Tea-plants are perennial, and are set about four feet apart on hillsides. At three years of age they become productive. Familiar sights in the hills are the coolies with baskets of slips setting out plants wherever unemployed spaces may be found, and groups of Tamil girls plucking buds and young leaves from mature bushes. These girls are happy countenanced, some slender and graceful in carriage and movement, and none express objection to being snapshotted by travelers. The girls' baskets are emptied and contents systematically sorted at convenient places in the field, or at the factory. Essential to every important estate is the factory, for there the leaves are withered, broken by rolling, fermented, fired, and finally sifted into grades preparatory to packing in lead-lined boxes ready to be despatched to the markets of the universe.
It is reassuring to witness the system and scrupulous cleanliness of every step employed in producing Ceylon tea. Anybody who has spent a day on an up-country estate is fairly certain to be friendly to Ceylon tea the rest of his life, for modern machinery does much of the work which in China and Japan is performed by hands none too clean and amid surroundings none too healthful.
CHAPTER VI
BOMBAY AND ITS PARSEE "JEES" AND "BHOYS"
The Parsee is the only sect holding religious tenets strange enough to stamp them as "peculiar people" who amount to much in the material affairs of life. Every country possesses groups of people having religious beliefs and practices which attract to them a curious interest; but Bombay's Parsee colony is the only illustration of a brotherhood following strange lives who shine resplendently in the financial and social worlds.
Everything in Bombay is dominated by the Parsee element, and every public hospital and other charitable institution, public statue, or drinking fountain, is the benefaction of a Parsee. The mansions and finest villas are Parsee homes, the leaders of club life are Parsees, and almost every bank and influential commercial house bears a Parsee name on its door. Bombay's population is not far from nine hundred thousand, of which the Parsees number only sixty thousand—but this minority impresses its importance on the majority and gives a character of unique interest to the city.
These dominating people are Indians only by adoption. Twelve hundred years ago the Mohammedan conquerors of Persia persecuted the disciples of Zoroaster to an extent that many of the strongest men and women of the faith fled to India for safety, and the Parsees of to-day are the descendants of these refugees. For generations they have made education a feature, have always helped each other, and been extremely clannish, although preserving toward people of other religions a respectful attitude. Their creed, claimed to have descended from the Hebrew prophet Daniel, is expressed in three precepts of two words each: Good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Orthodox Parsees wear a white girdle of three coils as reminder of these principles; but present-day Parsee men have discarded all evidences of their creed save the designating vizorless cap, and dress in garments of European pattern, and their women are garbed in robes of delicately-shaded and clinging silks, and wear embroidered mantillas on their heads.
Most Parsees are superbly educated, variously accomplished, and speak English fluently. Their equipages are the smartest in Bombay, and every walk of life is led by them. The great fortunes of this part of India are theirs, and Parsee names are identified with everything contributing to Bombay's importance. These names are strikingly peculiar, are usually of from four to six syllables, the last being usually "jee" or "bhoy." The Jeejeebhoy family is intensely Parsee, of course, and important enough to possess an English baronetcy. The city's principal hospital was the gift of Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy. Other families of renown in the financial world are the Readymoneys, Jehangirs and Sassoons.
Turn where you may the eye meets something donated to the public by generous Parsees. These people have long been loyal supporters of British rule in India, and frequently able to neutralize Hindu or Mohammedan opposition to a public measure. Baronetcies and knighthoods have consequently been showered upon them from London. Incidentally, a good deal of the money with which hospitals and libraries were given by great Parsees of a former generation came as reward for running a successful "corner" in Indian cotton at the time of America's civil war. Lancashire mills could get no staple from the Southern states, and astute Bombay capitalists, securing control of the native crop, held the same until the price advanced from ten or twelve cents to a dollar a pound. The fruits of this coup., some of them at least, dotted Bombay with noble buildings and statues.