First month at De Willem

Rambishoon’s first month at Plantation De Willem was not as traumatic as his voyage across the oceans, but the rains, which had arrived along with him, intensified and reminded him of the monsoon he had departed Ishmailpur for Calcutta. And he wondered whether it would match the rains of the day before the Allanshaw departed, which were so intense they had to wade through knee-high water on the short journey from the depot to the Kidderpore wharf. He couldn’t know that it was to be the highest rainfall in a single day in Calcutta – 10 inches – for almost a century.
As a basis of comparison, the highest daily rainfall during our disastrous 2005 floods was 6.5 inches. What surprised Rambishoon, however, was the sugar factory ceasing operations just before what he was told was “Christmas”. He did not have to turn out to work but also was not paid. He was told that all cane cutting would also cease until the rains ended. In the meantime, the few indentured factory workers and cane cutters joined in his gang to weed, bank trash, clean drains and other maintenance tasks that became doubly difficult because of the rains and sodden fields.
Rambishoon earned his first visit to the hospital, which in his case was at Plantation Uitvlugt to the east of adjoining Zeeburg, which were all now consolidated and owned by the same company in the consolidating drive replicated across the country as the planters tried various stratagems to ride out the decades-long depression in sugar prices. The factory – called simply “Building” – at Zeeburg had already been shuttered in the decade before Rambishoon’s arrival, and its machinery had been cannibalised for use in the Uitvlugt Factory. He was told this by one of the indentured factory workers – who performed the laborious, albeit unskilled, job of fetching the burnt bagasse ash from the furnaces for twelve hours daily to be staged for transport to the fields – where they were used as a fertiliser.
While being pushed by the Sirdar after sundown to complete his task of weeding grass in one of the fields that had recently been harvested, he gashed his right foot quite deeply and bandaged it with a piece of cotton torn from the excess fabric in his dhoti that was hitched up above his knees when he worked. However, during the next few days, rather than healing, an ugly ulcer with pus under the scab was formed, and he was advised by his roommate to go to the hospital, to which he painfully limped.
It was a long, two-storey building across from the Uitvlugt “building”, with the lower floor extending to half its length. He was directed to the southeastern stairs that took him to the male section, where he was attended to after an interminable wait by a Creole “sick nurse”. Unlike aboard the Allanshaw, there was no doctor present, and he was to discover that one covered half of the plantations on the West Coast and then only visited episodically.
The sick nurse washed the scab with a solution of carbolic acid, made an incision, squeezed out the pus, and then bandaged the wound after applying a salve. Since darkness had long fallen, Rambishoon spent the night in the hospital and discovered that as on the ship, females were separated on the other side of the building.
As he recounted to my mother graphically, the hospital was filled with workers with abscesses that would not heal and others with “intermittent fever” – as malaria was then called – along with a number of respiratory diseases that were just as deadly as malaria. The next morning, the overseer made his routine visit to the hospital to ensure there were no “malingerers” by sending them back into the fields. Rambishoon was “discharged” by the overseer and ordered to join his gang.
Returning to the De Willem loges that evening, because his abscess was so painful, he sought out a man from his district who treated such ulcers using their folk Ayurvedic remedies. To draw out any new pus and stop the spread of infection, the man made a thick paste or poultice of ground turmeric, tulsi (basil) leaves and mustard oil and applied it directly to the wound, covering it with the bandage to be changed daily. The next morning the overseer ensured that Rambishoon joined the gang in the backdam. Fortunately, his wound eventually healed, and he was spared an amputation.