Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Author's Note: This story was written as a birthday present for Slowfox.
Author: Penguin
THE TEA ESTATE
The road to the Tea Estate runs between rows of trees with trunks covered in
creepers; a long, slow, dusty snake gliding lazily through jungle. If they
stand on its back and look straight up above their heads, they can see a strip
of hot sky, ragged at the edges by leaves. Sometimes the strip is heavy and
dark, its belly pregnant with rain, and it throws a torrent of water into their
faces. Under their feet, the road is either dusty or squelchy with mud, and
their feet are never clean.
Huddled on a four-poster bed in a country very far from the Tea Estate: two
small girls with long black hair and dark eyes. Red drapes are drawn around
them; a ruby red bowl made of thin glass is between them on the bed. Their
fingers keep moving to it, picking up slippery pieces of mango to push into
each other's mouths. Their minds are at the Estate, and the taste of mango
helps them find it.
"Oh! There's the Bird with Blue Feathers," Padma whispers, and Parvati sees it
at once.
It's perched on one of the bottom branches of the tree by the corner of the
house, its tail feathers hanging down so low it would tickle the girls' noses
if they were allowed to get that close. A heavy fruit falls to the ground with
a thud from a tree near them, and they both laugh. The air is heavy with a rain
that hasn't yet begun to fall.
"I wonder why we haven't seen the bats yet?" Parvati asks.
Immediately, it gets nearly dark; a hot, thick, fragrant darkness where the
sound of bats moves across the sky. The girls have to concentrate hard for
their eyes to catch the black shapes; they move so swiftly.
The mango pieces in the bowl are gone and it's time to leave the Estate for
now. Padma slips out through the red curtains and returns to her own dormitory,
where the curtains are blue like the long tail feathers of the bird in the
tree.
Parvati and Padma have never been to Assam, but their mother has told them
about it many times since they were very small, and it seems like a memory of
their own. The Tea Estate in Assam is a land of legend to them. It's the home
of dreams and wishes, of tales and adventures, of all kinds of fantastic
things, and what isn't already there can easily be added by imagination. It's a
place of colour, of vivid reds and yellows, of electric, vibrant blue and all
shades of green – from the sharp, acid green of lime flesh to the dusty dark
hue of tired leaves that hang limp before the rain. The dust is red like the
bricks in the cold country where the girls live.
Parvati and Padma have been sent to school, and like all the other first-years
who have just arrived, they're frightened, daunted and homesick. But they know
they're lucky – they have each other; there's someone with a familiar smell to
comfort your nose and a familiar voice to soothe your ears, someone to feed you
dried apricots that taste of sun, someone to walk beside you up the road to the
Tea Estate.
At night, they share dreams of the Estate, and in the morning, at breakfast,
their eyes meet across the Hall. They smile as they both remember hot dust
under the soles of their shoes, the smell and sounds of the river, fruit
falling from trees and the fragrance of the tea.
As they get older, they find it increasingly difficult to share their dreams.
They are no longer content with exploring together and watching amazing
creatures side by side. They want to people the Estate but they don't want the
same people, and they both want to be the sole heroine of the new adventures.
More and more often, Parvati's hero has black hair, green eyes and a scar on
his forehead, and he can't resist her any more than he can stop the call of the
birds or the flow of the river. She dreams of kisses, sweetly bitter like milky
tea.
Years later, when things get very bad in their real world, peace is restored at
the Estate. Life has to have a balance. The twins are growing up and find they
must take sides and take risks, because Umbridge's stubby fingers are
relentlessly poking around and exposing secrets at Hogwarts, and this is only
one symptom of all that is sick and wrong in the world. The Tea Estate helps
the girls produce Patronuses. Padma's is a bird with long tail feathers, silver
instead of blue, and Parvati's is a mongoose, quick and agile and alert.
When the war comes, Parvati and Padma are energetic and unafraid, and they
prove very valuable for their side. They withstand pain and torture better than
most, because their mind has somewhere to escape to when the body is racked
with pain. The darkness swallows their screams and they stand in the soft mud
by the sleepy river, watching bats flit across the sky.
- - -
When everything is over and the serpent has been killed, Parvati goes to see
Harry Potter at St Mungo's. Her own sojourn there was blessedly brief, but she
still shudders as she enters the hospital. The reception area is as confusingly
chaotic as ever, but Parvati knows where she's going.
Harry is pale and tired and his eyes are hard. He has lost everything except
his life, and sometimes a life is such a very small thing. He is glad to see
her, though, because he welcomes any change.
Parvati places a wide, willow-patterned teacup before him and points her wand
at it. It fills with reddish-brown tea, clear and fragrant. She waves her wand
again and the surface turns into a kind of mirror, a memory mirror, a dream
mirror; the lighter, simpler version of a Pensieve.
"Come with me," she says to Harry. "You can rest there. This will be more
effective than any therapy they can offer you here."
Harry is looking at her, sceptical and faintly amused, and his eyes are more
alive than they were a mere few minutes ago.
"I'll give it a try," he says. "Hell, I'll give anything a try – anything is
better than this." And then he nearly laughs. "Tea therapy! The English way to
treat illness."
"Tea therapy is correct," Parvati says calmly. "But it's not very English."
- - -
Harry walks up the dusty road and marvels at the bright colours, the unfamiliar
sounds, the complex layers of smells, fragrances and odours he can't identify.
The air touches the skin here, and he feels he could grab a handful of it and
hold it in his fist. It would slide softly out of his hand, a silken whisper in
his palm.
Luminously green frogs are giving a croaking concert in the pond behind the
house, but when Harry approaches, the croaking ceases and is replaced by a
thousand little plops as the frogs dive from their lily pads.
He sits down and eats ripe, sweet fruit from a bowl that appears at his feet;
he swims in a warm pool under a waterfall, surrounded by enormous, dusky-pink
flowers. A blue bird with long tail feathers watches him benignly from a rock
nearby. It looks familiar, but he's sure he's never seen a bird like this one
before.
Rested and refreshed he returns to the drab room at St. Mungo's. Parvati is
sitting squarely on her chair with her hands folded in her lap. He sees her
more clearly than before. Gold threads are woven into the red fabric of her
sari, and the skin of her bare midriff is a rich, shimmering brown. It makes
him think of cinnamon, of cardamom, of sweet warmth on his tongue. Her hair
falls in a shiny cascade down her back, and caught in it is a dusky-pink petal.
- - -
Parvati goes to see Harry once a week, and she realises he is looking forward
to her visits as much as she is. But it isn't until her ninth visit to St.
Mungo's, and after his own ninth visit to the Estate, that he asks:
"What is this place?"
And she tells him about the Tea Estate in Assam where she has never been, but
still knows better than any other place because it's hers, it's her creation,
hers and Padma's, and she feels confident enough about her creation to let him
into it.
His eyes don't let go of her even when she stops speaking. He holds her gaze
and a strange little smile is playing around his mouth. When he kisses her at
last, she can still taste exotic fruit on his tongue, saffron and cinnamon and
the smoky bitterness of exquisitely prepared tea.
He smiles into her eyes, and she knows that the therapy isn't only working for
him.
"You were right," he says. "I think you've been right a lot of times before,
and I just haven't noticed it."
She isn't quite sure what he's referring to, but then his hand brushes a
non-existent strand of hair from her face and stays there, barely touching, and
she finds there is no need to know.