Anjali
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 2
By the time the mist lifted from the lower terraces, Asha Rao had already been walking for two hours.
She preferred the early morning, before the pickers had fully spread across the slopes and before the day’s demands began to arrive at her elbow. The gardens at that hour belonged to no one. The bushes stood in their rows, beaded with moisture, and the paths between them were dark with wet. She went along them in a plain cotton sari with the end tucked firmly at her waist, and a shawl of Tibetan wool against the chill. Her boots, a pair she had ordered from a Calcutta cobbler against her mother’s mild despair, were caked to the ankle.
She knew the ground as she knew her own hands. The third terrace below the drying sheds always slumped after heavy rain. The path by the spring turned to glass if you did not keep to the left. On the eastern slope, where the old bushes grew, the leaf had been yellowing since the cold snap in March, and she stopped there now, as she did every morning, and turned a branch over between her fingers.
“Still the same,” she said.
“Worse on the north side, Asha-didi.” Hari Prasad had come up the path behind her, as quietly as he always did. He was a lean man of nearly sixty, with a close-cropped head gone white and a face the color of old teak, creased deeply around the eyes. He carried a stick of polished bamboo that he rarely leaned on. “The frost took the young growth. We will lose perhaps a tenth of the second flush.”
“A tenth.”
“If we are fortunate.”
She released the branch and straightened. From where they stood she could see most of Rao’s Grove laid out below her, the long green terraces stepping down into the valley, the tin roofs of the drying sheds, the white wall of the family house among its deodars. Beyond the boundary stones the land passed into other hands, the neighboring estates, and beyond them the forest, and beyond the forest the plains, which she had seen only twice in her life and had not liked.
Her grandfather had cleared this slope. She had heard the story so often that it had worn smooth. He had come up from the south with a handful of men, long before the English thought the hills worth the trouble, and had planted the first bushes from seed carried over the passes by a Chinese trader who spoke no language that anyone could understand. Hari had been among those men, then a boy of fifteen. He had carried water, and later stone, and later still the keys of the storehouse, and had never in forty years been known to raise his voice.
“Come,” said Hari. “There is something I should show you before the Company’s people arrive with their questions.”
He led her down to the weighing shed, where the day’s first baskets were being brought in. Thirty or forty women stood in a line in the pale light, their baskets slung from bands across their foreheads, waiting their turn at the scale. They were Nepalis for the most part, with a scattering of Lepcha and Bhutia women among them, and they spoke in low voices that fell silent as Asha entered and then resumed, a little more easily, once she had nodded to them. She knew their names. She knew that the tall woman near the front, Maya Tamang, had buried a husband in the winter. She knew that the girl beside her was not yet twelve and was supposed to be at school, though the school was a four-mile walk and no one could spare her.
The clerk at the scale was a stout young man named Dhan Bahadur, who sprang up when he saw her and bowed. She waved him down.
“Show her the book,” said Hari quietly.
The ledger lay open on a box beside the scale. Asha bent over it. The entries were in Dhan Bahadur’s round hand, line after line, the weights set against the names. At the right-hand margin ran a second column, in a different ink, that she had not seen before.
“What are these deductions?”
Dhan Bahadur shifted. “It is the new allowance, miss. For the, ah, the carriage. The Company’s agent at the lower station has instructed that a portion of each worker’s weekly pay is to be retained against the cost of bringing tea down to the plains.”
“Retained by whom?”
“By the estate, miss. Then forwarded to the agent.”
“From the workers’ wages.” She read down the column. Two annas here, three there. It was not a great deal for any one woman, and for forty women over a season it was a fortune. “Who authorized this?”
Dhan Bahadur looked at Hari. Hari said nothing.
“My father signed it,” Asha said slowly.
“Your father signed what was put before him, didi,” said Hari, in the gentle voice he used when he wished her to hear a thing without being angered by it. “There was a letter from the Collector’s office. A notice, with a seal. It said the estate would be assessed for transport otherwise, at a rate considerably higher. Your father is a careful man. He chose the lesser burden.”
“The lesser burden for the estate,” said Asha. “Not for Maya Tamang.”
“No.” Hari met her eyes. “Not for her.”
She closed the ledger. Her hands, she noticed, were not quite steady, and she pressed them flat against the cover. The anger that rose in her was a familiar one, cold and exact, and she had learned long ago that it was useful only if she did not let it speak. If she spoke now, in the shed, before forty women and a nervous clerk, she would be repeating it by noon in every house on the estate. And it would be repeated in the wrong way, with the wrong names, to the wrong ears.
“I want a list,” she said at last, evenly. “Every worker who has been charged, and the amount, and from what date. Not for my father. For me.”
“It will be ready by evening.”
“And Hari-kaka.” She hesitated. “Thank you for showing me.”
“You would have found it yourself within the week,” said Hari. “I preferred that you should find it with me beside you.” He leaned, finally, upon his stick. “Be patient with it, Asha. Your grandfather used to say that a hill is climbed with the feet, not with the temper. I do not tell you that nothing is wrong. I tell you that the way out of a thing is rarely the way you first wish to take.”
It was the answer she had expected, and she was no happier for it. But she knew that he did not give it lightly. Hari had seen more than she ever would, the rise of the Company’s power from a distant rumor to a daily fact, and he had paid for his caution, over the years, with a quiet he did not discuss. She had never known him to turn away from a person in trouble. She had also never known him to say more than he thought wise.
The house stood on a level shelf above the gardens, a long white building with a deep veranda and green-shuttered windows, half Bengali in its design and half English. Her grandfather had built the first wing in stone, and her father had added the second, with a drawing-room in the Company style, a piano nobody played, and a pair of framed engravings of the Thames. It was a house that spoke two languages, and Asha had grown up fluent in both.
She came in through the side door to avoid the formal hall, kicked off her muddy boots, and was halfway up the back stairs before a voice stopped her.
“Didi. Don’t you dare.”
Devika leaned over the banister above her, in a morning dress of pale blue muslin that Asha had last seen on a Calcutta fashion plate. She was eighteen, small and quick, with her mother’s wide dark eyes and a talent for appearing at exactly the moment one wished to be elsewhere. Her hair was already arranged in an elaborate coil, secured by a pin that Asha suspected she had borrowed without asking.
“I haven’t done anything,” said Asha.
“You were about to disappear. You were going to wash, and then go to your room, and then I would not see you again until supper.” Devika descended three steps and folded her arms. “Mrs. Hallam’s tea is on Thursday. You promised.”
“I promised nothing of the sort.”
“You promised with your face. You nodded.”
“I was thinking about leaf blight.”
“Then you must think about it more quietly, because Mrs. Hallam is going to ask you what you are reading, and you are going to say something clever and alarming, and then Mrs. Hallam is going to tell Mrs. Prentice, and Mrs. Prentice is going to tell the entire station that Mr. Rao’s elder daughter has opinions.” Devika threw up her hands. “Didi, I am not asking you to be stupid. I am asking you to be quiet for an hour. A single hour.”