In Coorg, where coffee shrubs stretch endlessly across the hills, caregiving is not a task—it is a way of life, stitched into every fold of the landscape. It begins before dawn, often before the first light seeps through the misty valleys. Leela, like many others on the estate, ties her youngest child onto her back with an old, soft sari. Her older son, barely five, tags along, his tiny hands brushing the leaves as he trails behind, always watching, always learning.
“This land teaches them everything,” Leela says, half-laughing, as she adjusts her load of coffee beans. “They know how to tell ripe cherries from unripe ones before they can even read their names.”
On these estates, children don’t wait for classrooms to begin learning. They grow up amidst trees heavy with fruit, under skies that shift from bright blue to heavy grey within hours. Caregiving here isn’t something separate from work—it moves alongside it. Young children often follow their caregivers into the fields, toddling through the narrow paths, their laughter mingling with the hum of the estate’s daily rhythms.
But life here is not without its storms—especially when the monsoon arrives. The rain, when it falls, doesn’t trickle gently. It thunders down, swallowing paths and flooding shortcuts that link these scattered homes to anganwadi centres miles away. Roads that are dusty and rough in the summer become slick with mud, impossible to walk without slipping.
“During heavy rains, the anganwadi stays empty for days,” says Sheena, an aunt who often looks after her sister’s children. “How do we take the little ones through knee-deep water? It’s too risky.”
In those months, homes become makeshift schools and kitchens transform into care centres. Meals are simpler—millet porridge, boiled roots, whatever can be sourced close by—and learning is improvised. Numbers are taught using coffee beans, letters traced on flour-dusted floors.
Sometimes, though, even the strongest hands must let go. Many families send their children to live with relatives in towns like Virajpet or Madikeri during the school term, where access to education—and dry roads—is easier. Boarding school becomes a rite of passage for many, often starting as early as age nine or ten.
“My heart broke the first time we sent Rohit away,” Leela confesses softly, staring out over the rain-drenched fields. “He was only a boy, but what choice did we have? The rains had started early that year, and every path was blocked. He’d already missed too many weeks of school.”
These decisions are made not out of ambition, but necessity—a quiet calculation of what each season demands. The absence of children in the homes during school terms changes the rhythm of the estates. Grandparents often fill the gaps, watching over younger siblings, keeping traditions and stories alive until the children return on breaks.
“My house becomes full again during holidays,” Devamma, a grandmother, says with a grin. “The noise! The mess! But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. They bring the hills alive again.”
In many ways, caregiving here is less about individual responsibility and more about collective endurance. It is sisters sharing childcare so others can harvest; neighbours leaving extra rice at a doorstep when someone falls sick; children learning, from an early age, that their hands, too, have a role to play in keeping the family afloat.
There is a tenderness in these quiet acts of care—an intimacy born from proximity to both land and hardship. The care here doesn’t shout; it hums along with the rain, whispers through the trees, is folded into every task of the day.
The estates may feel isolated to outsiders—houses spread far apart, hills separating communities—but they are bound tightly by shared rhythms of work, rain, and resilience. Even in the hardest months, there is laughter by the kitchen fire, lullabies hummed over boiling kettles, stories swapped under leaky roofs as the rain drums on.
“Some people think we live far from everything here,” Sheena says. “But they don’t know how close we are. To each other. To this land. To the ways we care.”
In Coorg, to give care is to keep moving through storms. It is to braid love into labour, to carry a child on your back and a basket in your hands, to raise generations in step with the seasons. Here, care grows wild and quiet—steady as the coffee trees, rooted deep, ready to bloom again with the first break of sun.
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