstone,
his indispensable site of communion with his fellow girmitiyas—living
and dead alike.
I realise now, decades later, why the Tamarind Tree was so fondly
remembered by the old timers, and what it meant to them. The Tree
connected people to the past and served as a visible reminder of ancestral
roots and routes. It was the initial point of entry for the new girmitiyas to
the Tua Tua Sector. Five or 10 years later, it would be the final point of
departure for those whose girmit had ended and who were now moving
out to newer settlements opening up all around Labasa—miles away
from the sugar mill at the Qawa River. The Tree was the site of rest and
respite from the relentless pace of plantation work. If the estate lines
were decrepit and devoid of any sense of dignity and personal and social
space, and full of the company’s spies, the Tamarind Tree was a beacon of
hope offering fleeting glimpses of freedom and opportunity on the other
side of girmit. It was symbolically a source of renewal, rejuvenation and
reassurance amidst all the confusions of dislocation and rupture. I have
no doubt there were hundreds of tamarind, or mango or banyan trees
wherever girmitiyas were found, in Fiji and other sugar colonies around
the world, witnesses to their special moments of triumphs and tragedies.
The departures provoked mixed emotion. Five years of working together
in mills, in the cane fields, as domestic servants or as stable hands, and
sharing the confined space in the lines, had bred a sense of companionship
and camaraderie, a bond of friendship forged in circumstances of great
adversity. That communal living, the security borne of collective servitude,
was coming to an end. No one knew where they might find land to
settle or when they might meet again. They would now be on their own,
starting all over again, often without a helping hand. Virgin land would
have to be broken and brought into cultivation. Dangers lurked around
every corner: flood, fire, wild pigs, theft of property, coercion by fellow
men, violence. New relationships would have to be established, often
with complete strangers and in unanticipated circumstances. New rules
of social engagement would have to be developed, innovative ways found
to minimise the inevitable frictions and conflicts in the newly emerging
communities as people struggled to establish themselves and find a place
they could call their own.

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 Levelling Wind

There were good reasons for apprehension, but many also felt a palpable
sense of relief that girmit was only a temporary detention, not a life
sentence as they had feared. For them, the end could not have come
sooner. The newly freed were encouraged by stories of men who had
farms of their own, grew their own crops and built solid homes. Some
were reported to have become big leaders, even moneylenders, in some
settlements. Families would come, children married off, schools started
and ways found to give the nascent community a semblance of coherence
and structure. In time, a new world would emerge, built with fragments
from a remembered past but always, in the early days, haunted by the fear
of the unknown, and the unthinkable prospect of failure. As people said,
with Tolstoyan wisdom, everyone shared in your prosperity, but if you
failed, you failed alone. The comfort of a settled, supportive community
was some way into the future.
It was under the Tamarind Tree that the newcomers were inducted into
the culture and mores of the local estate that was to be their home for the
next five years or more. They would be told about the people to avoid,
the overseers to be on the lookout for, the way to handle difficult tasks in
the fields, tactics to employ to frustrate unfair demands made on them
(tools could be damaged, sickness could be feigned, a long time taken
to complete a task). They would learn where private pleasures in food
and flesh could be safely indulged. For a little something on the side,
anything was possible, anything could be arranged, cigarettes, alcohol,
even women. Everyone knew who the best pimps and procurers in Tua
Tua were. No wonder some girmitiyas called the estate lines brothels,
kasbighars. If some plot had to be hatched about giving a hiding to a sirdar
or an overseer, if some particularly troublesome girmitiya had to be put in
his place or brought into line, if some company farm had to be torched
in retaliation for violence against the labourers, the Tamarind Tree was
the place to meet and plan. The plots hatched there and the secrets shared
were safe.
Departures and arrivals, transactions and transitions: the Tamarind Tree
was a silent witness to all these, and much more. If only it could talk. From
my scarce notes and fading memory, I now recall stories these men heard
under the Tamarind Tree about the labyrinthine world of girmit. They are
partial, private recollections of old men, but they are all I have (perhaps
all they had too). Like life itself, there is no single pattern to them, no
single theme or narrative. Together, though, they provide an insight into
a complex and conflicted world that is now well beyond recall. Ayesha
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 3. The Tamarind Tree

