There was always a feeling of dissolution, a languid and inescapable stupor, a pause which fell upon the tapper when he walked under the trees arched so regularly overhead, in endlessly repeated criss-crossing alleyways. Perhaps it was the overwhelming uniformity of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of trees, equidistant from each other, all the same height and size, thousands of acres of rubber, millions of rubber trees. Not a breath of air moved under their identical foliage. At seven in the morning already the coolness was going. An insidious, moist heat oozed between the rows, clinging to the tappers’ clothes, to their sweat-covered faces, their damp hands, and the knife handles. It was light enough to see the straight boles dappled with patches of silver and rust, girded with sloping broad belts of shorn bark. Along their lower rim the grey-white congealed latex of the night ended in a glazed runnel into the collecting cup, fastened with wire round each tree. Tree after tree after tree, through which the earth’s damp rose, sucked upwards in the trunks, lifted drop by drop, to vanish, insubstantial vapour in the pale empty sky. Tree after tree after tree, quietly bleeding its white, smooth seeping blood, latex, into cups.

Daughter and Son ran ahead, stripping the greyish hardened latex along the cut, scrap rubber, to be handed in to the estate. Husband and wife followed quickly, sprinting from trunk to trunk, bending over the cuts like black parasites gorging, their tapping knives gouging thin, precise strips of bark. Too deep a nick, a careless slash, and the tree, wounded, would bleed to death. And now so many trees in rows were slashed at night, by the People Inside.

The sky, now blue, was peopling itself with the white, full-bellied muster of rotund morning clouds. Leaden-footed, the heat trod in the orderly man-made jungle of rubber. Mosquitoes singsonged round the tappers’ heads, then dropped to the damp hollows in the clefts of boughs. A stray bulbul began to state its beauty-haunted tune, but lost the thread, faltered, and stopped. A muter lowing echoed distantly from the cattle of the Tamil rubber tappers who tapped Division 2 and 3 of the estate.