Exercise for pregnant women
Tea plantations in Sri Lanka are not like those sugar plantations from a Brazilian soap opera, where the slave Isaura slaved away 14 hours a day. The social package of a Sri Lankan tea plantation worker is something to envy. Upon hiring, they immediately provide a house with furniture. House is, of course, a strong word. But given the fact that on the island you can sleep outdoors all year round, a roof over your head is already a luxury in itself. If you don't want a house on the plantation grounds, they'll give you money to build another one in a place you like better. Work a year or two, decide to leave – they'll let you go in peace and won't take the house away. But there are no takers for leaving the plantation.
«Working at a tea factory is considered prestigious,» says Ramya Puara. «It so happens that all our people work here. And outsiders aren't really taken. Is that bad? They give housing, pay a salary, and when you grow old, they'll provide a pension, and your house will pass to your children. That's how we've lived here for generations.»
Picking tea from the bush is mostly women's work. Despite having to pick 15 kg of tea leaves a day, this work is considered easy and even very beneficial for health. Therefore, getting a job as a tea picker is not so easy – all applicants must go through competitive selection. «Even wealthy Sri Lankans send their wives who are expecting a new addition to the family to work on the plantation,» says Ramya Puara. «It's considered excellent exercise for pregnant women.»
Although the salary at the factory is modest – on average $40 a month – it's quite enough to live on. Sri Lanka is not without reason translated as 'blessed land': stick a stick in the ground and it will grow into a tree without your help. You won't even need to water it. Pineapples and coconuts, mangoes and papayas, not to mention bananas, almost fall into your mouth on their own. On Ceylon trees, everything grows: from breadfruit to rubber, from pepper to – believe it or not – tulips. There is a bottle tree: its fruits look like bottles. There is a shoe tree: its fruits are copies of women's 'pumps'. And all of this is edible.
A traditional Sri Lankan dish – rice with curry – costs pennies, even by local standards. The dish is so spicy that a white person after lunch gains the ability to light a signal fire with their breath for the rest of the day, and it's better not to approach a gas station for safety reasons. Even cheaper are the huge shrimp, which in restaurants back home are respectfully called king prawns.
Moonshine from «Bounty»
It so happens that we love Ceylon tea more than Chinese or Indian tea. And for good reason. The love story between Sri Lanka and our country is long and touching. In the 1960s, trying to teach Sri Lankans socialism, the USSR did a lot of good for them. It built a giant tire factory, a rolling mill at a metallurgical plant, and even a mill with an elevator.
For good deeds and advanced technology, they didn't charge the islanders money. The Sri Lankans paid us with tea, which became an indispensable attribute of Soviet special rations and New Year's orders. Today they remember the Russian patronage in Ceylon with reverence. They tell how our compatriots came here, pale and frightened. How at first they only walked in groups and didn't make friends with the locals. But then, after a couple of weeks, having gotten their bearings and sunbathed, they began to rejoice at everything like children: the hot sun, giant palm trees, and dirt-cheap bananas. How in the evenings they drank coconut vodka, and when drunk, shed a tear and called rubber trees birches.
Today there are no Russians left at Sri Lankan enterprises. But our tourists, visiting the island, all as one strive to stop by the tea factory to see how that very tea grows. But for some reason they refuse the tea tasting. Like their Soviet predecessors, they say that drinking tea in the heat is a lost cause and demand to bring coconut vodka. Fusel oils in it, of course, are plentiful. But at least there are the priceless 40 degrees available.
«Before the tsunami, Russians came to our plantation,» says Ramya Puara. «They told interesting things. They said that Buddha's teachings are very close and understandable to them, but only after a couple of shots of alcohol. They said that after drinking, without any meditation, you can realize your body as a temporary abode, feel how the immortal soul separates from it, how it goes through the initial stage of enlightenment – Sotapanna, Sotapanna turns into Sakadagami, Sakadagami smoothly flows into Anagami, and finally comes the last stage of enlightenment – Arahant.»