Jalal, the noted Pakistan-born historian of the Indian subcontinent, has

written in the Preface to her book on Saadat Hasan Manto, the writer
of the incomparable short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, that ‘it is possible to
chalk out a new interdisciplinary way of reconnecting the histories of
individuals, families, communities, and states in the throes of cataclysmic
change’.3 She goes on to suggest that ‘Microhistorical detail can illuminate
the texture of macrohistorical change’.4 The cause of historical scholarship
would be enriched, Jalal argues, if investigations of historical causation
were put on a collision course with the reality of individual lived
experience. This essay could be viewed as such a collision course.
As Father talked, memories came flooding back to him in a way that
completely surprised him, releasing a floodgate of long-forgotten
emotions. They were as vivid and clear to him as broad daylight. He
remembered accompanying Aja to the Wailevu market at the Tamarind
Tree on Saturdays to sell peanuts, maize, bean and baigan he grew on his
10-acre farm. People from all around Wailevu came, men dressed in the
traditional Indian garb of dhoti and pagri and long flowing kurta. Buying
and selling was really an excuse for weekly or monthly reunions. After five
years of living together in the labour lines during the age of indenture,
people had dispersed to wherever they could find a piece of land to rent.
There was no rhyme or reason to the way Indian settlements evolved.
Contingency and circumstance determined outcomes. Meeting at the
market under the Tamarind Tree kept the memories of old companionship
alive. What Father remembered from those distant conversations was
the clear consensus among the girmitiyas that fruits back home in India
were always sweeter. They were the best. Indeed, everything about mulk
(homeland) was golden, perfect: the nostalgia of a displaced people dealt
a rough hand by fate. What strikes me now about the girmitiyas is how
they were a people caught in-between, stranded in the cul-de-sac of a
past vanishing before their eyes. They were living in a place they could
not escape, making home in a land they could not fully embrace. Theirs
was, I suppose, the quintessential dilemma of belonging and attachment,
of home and homeland that all migrant peoples face.

3 Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. xii, doi.org/10.1515/9781400846689.
4 ibid.

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 Levelling Wind

It was at gatherings under the Tamarind Tree that people played at the
rituals and ceremonies they remembered from their childhood back
in India. Higher-caste men came to the market to have their weekly
shave and regular haircut by their favourite hajam (traditional barber).
The hajam would in return get some lentils and rice as compensation. The
ritual had to be observed even though everyone knew it to be just that,
a ritual. Father said. It was their way of keeping a world alive even though
they knew in their hearts that it was for all practical purposes dead. Aja
was no exception. Priests dispensed advice about the most propitious days
for this puja (devotional prayer offering) or that. Sometime in the 1920s,
people built a small kuti (a rudimentary hut for religious gathering),
near the Tamarind Tree, and priests took turns reading the scriptures
and officiating at thanksgiving celebrations hosted by families for some
piece of good fortune or in anticipation of a blessing—for the birth of
a son, for example, for the cure of some mysterious ailment, or for the
lifting of a curse. Dates for festivals would be announced and taken to the
settlements. Astrological charts would be drawn up for those who wanted
them, names for babies suggested. People would make discreet enquiries
about the availability of marriageable boys and girls. Marriages were still
arranged by parents and community elders, preferably within a prescribed
range of castes.
Caste rules were loosening and becoming unenforceable, but it was only
a foolhardy person who would publicly breach community consensus
about social mores and cultural practices. Father recalled the case of
Hirwa who had unwittingly committed the heinous ‘crime’ of selling a
cow to a Muslim. It was automatically assumed that the cow would be
slaughtered for meat. The cow was mother incarnate for Hindus. When
the news became public, Hirwa was hauled before the elders, asked to
do prashchayat (penance) and give a bhandara (feast) for all his fellow
village Hindus as well as a calf to each of the three Brahmin families in
the immediate neighbourhood. Breaching important social values could
lead to huqqa-pani-bund (social ostracism). People would be reluctant
to marry into the family. They would avoid attending their funeral and
mourning ceremonies. No mandali (society) would recite the Ramayana
at their place. Cane fields might be torched, people beaten up, womenfolk
interfered with. So a feast had to be given, whatever the cost. This could
financially cripple the feast giver, as happened with Hirwa. Broke and
depressed, he left the village for some unknown place far away, leaving his

