Dark Roast Graves

Buried under landslides, low global prices, Coorg’s coffee planters peer into oblivion

 

- Ajay Sukumaran

A fully-done crossword puzzle is on the table next to Chitra Subbaiah who confesses that she could forego reading the newspaper, but not the crossword. We are in the cottage of a home-stay in Madapura, north Coorg, resplendent in the evening sun—the first day in two months that the rain has let up. It brings some relief from fear. Chitra, nearing eighty, recounts a painful experience with great fortitude. “You have to do some mental jugglery, you know. You can’t curse your fate.” She’s staying in a friend’s cottage because her home, in the neighbouring village of Hattihole, now lies beneath a pile of earth which slid down the hillside, burying everything she owned. “Wiped out, totally. I don’t have one pin.

There is nothing to say there was a house,” she tells Outlook. All she could reach out for in time were her spectacles, medicines and some gold the workers from her coffee estate had entrusted her with safekeeping. The workers’ quarters on her coffee estate too went down.

Fortunately, they had had time to move out. She points to others in the same situation. “At least I can rent a house and stay. What about so many others, who have nothing,” she asks.

Before the rains started this year, coffee planters in Coorg were talking of a good crop—the plants were well rested after a lean year and went through the process of blossoming and forming fruits.