by Shani Mootoo
She would study, too. She was refining her goal of becoming a literary critic, and was currently enjoying the notion of becoming a Naipaul scholar. She would embark on a study of early East Indian communal life in Trinidad, in the countryside, in the town and in the city, and she would theorize on the gulf between the cacao Indian and the sugar Indian. It would be one small step toward understanding Naipaul’s work and Naipaul himself.
What she couldn’t know was that the Prakash household was unravelling.
III Chayu
24 Weeks
Your Journey, Part Three
FROM SAN FERNANDO, THE JOURNEY DUE EAST BY CAR TO RIO CLARO begins at the San Fernando Roundabout. Within seconds you’re in Cocoyea Village. The road is high, and on either side the land slopes into deep valleys of gently billowing sugar cane. The air becomes increasingly thick and sweet at the back of your throat, announcing your proximity to the sugar-cane factory at Sainte Madeleine. The descendants of the Indians who worked these fields carry with them the stigma of impossibly hard manual work, for little pay, done under blazing sun amidst the threat of snakes and scorpions. You pass them, one of them immediately, a man, risking life and grey limbs by walking on the edge of the shoulderless, two-lane road he must share with vehicles — from bicyclists to buffalo-led water carts. The man you have just passed is serious, appears to be humourless; sweat trickles down the side of his face. He is gaunt, and you attribute all of this to the common idea that the Indian leads a harsh life mired in notions of the irrevocability of one’s fated lot in life.
Continue to travel due east, on an instant incline that undulates toward and well past your destination, riding high above sea level, and if you haven’t become nauseous from the winding roads and near misses of cars flying around blind bend after blind bend, heading straight for your vehicle — or so it seems — you will be wide awake, fearfully watchful, expecting that if only you can spot the moment of impending impact your seeing it might aid in stopping it or allow you, at the very least, the opportunity to witness exactly how you were killed.
You pass wooden houses on either side of the road. They perch on stilts that reach far down the slopes, while a plank or two of wood connects the front of the house directly to the roadway. From the houses’ eaves hang lush baskets of ornamental ferns. Some less precariously situated houses have banister staircases from the house down to the yard, and then from the yard back up to the road. These staircases are lined with red milk and paint tins containing anthuriums, ferns, philodendrons, and other plants that are lush and bursting with caring. Curtains billow in open windows and rocking chairs trembling in the wind on the modest verandas look as if they have only just been abandoned in favour of some quotidian chore.
You pass little hubs of activity — cars pulled up in the paved driveway of a small grocery store attached to a bar, a roti shop, and opposite, a tire repair shop and air-conditioned hair salon advertising that it rents and sells videos of the latest Indian movies. The traffic has eased, but the pace continues easily, if only to keep up now with the quiet and calm of the land so far from the big town, lifestyles away to the west.
Then, quite suddenly, you’re in the centre of the island, high above sea level, in the low mountains of the Central Range. Citrus, banana, peewah grown in small plots are now offered for sale roadside, but to stop on such narrow roads and make a purchase is to endanger yourself, the seller, the cars behind and ahead. Still, the stalls dot the road here and there, and in between, tied to lamp posts and water-stands, are wreaths and Christian crosses made of palm fronds, spent flowers tucked into them, topped with handwritten signs that say “R.I.P.”
A little farther on, brilliant flame-coloured pods begin to dot the forests, and in time, fields of cacao planted in neat straight rows begin at the road’s edge and stretch deep into the forest. The road meanders now with the most dangerous U-turns.
An hour has passed since leaving San Fernando, and finally you arrive in the village of Rio Claro. The last three miles of road into Rio Claro boast no less than thirteen well-patronized rum shops, a Catholic Church, a Pentecostal Church, the Open Bible Church, and a mosque. Hindu temples and shrines are not visible, but Hindu homes stand out with their collections of jhandi flags filling one corner prominently. The edges of the red, saffron, and white cotton triangular pennants are frayed from billowing brightly in the breezes from the Atlantic Ocean on the eastern shore of the island, another forty-five minutes or so around the bend from here.
Just off the main road, still going east, you turn left at the first main road, and ask anyone — and they will jab their forefinger decidedly in the direction of Chayu.
The Prakashs
ENOUGH WAS FINALLY ENOUGH WHEN RAM AND NAYAN HAD STOPPED speaking with each other. Minty found unusual courage to speak her mind to Ram about his lack of respect for his son and his son’s wife. Her stand produced no change in Ram’s attitude toward his son and daughter-in-law but resulted, rather, in hours of silence smouldering between her and him. And Nayan couldn’t make mention of his father to his mother without frothing curse words she didn’t know he knew. She demanded in vain that Nayan have respect, if only when talking to her. She lost weight and slept little. Nayan, meanwhile, did not even come to eat supper, his mother’s cooking, anymore. Morning and night there was the scent of beer on his body.