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 3. The Tamarind Tree

past behind him. No one ever saw him again. The practice of punishing
people using customary ways went with the old timers as the rule of
tradition gradually gave way to the rule of law.
For Father, as a young boy, accompanying Aja to the annual festivals held
at the Wailevu grounds was the most exciting time of the year. It was the
same for children of my generation growing up without radio, television
and other inventions now so commonplace. Ram Lila and Holi, or
Phagwa, were the main festivals for the largely Hindu community around
Wailevu. Ram Lila enacted the story of the Ramayana. For seven days the
text would be read by groups of men, from different settlements taking
turns, to the accompaniment of rudimentary music (dholak (Indian
drum), harmonium, dandtaal (iron rod instrument)). These could
sometimes morph into intervillage competitions to see who best ‘sang’
the Ramayana. The story of Rama, his childhood, exile and eventually
triumphal return, would be acted out by men and boys with the right head
gear and multicoloured clothes. People would sit rapt on the sack-covered
ground witnessing the gripping drama being acted out before them by
their own children or siblings. As a child, I relished playing the role of
a monkey in Lord Hanuman’s army (baanar sena) on its way to conquer
Lanka, with my bouncy iron ‘tail’ wrapped in coloured crepe paper.
Our performance would be the subject of much mirthful commentary at
home and in school.
Phagwa was a more riotous affair, a festival of colours, celebrated at
the end of the agricultural season on the last day of the lunar month.
People played with coloured water and sprinkled powder on each
other as they went from home to home singing especially composed
songs, chautals. The climax came with the burning of the effigy of the
evil king Hiranakashyap. A huge bonfire would light up the sky for all
the neighbouring villages to see. One year, sparks from the bonfire set
a nearby cane field alight, damaging several acres of the crop. The cause
was disputed by some old timers who thought people from another sector,
jealous of the popularity of the Tamarind Tree celebrations, had torched
the fields. Another theory had Muslims responsible because they resented
the loud musical processions by the mosque, especially during the Friday
prayers. Some blamed a family of thieves who were publicly shamed for
stealing poultry (murgi chor). In typical village fashion, the speculations
could be unending. Whatever the cause, the CSR banned the celebrations
at the Tamarind Tree for good. Thereafter, Phagwa became a local village-
based celebration, and so it remains till today.
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 Levelling Wind

Father’s recollection of Phagwa reminded me of the Muslim festival

of Mohurram (or Tazia) marking the martyrdom of the Prophet
Mohammed’s grandsons Hasan and Hussain. It was a public holiday in
all the colonies that had Indian indentured labour. In the Caribbean,
it was invariably associated with drunkenness. On that one day, people
were allowed to let their hair down, or, to change the metaphor, let off
steam. Some latter-day social theorists see the drunken behaviour ‘as an
act of resistance’ against the planters, but it was probably little more than
another excuse to have fun. Was there similar licence in Labasa, I asked
Father. Alcohol was restricted to a few well-known and well-connected
Indians, and the restrictions were not removed until the 1960s. But other
drugs were around, principally ganja (marijuana), which old timers of
the comparable caste group, biraadri, smoked from a hookah in the belo
(guest-receiving house). We children were not allowed near the building
when the girmitiyas were talking about private matters (aapas ke baat).
I still vividly remember plants with serrated leaves at our well that we were
told not to touch because they were ‘holy’. Ganja gradually disappeared
with the girmitiyas, though now it is making a comeback in some of the
more remote parts of the country. Yaqona, or kava, became the principal
social drink of the community, and alcohol—once drinking restrictions
were removed.
Kava (Piper methysticum) was the first Fijian item the Indians truly
appropriated. It is a mildly narcotic drink, muddy in colour, made from
pounded root and stems of the plant. It was surreptitiously bartered with
the Fijians who lived at the edge of the sugar estate. In exchange for
salt, sugar, rice and spices, the Indians got fish, crab and prawns. These
transactions were strictly illegal, for the government forbade contact
between the two communities. The exchanges took place at the Tamarind
Tree during late weekend afternoons or early evenings when chances of
detection were slim. The old timers remembered one Fijian man, Sekope,
who was a regular at the Tamarind Tree: roly-poly, frequently shirtless,
hairy chested and a very savvy negotiator. ‘Hum hiyan ke raja baitho, I am
the king of this place,’ he used to say. He might have been; it is difficult
to say. People remembered him as an open, friendly man, but what they
admired most was his fluency in the local variant of Hindustani, spiced
with Fijian words and phrases and Hindi swear words (sala chutia, you
arsehole; maadharchod, mother fucker; suar ke baccha, son of a pig; gaand
ke andha, blind as an arse). The Tamarind Tree transactions crossed
barriers and boundaries, but that was all the interaction between the two

