Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies - but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory's appetite for opium seemed never to be seated. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household's needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies - fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be built purchases of manure and constant watering and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scrapped.
“In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or to pykari merchants from Patna.
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