“Make mine a double,” Digby says as Cromwell pours. Cromwell’s grin widens.
One drink, and never alone, is Digby’s rule. “A matter of self-preservation. An estate hazard,” he might say if asked. It has been fourteen years since he acquired Müller’s estate for the consortium that consisted of the friends who had gathered around the Mylins’ dinner table on a New Year’s Eve. Thirteen since he earned a portion of it, which he named Gwendolyn Gardens after his mother. Over that time he’s witnessed the fall of three assistant managers at neighboring Perry & Co., young men who knew their way around a pint back home. It was a grand adventure at first: bungalow, servants, company motorcycle, and being the laird of more tea, coffee, and rubber than they knew existed. But they’d underestimated the loneliness and isolation of the first monsoon and found the antidote in the bottle.
His only regret about his estate is its distance from Franz and Lena. Even in fair weather it’s an all-day drive south, past Trichur and Cochin, to reach the vicinity of Saint Bridget’s and then several hours’ climb to get to AllSuch. His family, such as it is, consists of Cromwell, the Mylins, and Honorine, who comes every summer for two months. When she leaves, a melancholy descends on him. Without Cromwell, without this nightly ritual during the monsoon, he might be lost.
Cromwell disdains chairs and hunkers near the fireplace, the glass under his nose, whisky to be breathed as much as sipped. That mix of deliberation and pleasure is in everything he does. Digby thinks of him as ageless, so he’s perversely pleased to see gray creeping over his friend’s temples. Digby keeps his own hair closely cropped, which makes his graying less evident. He’s forty-two, but looks considerably younger; Cromwell, he guesses, is slightly older.
In this nightly ritual, they “walk” through Gwendolyn Gardens’ nine hundred acres. If it were all coffee, it’d be easy, as coffee needs little labor—even less labor after they switched to robusta when leaf rust wiped out their arabica plants. On a magical morning in March, a hundred acres of Gwendolyn Gardens will look blanketed in snow because of an overnight explosion of the glorious white coffee blossoms. But competition from Brazil has driven down prices. Tea is very profitable and forms the bulk of the estate, but it’s the delicate child that demands the most laborers. Being closer to the equator, their tea can be plucked all year round, unlike Assam and Darjeeling. The demand is insatiable. In the warmer, lowest reaches of the estate are the many acres of rubber trees.
“On eleven ’arpin. Sliding. Same place as before,” Cromwell says at the end of his report.
I knew there was a reason I wanted a double. A landslide on the eleventh hairpin bend is a disaster. They’ll run out of their stock of paddy in a week; for their laborers, the provision of rice is more critical than giving them their wages. Digby pictures the spot, the road ending abruptly in a crevasse of mud, boulders, and uprooted trees. Just above it, water springs mysteriously from the flat mountain face. A stigma. The tribals place cairns there, offerings to Varuna or Ganga, but the gods are not appeased. The treatment is painful: they must hack down parallel to the landslide through dense forest till they get below it, then cut across and back up to join the ghat road again. Every estate will pitch in. Workers will carry headloads along this U-shaped detour till the road is rebuilt. The detour could become the new road.
The next morning the monsoon ceases as though a switch was flipped, the incessant drone of rain on the roof silenced. For so many weeks, Digby’s view was of swirling mist or, rarely, when the clouds settled in the valley, he’d be staring down like Zeus at the tops of cumulus and thunderheads. When he steps out, it’s bright and sunny; the processing sheds and the thatch of the clinic have the soaked, bedraggled look of a pariah dog caught without shelter. Despite the landslide, his spirits soar.
Skaria, the compounder, scurries to the clinic, sporting a sweater the color of bilious boak. Tobacco smoke pours out of his nostrils and thickens in the chilly air. The man is so addicted to nicotine that he sucks on vile cheroots as though they were beedis. Seeing Digby, he holds his breath to conceal the smoke as he salutes. The jumpy Skaria can manage a routine sick call, but in an emergency he’s worse than useless, he’s an impediment.
Cromwell brings the horses around. He’s bleary-eyed but grinning. Somehow he has already visited the landslide, taking every able-bodied person with him to start on the bypass. He reports that a cow is about to calve, while the polydactyl cat in the same barn has given birth to kittens. “Babies also six fingers! Good luck only!”
Digby mounts Billroth. The mud embankments flanking the driveway are green with “touch-me-not” and twitch in response to a sudden breeze, just like the skin of his colt. He gets goose bumps at the sight. He could drop a toothpick in this sod and it would soon be a sapling. From city boy to surgeon to planter. The fecund soil is what keeps him here; it is the salve for wounds that never close.
Billroth suddenly pulls back his ears and whinnies, well before the sound reaches Digby: the rattle of a bullock cart moving at breakneck speed, and contrary to the physics of wooden wheels, fragile axles, rutted roads, and bovines. Then it comes into sight, the bullocks wide-eyed, trailing ribbons of saliva, while the driver whips them as though the devil is on his tail.
Cromwell trots forward to meet the cart. After a brief exchange, he points to the bridle path. It ends in a squat building with the thatch pulled down over its ears like a bonnet. The clinic.
“They coming from other side of mountain,” he says. “Landslide there also. Turning and come this way. Someone told doctor is here. Not good.”
Digby experiences only the fear, not the heady excitement he once felt in Casualty at engaging with human life reduced to its core elements—breath, a pumping heart—or their absence. He knows what should be done for most emergencies, but he doesn’t have the means. For things that aren’t emergencies . . . well, more than a few estate managers have discovered that if they’re looking for the friendly GP willing to drop by because Mary or Meena is off her porridge, Digby’s not their man. He has furnished the dispensary well enough to care for his laborers, but he’s a planter first. In an emergency he’ll do what he can, but he can’t help feeling resentful and apprehensive about what he might see.
“SIR, DIGBY, SIR!” Skaria shouts, emerging from the clinic, waving his arms in that ghastly sweater. Billroth trots toward the clinic; the colt knows where duty lies even if his master is conflicted.
A baby’s fist sticks into the air.
What confuses Digby’s senses is that it emerges from a slit of a wound in the belly of its very pregnant and utterly frightened mother.