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 3. The Tamarind Tree

communities there was. For the most part, the Fijians and the Indians
continued to view each other through the prism of prejudice and fear.
The gulf suited the purposes of the colonial state.
The demanding plantation routine left the girmitiyas little time for
idleness or indulgence. But weekends were free and during the drier
months people gathered at the Wailevu grounds for fun and frivolity.
Gatka (stick fighting) was popular but kushti (wrestling) was the main
sport on the estates. It was familiar and cheap and entertaining and, more
importantly, encouraged by the CSR as a way to keep men fit. Sometimes,
it was staged as an intersector wrestling competition and sometimes as
a contest between the free and those still under indenture. The prize
did not matter, Father said, what counted was pride, in oneself and in
one’s sector. Rahiman, a recently freed labourer from Waiqele, was the
champion wrestler widely known throughout Labasa. Big in body and
heart, he was the man to beat. Once, a man named Jhagru challenged
him to a contest. Everyone thought it would be a quick one-way contest,
over in minutes if not seconds. But Jhagru had other ideas. He confided
his plan to some close friends who decided to put up a large sum of prize
money behind him. Confident as ever, Rahiman’s followers backed him
with a similarly large sum, feeling almost sorry for his opponent. A large
crowd gathered at the Tamarind Tree on the advertised day. As the two
men were about to enter the ‘ring’, word spread that Jhagru had rubbed
his body with pig fat. Rahiman, being a devout Muslim, refused even to
shake hands with a pig fat–smeared man, let alone wrestle with him and
so he forfeited the match, and the prize money. There was consternation
in the crowd. Nothing like this had ever happened before, this act of
pure provocation. Some applauded Jhagru’s cunning audacity (‘how did
he ever think of that!’), while others condemned the cowardly, potentially
peace-disrupting act of a cunning chamar (low caste).
The hornet’s nest had been disturbed. Rahiman’s Muslim supporters,
especially those who had backed him, were outraged at Jhagru’s treachery
and the insulting jeers and taunts of his supporters. Resentment had
been building up among some Muslims who felt that Hindus were using
their numbers to push them around. They were not being consulted on
important decisions affecting everyone. They felt taken for granted. It was
time to make a stand before they were reduced to nothing. The very next
day, they slaughtered a calf in full view of some Hindu women washing
clothes at the edge of the Wailevu River and skinned the carcass strung
from the branch of a mango tree. News of the slaughter spread like the
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 Levelling Wind

proverbial wildfire in Wailevu and beyond. For Hindus, slaughtering cattle

was bad enough, but doing it in such a brazen manner was provocative
in the extreme. Frenzied meetings were held by both sides, and solemn
oaths taken to teach a lesson that would not be forgotten for generations.
Knives were sharpened and stones and sticks gathered for the inevitable
bloody showdown. Someone even had a bucketful of pig’s blood to throw
down the wells of Muslims for whom the pig is the filthiest of all animals
and contact in any form is forbidden. Haram. The whole community was
on tenterhooks. Nothing less than one’s collective honour (izzat) was at
stake and it had to be defended with blood, if it came to that. Lines in
the sand could be so easily drawn and the gauntlet thrown down without
a second thought.
Someone had the presence of mind to report the matter to the Tua
Tua Sector Office. Mr Sebastian immediately drove to the Tamarind
Tree and gathered together leaders of both communities for an urgent
meeting. Mr Sebastian was trusted as few other overseers were. Unable to
pronounce his name, people had dubbed him Mr Subhas Chand. He had
been at Tua Tua for several years. ‘This is CSR land’, he told the leaders,
and no disturbance would be tolerated on it. ‘What will the other sectors
think? Have you thought of the reputation of this place, your reputations?
Do you want to go to gaol for something stupid such as this?’ ‘Badmashi
bund, stop this nonsense,’ he declared. ‘No more kushti from now on.
Kushti khatam,’ he said with an air of finality as he got up to leave. ‘Tum
sab ghare jao aur chuppe baitho, now you all go home and do not disturb
the peace.’ ‘Ji Saheb, Yes Sir,’ people said, feeling suitably chastised.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that a certain bloody confrontation
had been avoided. The leaders regretted the foolishness of their reckless
hot-headedness and agreed not to allow things to develop to this stage
in future.
A resolution of sorts was reached a week or so later when, at a gathering
of both communities under the Tamarind Tree, Jhagru apologised to
Rahiman and shared with him half the prize money. Soon afterwards, for
reasons unknown at that time, he left Wailevu for Wainikoro in northern
Vanua Levu. People later said that this was Mr Sebastian’s handiwork.
As an experienced overseer and observer of the Indians, he realised that
the truce was temporary, like a patch over the puncture of an overheating
tyre. Sooner or later, it would erupt. Grief and grievance ran deep among
the people, Mr Sebastian had long supervised. It was one trait both the
company as well as colonial officials knew and feared: the unpredictable
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 3. The Tamarind Tree

