Rambishoon's Life as a Girmitiya on De Willem Plantation in the Late 19th Century

According to the Guyana Times, Rambishoon experienced life as a Girmitiya on the De Willem sugar plantation during the closing years of the 19th century. His experience was influenced by the planters' strategy to remain viable in a market downturn caused by competition from beet sugar. As plantations consolidated and modernized equipment to reduce production costs, the demand for sugarcane increased, making Rambishoon's daily tasks more demanding for the same one-shilling wage.

Rambishoon married Sanichari in late 1894 after he had re-indentured, and their life became more stable as they shared their own logie room. He considered Banka, Sanichari's two-year-old son whose father, Budhu, died within a year of his birth, as the child he had left behind in Ishmailpur. During the day, Banka was cared for at the estate creche alongside other children while parents worked in the fields; in the evenings, Rambishoon would spend time playing with him while Sanichari prepared dinner. Occasionally, Rambishoon's mother-in-law, Rookoo, whose husband Kaliyan died in 1885 and who later remarried Bishun, would visit with her five-year-old son, Bissoon. The housing arrangements meant that very few women in the logies remained single.

Rambishoon was not surprised by Sanichari's fluent command of the polyglot "Bhojpuri," which had become the common language in the logies since her arrival at age three. Rambishoon himself spoke Magadhi, which shared similarities with other Hindi dialects spoken by most immigrants, but Rookhoo's Bagdhi variation of Bengali differed from that of the Girmitiyas who arrived from the south via Madras. Rookhoo's father, Doerga, spoke Bengali and married her to a Baghdi boy, Kaliyan; they spoke Bengali in their logie with Sanichari. Kaliyan passed away a few years prior at age twenty-eight, a victim of the endemic plantation "intermittent fever," which is malaria. Doerga and Kaliyan were proud of being Tentulia Bagdis, descendants of foot soldiers named after Durga/Kali, who is widely worshipped in Bengal and upholds a fierce marital tradition.

Rambishoon found Rookhoo's lullaby to her grandson, "Khoka Ghumalo," to be moving, and Sanichari passed this down to Rambishoon's grandfather, Ramlagan. Rookhoo explained that this lullaby was iconic for the Bagdhi people and lamented the raids by the 18th-century Bargi (Maratha cavalry) that destroyed the villages they were meant to protect. The lyrics read, "Khoka ghumalo, para juralo, Borgi elo deshe/Bulbulite dhan kheyeche, khajna debo kishe?" which translates to, "The baby sleeps, the neighbourhood is quiet, the Maratha raiders have entered our lands/the nightingales have eaten the grain, how will we pay our taxes to the landlord?" This sentiment strongly resonated with Rambishoon, whose Kurmi background also emphasized marital heritage, but more recently, it reflected his feelings against the British conquerors. Rambishoon could also relate to the destructive taxes imposed by the conquerors that had depleted Kurmi landholdings in his native Gaya.

Prior to Doerga's passing, conversations between him and Sanichari often focused on the lives they had left in their homeland, as both arrived in Demerara as young men—Doerga at twenty-five and Rambishoon at nineteen. Doerga missed the increased public worship of the goddess after whom he was named and the sense of community the festival inspired. For Rambishoon, this related to Chaath Puja, where agrarian castes like the Kurmis would prepare and carry offerings of produce to the waterway to the sun. Although there are two Chaath Pujas annually, the main and largest Chhath festival occurs in autumn during the Kartik month, which in 1888 was celebrated nine days before the Allanshaw arrived in Guyana on November 18. The year before, Rambishoon had carried a large basket (dowra) filled with their produce on his head while accompanying his then-pregnant wife.

Sanichari did not connect with these stories as much, as she was more focused on the freedom to wear newer women's styles that she knew in Demerara. In the afternoons and on Sundays, she would join the women's circle in front of their logie, using sewing needles to stitch Jhoolas (blouses) that covered from below the knee to the ankle, which were worn with heavily pleated Ghangris or skirts. Sanichari modified her Johhlas, which were intended to be loose, to resemble the tighter blouses (Cholis) and shorter Ghangris that imitated the white women she observed in the Overseer quarters.