Minty knew it would be better for Nayan and Anick to be living on their own. They could move to Chayu. It was a little over an hour away, although admittedly deep in the central forest. Currently, there was a caretaker living there with his family, but he could easily be removed if Nayan and Anick wanted to go there. Minty ached to suggest it, if only because she remembered what it had been like when she had married Ram and lived with his parents in Chayu. How she had loved his parents, and they her. She had come from a devout Hindu family with Trinidad origins in the canefields, and who later owned a dry goods and hardware store on the north coast of Trinidad. The Prakashs were Hindu, too, but they were more relaxed about it, and unlike her parents, they knew more about the whole of Trinidad, not just the place in which they lived. They took part in the lives of the workers on their estate, and in the life of the village, and had opinions about politics on the island. They knew of the French origins of Chayu and even spoke the patois of the area.
Ram had been an interesting young man, unlike the Indians she knew who were more insular, but his parents spoiled him, gave him anything and everything he wanted, and he seemed to dislike this about them. He was at odds with them, if only because he needed to find his own way in the world. There were quarrels between him and his father, and Minty had thought then that things could not be worse between a parent and a child. Ram’s father had bought the land in Luminada, in San Fernando, as a gift. She and Ram had a house built and they moved out of Rio Claro. In San Fernando, Ram became a born-again Hindu, and Minty found herself trapped in the role of a Hindu wife that she thought she had fled in marrying into a cacao family. Nayan came late in their lives, and Ram changed yet again with Nayan’s birth. The autocrat she had run from by leaving her own family behind bloomed before her, right there, in her very own house in Luminada.
And now, how much worse were things between parents and child? She could not have imagined such bitterness or the kinds of words spoken between her husband and her son. The time had come for Nayan to leave their house and to find his own way, too. But, as his mother, and under the current unpleasant circumstances, she dared not suggest this without it seeming as if she didn’t want him and his wife living with her and Ram. And Ram would have thought her mad, had she made such a suggestion. Thoughts of what her life might have been like had she married a professional man, or even a simpler man, a school principal perhaps, someone from her own background in the north, ran through her head frequently. That was where they stayed, too — in her head.
Meanwhile, communication between Nayan and Anick had been reduced to hissing, and Ram and Anick made sure not to be in the same room togethe
r. At meal times, all four scattered, eating separately. Nayan slept in the guest room while Anick, in her bed alone, cried a great deal.
Finally, Anick gave Nayan an ultimatum: either they begin to look for a house of their own or she would return to France. But Nayan was not ready to leave his parents’ home. He feared that if he did, he would not be able to keep as strong a hold on Anick. He suggested alternative strategies for dealing with all that was going on in his parents’ house — for instance, that Anick should go do something constructive with herself: join a fitness centre, or take a cooking class, or take up sewing, maybe start a fashion business with Shanti.
Minty tried to console Anick in broken English, which she thought might be better understood by her daughter-in-law, a French word remembered here and there from high school days tossed in. Her sense of self-preservation stopped her from trying to build any sort of bridge between her husband and daughter-in-law.
It was in the midst of all of this that Ram suffered a heart attack. It did not debilitate him, but after he recovered it was unanimously agreed that Nayan and his wife should move to Rio Claro, to Chayu, thirty miles away as the crow flies, an hour-plus by car.
The decision had the effect of washing a slight calm over Anick and Nayan, and even brought between them some tenderness. Anick could finally imagine an end to her claustrophobia. She would soon live in the very landscape Nayan had wooed her with. Furthermore, she welcomed the idea of living in a house that had French origins. The caretaker and his family would be removed. Anick was promised that they would be offered a decent place not lacking in basic amenities. She would restore Chayu — not to the way the Prakashs had kept it, but to its origins. There, not only out from under the thumb of Nayan’s father but away from all the wanting and missing that had distracted Anick and caused rifts between her and her husband, she and Nayan would create a life for themselves, begin a family, get involved in the betterment of the community of Rio Claro. And she could make a home with some of herself in it, perhaps, and invite friends there. Not just for dinner or for Sunday lunch — which was most likely, given that Rio Claro was on no one’s regular route, and several hours out of the way — but for overnight weekend stays. She would be able to resume her connection with Viveka Krishnu, perhaps invite her to visit. For her friends, there could be walks in the forest, tours that included watching pods being collected and transported out of the forest on baskets that hung on either side of the donkeys, viewings of the fermenting process, of the drying sheds and the roasters. Perhaps she could invite artists to come out and paint the cacao when it was in pod — the scarlet and the cadmium yellow pods, pendulous amidst forest greens and burnt umbers. Perhaps there was a chance for her, after all.
Anick still felt that old loss whenever Nayan touched her body and she his. But it was tolerable. It was only now, after all the time she’d been on the island, that she felt any closeness to him. How he had finally brightened, and how much!
