Scavenging, and this happens

Romit’s friends were closing down their gym and had a bunch of stuff that they were trying get rid of. And in keeping with our attempts to reuse anything we can, we took a break from picking pepper and offered to help clear things up. So, Neeti treated us to lunch at Mangalore Pearl, in exchange for a few hours lifting 6kg 18"x18" rubber tiles off the gym floor and piling them up in a corner for later storage. We cleared maybe 1500 sq ft, which means, we lifted and carried 650 tiles or so… 3900 kgs! Not bad, and we picked up 2 benches, a wooden box, a shoe rack, a metal rack of shelves, 3 rolls of artificial turf, a large mirror and 43 of those heavy bloody rubber tiles. Thank you, Neeti!

So, all this stuff, we pile onto Manik’s Isuzu that I had borrowed for this purpose, add an old wooden sofa on top and set off back to pin code 571201. Of course, a cop’s eyes light up when he sees a private vehicle carrying “goods” and he waves us down. “RC thorsi (show me the vehicle registration)”, he says, through his covid-19 prevention mask. I scramble for my phone where Manik had shared a photo of his RC card with me. Before I can locate the photo, we hear a mumble, “Corona… hogi, hogi (corona… go, go)”, and the cop’s gone! We stare at each other for a minute wondering what happened before the realization hits us… this is a “Chinese virus” and I must be a carrier! Muahahaha… I am a walking talking nightmare!

Anyhow, the rest of the drive up, I couldn’t help notice that the usually curious eyes in my direction were more wary than usual. Shrug, I guess.

The coffee was picked, now pepper

Back in the district of Coorg, the same one in the Western Ghats that played host to two weeks of coffee picking in January, the pin code of Avandur remains the same. And here I was again, with a month in hand this time, to watch the coffee bloom and to pick some ripening pepper off the vines.

Romit had already started the sprinkling using our brave and lonely sprinkler to encourage the coffee plants to flower; the plants were responding brilliantly. When I arrived, along with Gari, the area around the house smelled like someone had generously sprayed coffee flower perfume everywhere to welcome us. And the soundtrack to our walk up the slope was the buzz of the bees going about their business.

But before we could get to the business of picking the pepper, a few coffee trees remained to be picked, on the highest and steepest part of the plantation. Not much… but we don’t have so much coffee that we can ignore even these few trees. So, up we went, and pretty soon, as thankful as I was to have opposable thumbs, I was questioning evolution on how it was decided that we wouldn’t be needing prehensile tails any more. The need of a prehensile tail actually struck me while hanging desperately onto a branch; I looked down and realised that I was a little too close to being back down at the house post haste without too much skin left on my butt! I survived.

The limited horizontal space we have meant that we had to borrow space from Uncle Poonacha to dry some of our coffee, which in turn meant twice daily treks to his home to turn the coffee over. On one such visit, he mentioned that the water supply to his sprinkler had diminished and it needed to be checked. Romit is nothing if not chivalrous, and so off we set, up a little stream, past some startled jungle fowl, to the place where Uncle had laid the pipe. On the way back, we noticed that Uncle’s enormous chikoo tree was heavily laden with juicy looking fruit. When he said that we could take as much as we wanted, we joyfully bagged a bagful. Fixing a sprinkler for chikoos… I like! Another time, I scored a nice ripe papaya as well!

Selling our dried coffee berries was a new experience for me, and whether we got the best deal or not, I was quite thrilled to be given cash for the work that we’d done (mostly Romit). Maybe next year, I should be thrilled when we get the best deal, and not just any deal.

Oh yes, this was supposed to be about pepper! Yeah, we did that too… Romit put on a superman cloak (his father’s old lungi) clambered up a bamboo pole with me holding on with all my still developing might and picked the pepper high up in the trees. That was until we figured that we should 1. get some better equipment, and 2. perhaps leave it to the pros (now that we know what it takes!). And so we went back to watering our fruit garden of lychees, avocados, jackfruit, chikoos, custard apples, rambutans, dragon fruit, pineapples, mangosteens, persimmons… it takes forever! But patience, we’ll get there.