The camera shows the timestamp as 5:53 am when this photograph was taken. We were walking past the storeroom at Goomtee – one of the oldest estates in Darjeeling. Already, it was a busy morning there. And it was here that we came across Amar Subba, a ‘sprayer’. On the estate, most of the tea pluckers are women while it’s the men who work in irrigation and spraying.
Amar Subba was going to drop his daughters off at their school and we walked along with him. What are your plans for them, we ask. I want them to study well and go to the city and have a good career, he replied, echoing the dreams of so many estate workers here.
“Did you grow up thinking you would work in the tea estates?,” we asked.
“My dream was to become a football player”, he said, smiling.
Photograph by Gautam Virprashad
