Daffield and Powell came forward. Discussing the matter with them, Lum Kwa spoke again, ‘To get back the money you have paid Yi Kan, these gentlemen have asked you to appeal to the court. They will tell you what to do. Meanwhile, they have asked you to stay quiet. They have promised to look after you.’

After this the crowd calmed down, and Lum Kwa turned his attention to the injured.

The shores of the Hooghly slowly became quiet with the onset of night. The boats and ships floating on the river and the lights from the surrounding houses lent an ethereal air to the place.

On the mud floor of the coolie depot, a tired and injured group of pigtailed youth, clad in hemp, sat down to eat. A team of armed guards waited outside to transfer them to the depot in Howrah.

Eight

Green. Green everywhere. On one side of the huge tea garden Ho Han was making furniture on the verandah of a spacious single-storied quarter made of wood, bamboo and thatch. There was a long wooden box full of Chinese tools next to him. This was the house of the tea garden manager. Ho Han built it with help from Ho Yen and another Chinese fellow named Ah Chin.

The manager’s bungalow was quiet. A Kachari worker was repairing the bamboo fencing around the spacious compound. Another worker was mowing the lawn. Ho Han was working by himself with deep concentration. There wasn’t any trace of joy on his youthful face. Hard work and lack of nourishment had shadowed it. A long time had elapsed since their arrival in Assam.

They were now used to this way of life. Having already picked up a smattering of Hindustani and Bengali in Calcutta, they were now trying to learn the local dialect. When they were at the Howrah depot, Lum Kwa tried to teach them a bit of the local language and impart some knowledge about Chinese medicines. It was not easy trying to teach them new things, for most of them had suffered terrible cruelty and hardships and had lost all inclination to learn.

At the end of their long boat journey over the Brahmaputra, the group had been taken to the company’s headquarters and there they were assigned to different tea gardens. The men were put to work felling trees, digging trenches, plucking tea leaves, and building houses. They were sent wherever there was a need. In a new place, with unusual food, unheard-of diseases, and gruelling work, the men were exhausted and weak. They feared never seeing their homeland or their loved ones again. In the beginning, some of them rebelled and refused to work. Gradually they came to accept their fate and this place as their own. The world they had left behind was slowly passing into obscurity. They did whatever was asked of them without any protest. Their infinite sighs had mixed with the air of the tea gardens of Assam. A million drops of their sweat mixed with the freshly dug soil of the gardens. Uncountable days and nights had passed in loneliness, in the small thatched huts assigned to them.