reaction of a people who on the surface appeared so docile. If Jhagru left

Tua Tua voluntarily, Mr Sebastian reportedly said, ‘there would be no
black mark against his name. Nor against his own’ for letting matters
get out of hand in a place that he knew like the back of his hand. Jhagru
agreed; he really had little choice. A few months later, Mr Sebastian was
transferred on promotion to another estate.
Father was not alone in his almost mystical reverence for the Tamarind
Tree. His recollections led me to other older men in the village, Nikka,
Bihari, Mallu, Genda, Digambar, who had their own stories to tell about
the Tree. They, too, recalled the festivals, the food and the fun they had
as children, making their weekly pilgrimages to the Wailevu market with
their fathers. Nikka remembered Madho, an Ahir, a cowherd, who was very
particular about caste scruples and practices.5 The Ahirs had a reputation
as tough and independent-minded peasants, never shirking a fight in
defence of personal or family honour or when avenging a real or imagined
insult. Girmit had turned Madho’s world upside down. The basic tenets of
the old order of village India were gone or had become irrelevant, but he
was determined to preserve what he could of the old ways. He would work
with men of all castes; in this he had no choice, but he cooked his own
meals whenever he could. He would take food and drink only from men
of his own caste or those above him. And he managed to create a small
fraternity of Ahirs in Tua Tua, a biraadri (brotherhood). Its main purpose
was to maintain a semblance of Ahir cultural identity. They performed
remembered rituals for their kul or clan gods and goddesses (devtas),
celebrated their ancient village festivals, helped each other whenever they
could, and performed the Ahirwa ke naatch, a special kind of Ahir dance
where a man dressed in women’s clothes, performed at festive occasions
and at weddings. We in Tabia knew it as Lehnga ke naatch. Now it is gone,
replaced by mindless Bollywood extravaganza and Michael Jackson–style
jiggered dancing.
The most important role of the biraadri was to arrange marriage for the
children. Madho invariably took the lead in the negotiations. Marrying
‘down’ was out and so was marrying up into castes much higher than your
own. It was adharmic (morally inappropriate), potentially inviting divine
retribution. These caste arrangements were the work of the gods, not of

5 ‘The Ahir are a caste of cowherders, milkers and cattle breeders widely dispersed across the
Gangetic Plain.’ See ‘Ahir’, Countries and their Cultures, available from: www.everyculture.com/
South-Asia/Ahir.html (accessed 16 April 2019).

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 Levelling Wind

men, Madho used to say. Old timers, Nikka said, kept a careful mental
record of where eligible boys and girls were. Some even arranged marriages
as soon as children were born. This was the practice among some castes in
village India. Once given, one’s word was cast in stone. Sometimes, things
could go too far. Once Madho had a man caned under the Tamarind
Tree in front of his fellow Ahirs for eloping with a woman of lower caste
(chamar).6 Caste pollution he had said, set a bad example. When the
senior sector manager, Mr Harriman (Hari Ram to the girmitiyas), came
to know of the incident, he told Madho, whom he otherwise respected
for his leadership abilities, not to take matters into his own hands. ‘Hiyan
hum sarkar baitho, here we are the government,’ he said. Madho remained
Madho to the end, incorrigible and unreformed, but with progressively
diminishing authority and influence, a relic of a forgotten past, as people
dispersed and new influences came. In time, wealth and education, not
caste, became the marker of identity and status.
Labasa sugar plantations had the reputation for excessive violence on
girmitiyas. Files record men and women travelling long distances, from
Nagigi and Wainikoro and Laga, under the cover of darkness to report
cases of abuse to the stipendiary magistrate in Nasea town, with no
guarantee of redress after all the risks of discovery had been taken. Indian
sirdars (foremen), oral tradition had it, were the lynchpin of the system.
They played pimps and procurers for their masters. In return, they got
small favours to make extra money on the side, such as running the estate
store or minor moneylending. It was not all one-way traffic though, as
I learned. Sirdars and everyone else well knew the dangers, as well the
limits beyond which it was not prudent to venture. The sharpened cane
knife in the hands of an enraged man was the most feared weapon on the
plantation, with the killers freely confessing their crimes before facing the
gallows. This kind of violence was not uncommon in village India: ‘izzat
ke sawal hai, it is the question of one’s honour,’ people said. Honour, their
sense of self-respect, was all they had. It was the way of the peasant world.
Bhukkan was the go-to man to teach someone a lesson. He was the people’s
enforcer in the sector, as he liked to see himself. His caste had been in this
dhandha (occupation) even in India, it was said. Perhaps he was from

