Life on the plantation

As Rambishoon settled into his new life, he looked forward to his first payday after working for six days in the week following his arrival at De Willem. This was the reason he has left his wife, son and home in Ishmailpur, and he was quite excited. Payday was on Saturday afternoon, and he followed the workers in his gang to a window at the pay office window from where his overseer doled out the coins in shillings and pence that he had determined to be their payment for the tasks they had completed. The standard was one shilling per task per day, and Rambishoon discovered there were always disputes by some workers on the amount received. Invariably, the overseer – with his driver interpreting – would point out some deficiency in the completion of the tasks for which full wage was not paid. Rambishoon was disappointed to receive four shillings instead of the six he had expected and was reminded brusquely by the driver that two shillings had been deducted for the rations he had collected for the week on the Saturday after his arrival.
Rambishoon was shocked to say the least. He had found the rations to be rather generous: three and a half pounds rice; one and a half pounds Dal or peas; half a pint coconut oil; four oz masala; one pound sugar; four oz salt; and several pounds of either wheat flour, yams, plantains, sweet potatoes, tannias or cassava. He determined there and then that after the compulsory three months of supplied rations, he would be able to live on, at maximum, one shilling weekly. He did not realise that after the three months he would have to pay for the pot he thought he had been given.
In his second week, he was taken to the end of the three-mile depth of Plantation De Willem – field #24, he was told by the driver – where he could see the actual “back dam” that had been created across the width of the fields extending east and west as far as his eyes could see. The backdam held back water collected from further inland to create a large reservoir that was released through locks to provide irrigation via the canals that flanked the Middle Walk that traversed the plantation all the way to the Public Road. This arrangement reminded him so much of the Ahar-Pyne system in his homeland that allowed him, his family and other farmers to cultivate three different crops annually – in his family’s case, rice, corn and lentils.
The Ahars were reservoirs with dams on three sides designed to store rainwater or diverted river water, while the Pynes were canals that moved the water between the Ahars and into the surrounding fields. Unlike the system in British Guiana, where the irrigation waters into the fields were channelled into drainage canals adjoining the side-line dams between plantations and emptied into the ocean, these form an interconnected water storage and distribution system for the entire region. As such, it demanded a high level of disciplined cooperation by the farmers to ensure that everyone benefitted. Rambishoon was also aware that the British had constructed a massive canal from the Sone River to the west of Ishmailpur just before he had been born, which supplemented the ancient Ahars and Pynes.
Rambishoon’s Ahars and Pynes had been in operation for over 2000 years, and had pretty much shaped farming and daily life in his region so that they were not at the mercy of the monsoons and rainfall that created floods and droughts. All the farmers in his district cooperated in this community-managed water network designed to store, distribute, and conserve water during both the monsoon and dry seasons.
Rambishoon had not quite finished his first month of indentureship when he began to dream how productive this new land could be in replicating the wet rice cultivation culture of Ishmailpur. Talking to some of the older, time-expired labourers on his Sunday day off, he learns that in order to encourage them to remain in British Guiana to work for the low wages that made sugar viable for the planters, the plantation would lease small plots of nearby swamplands to time-expired labourers, where they could cultivate rice. While Rambishoon’s initial idea was to earn and save as much money as he could to return to his wife and son, this thought was to play a major role in making him break his word.