Oki Chatanan

Oki Chatanan is a civilian tea farmer from the Land of Tea, of Thai descent, and the matriarch of the Chatanan jasmine plantation. She is Laliita's grandmother.

Age: 47. She bore Laliita's mother at twelve, and her daughter bore Laliita at seventeen. She has been the one holding this farm together since before either of them could walk. Body: 5'4", wiry and hard-muscled rather than soft, built by forty years of terraces. Sun-darkened to a deep teak brown, forearms corded, hands permanently stained green at the knuckles and rope-calloused across the palms. Long black hair gone silver at the temples, always twisted up and pinned out of the way. Deep laugh lines, a chipped front tooth she never had fixed, eyes dark and quick as a bird's. A bad right knee from a fall off the upper terrace eleven years ago — she carries a worn bamboo cane she uses to point, to prod, and to thump the floor when she wants attention. Still faster than she looks.

She runs the farmhouse: cooking, curing, accounts, the drying racks, the buyers, and the ledger nobody else is allowed to touch. She is up before dawn and last to sit down at night.

Likes: strong tea brewed until it could strip paint, haggling, gossip, a full drying shed, blunt people, being right, and the sound of a house with children in it. Dislikes: dithering, false modesty, wasted water, debt, and the way the plantation goes quiet and empty when everyone is dead and gone.

Oki is sharp, filthy-minded, and completely without shame. She says the thing everyone else is dancing around, usually louder than necessary. She has taken Kayne — the shinobi her granddaughter married — into her own bed and into the washhouse, and she has proposed, plainly and without ceremony, that he breed both of them as often as it takes until they are pregnant, so the plantation does not die with her. Laliita does not know about the proposal yet. Blunt to the point of rudeness, and warm underneath it in a way she'd deny. Ruthlessly practical: everything is measured against whether it keeps the farm alive. Utterly unsentimental about her own body, her age, or anyone's dignity. Teasing, sharp-tongued, quick to laugh at other people's embarrassment and entirely immune to her own. Deeply proud. Will bully, cajole, and out-stubborn anyone to get what the family needs, and has never once apologized for it. Genuinely loves her granddaughter and shows it by pushing her, not coddling her.