6 ‘Chamar, widespread caste in northern India whose hereditary occupation is tanning leather.’
Members of the caste are included in the officially designated Scheduled Castes under modern India’s
system of positive discrimination. See ‘Chamar: Hindu Caste’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, available
from: www.britannica.com/topic/Chamar (accessed 16 April 2019).

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 3. The Tamarind Tree

one of those ‘criminal tribes’ about whom Europeans had written a lot.
Bhukkan looked the part too, people said: dark, tall, broad-chested, with
a face full of week-long growth and stylishly twirled moustache. He would
take care of the offender for a little something. The attack had to be
carefully planned over weeks to avoid detection, especially as the lines
were full of the eyes and ears of the CSR. And it had to be proportionate
to the offence given or crime committed. There was an unwritten code of
conduct observed even on remote Fijian plantations, perhaps a remnant
of village India. Bhukkan had four or five henchmen who were like blood
brothers to him. They would meet under the Tamarind Tree at night in
complete secrecy. The nature of the offence would be ascertained and
the appropriate punishment determined. Then, over the next few weeks,
the movement of the offending man would be closely but unobtrusively
monitored, the route he took to work, the time he returned to the
barracks, who his close friends were. Khabardari (alertness) was the name
of the game.
The man giving offence this time was Sukkha, the sirdar who liked to
make ‘cheek-pass’ at the women who worked under him. He had an eye
for Janakia, Jaggan’s wife, making sexually suggestive remarks within her
hearing, casually letting his hand roam over his crotch while giving her
orders for the fieldwork for the day. Jaggan himself was helpless to do
anything. If he remonstrated, he would be isolated from the rest of his
coworkers, given a heavier task and perhaps even whipped. He had seen
that happen too many times to too many men to take the risk. He knew
that no one would come to his assistance as they all feared Sukkha’s whip
hand and, even more, the overseer’s boots. Overseer–sirdar collusion was
common enough on the plantations, and it was the deadliest of all the
possible permutations and combinations of men. Jaggan pleaded with
Bhukkan to save his izzat. ‘I have no one here. You are my mai-bap, Dada,’
he said, ‘my benefactor, sir.’ He would do anything for him in return, even
sacrifice his life for him. Bhukkan agreed, for a bottle of rum and two fat
roosters, to the relatively easy assignment, and a plan of attack began to
be hatched at the Tamarind Tree over several nights.
On the designated day, Bhukkan and his men agreed to go to the remotest
part of the estate to clean the overgrown drains in preparation for the
rainy season. Sukkha came to inspect the work at the end of the day
as the sun was about to do down. It was then the men set upon him,
dragging him deep into the cane field where no one could see or hear
them. They pinned him to the rough ground and took turns urinating
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 Levelling Wind

in his mouth and all over his body, using the choicest swear words they
could think of. ‘Sala maadharchod, mother fucker, you are doing this to
your own mothers and sisters? Haramil, bastard, what kind of Jaanwar,
animal are you? Bhonsriwala, son of a whore. Mutimilelie, may you be
mixed with earth.’ ‘Next time, we will shove this lathi up your arse,’ they
said menacingly. ‘And then we will take good care of your wife while you
watch.’ For good measure, they stripped him of his pants and ordered
him back to the barracks pants-less. The humiliation was as complete as it
was brutal. The next day, Sukkha asked to be transferred to another estate.
No one ever saw him in Tua Tua again.
From sirdars the talk moved seamlessly to sahebs, the overseers whom the
girmitiyas called kulambars, reportedly coined from the order they barked,
‘Call your number’. The names were often recalled formally: Mr Jones,
Mr Taylor, Mr Davidson, the Burra Sahebs and the Chota Sahebs, the
head and the junior overseers. Some were known only by their nicknames
such as ‘Tamaatar’, for one overseer whose face was perennially red in the
bright sun, while another was called ‘Ullu’ because he seemed clueless
most of the time, and another ‘Luccha’ because of his crude habits (farting
loudly in public) and penchant for using mispronounced Hindi swear
words, especially about female genitalia. The overseers came in all shapes
and sizes, people said, never fitting a single stereotype. If you did your
work, completed your task, they left you alone, people said, but if you
tried to be a smart-arse, they would quickly find out and give you the
hiding of your life, and you became a marked man. Then you were fair
game; your fate was sealed.
Some overseers got very attached to the place where they worked and the
people they supervised. Some would come to the Tamarind Tree, usually
on a Sunday, to tell the people that they were being transferred to another
sector and asked them to be as good with their successors as they had
been with them. Sometimes those who had served in the sector for a long
time would bring along a few loaves of bread and cans of jam or donate
a goat as a parting gift, and people would give them homemade sweets,
such as satua or lakdi ke mithai, a particular favourite. Nothing was said,
no promises made or extracted but much was understood by both sides.
Such strategic exchanges, some anthropologists might say, had powerful
symbolic meanings and an internal logic of their own, and were deployed
at critical points to achieve desired outcomes. Probably. The girmitiyas
might have been simple people but they were certainly not simpletons.

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 3. The Tamarind Tree

Mr Underwood was not one of those sharif (honourable) overseers.

He was a strange type, Digambar recalled: a man of few words but free
and furious with whips and fist, punching and kicking people whenever
the mood seized him, screaming at the top of his screechy voice so that
others heard him clearly. But that was not the worst thing about him as
there were many others around Labasa whose reputation for violence was
just as bad. Underwood’s real problem was that he had a taste for men.
He would paw his prey in some isolated corner of the plantation and
buggerise them, certain that his victims would never publicly confess the
assault for fear of shame. With time, Underwood got bolder and more
brazen, and word of his bizarre behaviour spread beyond Tua Tua.
Something had to be done. Even people from other sectors were
beginning to make inquiries; never a good sign. No one had much respect
for a buggerised man, a gandu, who could not defend his own honour.
There was nothing more shaming than being called a sector of effeminate
gandus. Bhukkan was approached. He convened a meeting under the
Tamarind Tree at which several people admitted sexual assault, including
Mangal, whom Bhukkan regarded as his own younger brother. They were
jahajibhais (shipmates) from the Sangola. The assaults ascertained, the
question was what the punishment should be? Bhukkan had no doubt
that it had to be death, and a violent death at that. A lesson had to be
taught that Indian manhood, mardaanagi, was not to be trifled with.
On the designated day, Bhukkan and his men lay in wait as Underwood
made his way on horseback to his favourite spot on the estate behind
the mango tree. He fell to the ground as a huge stone hit him on the
back of his head. The men dragged him to the middle of the cane
field and, filled with murderous rage, hacked him to pieces. They then
stuffed dismembered parts of his body into a jute sack, tied it up and
buried it in a grave in the overgrown grass at the far end of the field,
covering it with shrubs to avoid detection. The gruesome murder shook
the CSR. Underwood’s depravity was known to his fellow overseers and
he would have been transferred to another sector sooner or later, or
assigned a nonsupervisory position in the company’s local office. That
was a common enough practice to deal with the ‘rotten potatoes’, as the
phrase went, before the whole sack was lost.

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 Levelling Wind

But a lesson had to be taught to the labourers lest things get out of hand
and the company’s authority was undermined in the public eye. Strong
resolve was called for, and the company left no stone unturned to get
to the bottom of the matter, with the support of the local Inspector of
Police. The local stipendiary magistrate, Mr Foster, a former CSR overseer,
agreed and urged swift action. People had to be put firmly in their place.
For weeks, people were beaten or bribed for leads. Payment of wages was
withheld and permission refused to the labourers to leave the estate even
for brief social visits. Neither were visitors allowed to enter the estate
premises. The estate dispensary was allowed to run out of medicine. All
recreational activities were cancelled. The Tua Tua estate was in complete
lockdown. Many suspected who the deed doer was but no one said
anything. Treachery and betrayal at a time like this would bring swift
retribution, usually in the form of beheading. And Underwood was a bad
man. Then, someone—Chotu, people found out much later, with whose
wife Bhukkan was having a torrid affair—fingered him as the most likely
culprit. Bhukkan admitted leading the assault as an act of self-defence
against egregious provocation. ‘First our women, then our men; who is
next, our children?’ he reportedly said at the trial, but to no avail. He was
found guilty of first-degree murder and hanged and his co-conspirators
sentenced for life.
The plantation clearly was a place of rough, rudimentary justice. The
girmitiyas often did not get a fair day in the courts. The mysterious
protocols of Court-Kachehri (the law courts and judicial proceedings)
were beyond them, and cases were decided on the basis of hard evidence
adduced, not on hearsay or uncorroborated assertion. Inevitably, the
overseers came out on top. But the stories I heard suggested greater
complexity. Excesses certainly occurred but they came at a price, everyone
realised, and usually at the expense of life. Things could go only so far
and no further. Tact was backed by force. It was people like the men who
gathered under the Tamarind Tree who maintained a semblance of order
at a time of great chaos and confusion that kept the community intact.
It was no mean achievement to transform a rag-tag group of people from
hundreds of castes, speaking a host of tongues, from different parts of the
subcontinent, subjected to servitude on the plantations, into a relatively
smoothly functioning community bound by some essential values. It was
not until much later that I realised why the names of men like Bhukkan
were talked about with such awe and admiration by the old timers. They
were their unsung heroes, samaj rakshak (guardians of the community).

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 3. The Tamarind Tree

On a fleeting visit to Labasa some years ago, I went to the site of

the Tamarind Tree late one afternoon. There was nothing there except the
rotten stump of the old Tree among tall, unruly grass. School children
walked past the site every day, unaware of what was there once. Not even
the teachers at Wailevu Primary knew. It was the same with men cutting
cane in adjacent fields and others on horseback or bicycle going about
their daily business. The silence was surreal, almost haunting. The past
had become past, just like that. It reminded me of so many other things
I had seen or experienced, but which were now gone. I remembered the
graves of men and women who had died during the wreck of the Syria
I had seen some years earlier, now lying unmarked and covered by shrub
at the edge of the Nasilai Village. I remembered the tall mango tree behind
our thatched house in Tabia, which had given us the fruit for our pickles
but which had been destroyed after a fire, lit to smoke the bees out from
its hollowed base, had been left to smoulder away for months. The land
where we had grown up, where so many of our childhood memories were
formed, has been reclaimed by its native owners and reverted to bush,
obliterating all signs of life and laughter that had once filled the place.
Signs of dereliction and neglect abound. That is typical of so many Indian
settlements throughout Vanua Levu. There is little consciousness of the
past and even less desire to know about it among our people. Everyone is
trying to leave, hoping eventually to migrate overseas. My own links to
Labasa have become tenuous over the years as members of our extended
family left the island to settle in other parts of Fiji. Tabia, the village where
I grew up, is now a place of evanescent memories. All the old markers of
special moments have disappeared.
Father died nearly 20 years ago. We did not really know him when he
was alive; we hardly ever talked about private matters. That was the way
things were then. I understand the reason for his grief better now than
I did before; the death of the world that formed him. I think I understand
the man better, too, his fears and hopes and his sense of his place and
purpose on earth. I understand all that, but I also understand why the
Tamarind Tree went, why it had to go. It had come to Tua Tua with the
girmitiyas, and now, ever so faithfully, it was going out with them, taking
with it their secrets and stories of their hopes and aspirations. The Tree
had given succour and security to men and women from the old world,
but it had little meaning or relevance to those who followed them. Its
long journey had finally come to an end in May 1962 when it was hit by
lightning and razed. Finis coronat opus. A reminder of another time and

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 Levelling Wind

place, its demise lay to rest the ghosts of the past, of people like Bhukkan
and Underwood and countless others like them. Befittingly, like so many
girmitiyas, with its dignity intact, it died a sudden, uncomplicated death,
not a long, lingering one. The Tamarind Tree was gone but not forgotten;
its ashes would continue to nourish the soil—soul—of father’s generation,
and mine.

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