The change in Nayan, on the verge of becoming the man of his own house, came about almost instantly. As soon as the caretaker and his wife had been given notice and plans were underway for the move, Nayan began coming home early, his drinking lessened, and he was respectful to his father and to Anick, too. At last he could see his dream materializing of an estate that produced fine premium cacao. His father wouldn’t be coming to the estate too often now except as his visitor, so he would be able to uproot the old plants — even as few as a row at a time — and replace them. He would one day export high-quality beans and chocolates, and import luxury items to the island. This he would have to do without Anick’s knowledge, but it could be done, as she would have no dealings in the business side of things. And he would be the head of a family that was solid, unthreatened, and entirely his. It could all happen out of Chayu, in Rio Claro. He would become a big man in the village and eventually help turn it from a village into a town, and one day into a small city. Sooner than that, however, there would be a Rio Claro chocolate line, called “Chayu,” and that line would be available for purchase in specialty stores internationally.
Everything would, after all, turn out just fine.
Anick
THE ROMANCE OF LIVING DEEP IN THE CENTRAL HILLS WITH TROPICAL forest all around, in an original French plantation house, initially caused Anick to tingle with a feverish excitement and even the condition in which she found the house, one of almost total disrepair, did nothing to quell this enthusiasm.
The house was off the main Naparima-Mayaro Road. One had to negotiate roads that were not wide enough for two cars to pass each other. They were pocked with holes, some large enough to cut the already meagre width by half. It amazed Anick to know that there was in Trinidad an unfathomable asphalt lake with pitch enough to pave a good portion of all the roads of the world, yet most roads in Trinidad were deplorable. Hours after the long drive to Rio Claro and then the bumpy one into Chayu, her bones felt jarred and trembling, and her stomach continued to churn. But the sight of the once-great house, soon to be her and Nayan’s home, set upon a mound of lawn with the dark forest behind and the brilliant deep-green cacao fields running down into little valleys at the sides, made her want to weep with a childlike joy. It didn’t matter that even from the road, before one began the rough drive up an uneven gravel pathway, one could see that the house had not been cared for recently. Only a metre here and a metre there of the cast-iron cresting on the ridge of the roof remained intact, and the cast-iron and timber finials were either bent or the tips broken off. The dormer windows had lost their louvres, leaving the interior open to the elements, and the once elaborate timber fretwork that had decorated the eaves, gables, and the wraparound gallery wall was reduced to a chip here and a chip there. Most of the paint on the wood structure had been shaved right off by rain, or flaked up by the sun’s heat, leaving barely a trace of its former turquoise.
Chayu had been a working estate house from the days of its French origins, its attic a drying platform for the cacao beans. The attic was still being used today for that purpose, and the sweet, earthy odour of beans infected the air inside the entire house.
Inside, the house was spacious but plain. The kitchen and eating area were large enough to accommodate the feeding of workers. In the kitchen was a window with an awning and a deep sill into which was set a single enamel sink. There were shelves, but no pantry or cupboards. The floor, covered in a chipped, once lemon-coloured linoleum, sagged and rose and sagged again.
The old bathroom and the toilet from the earliest days of the estate were outdoors, some paces from the house, but a bathroom had since been added inside by Nayan’s grandparents. It was unused, though, as the plumbing had rusted out and never been repaired. The bathroom’s wall tiles were broken, and black mold sprouted on the sloped floor of the long-unused bathing square.
Anick hired an architect, who put together a team that included an historian and restoration contractors, and together they came up with a plan to restore Chayu to its colonial origins while modernizing it for daily residential living. Such a project cost Nayan about as much as having an entirely new house built in the city, and Ram and Minty were appalled. They could not understand why the old house could not have been simply made functional, the amenities brought up to date slowly, and blamed the fancy wife for making her husband, their son, spend his father’s money so frivolously.
The renovation took almost three months to complete, with the work stopped intermittently by inclement weather, by material shortages, by the seizure and contestation of imported materials at customs, and by sick or slack workers. During this time, Anick and Nayan lived in a rented house in Chaguanas, a bustling town in the centre of the island, about a forty-minute drive from Rio Claro. Anick paid for English-language lessons from a neighbour, a young woman who had finished Advanced Level examinations in French and was awaiting results. The young woman was studious, religious, and serious. She did not find Anick’s accent amusing, and had little patience with literal translations from Fr
ench into English. Anick was inspired, and somewhat shamed, into improving her English at a rate that won her quiet respect from Nayan.
It was a ten-minute drive, twenty in rush hour, from their temporary house to the chocolate-making factory. Nayan’s days were spent at the factory doing the work his father had done when he’d been in better health. Late afternoons, Nayan raced from there to Rio Claro, trying to arrive before dark. Once there, he haggled with the various contractors, who seemed to find daily that they had under-priced materials and miscalculated to such an extent that they simply could not carry on the work without an advance or assurances that he would meet the regrettable increase in their quoted price. At home, Nayan was exhausted and quiet much of the time.
Anick had wanted to be involved in overseeing every nail that was hammered, every new set of louvres or fretwork crafted and installed. She had gone to Chayu with Nayan a few times, but her presence disrupted the workers. With more English words in her head and on the tip of her tongue, she was inclined to ask questions incessantly, give opinions, make comments, all in an accent, however much slighter now, that took contractors and workers valuable time to decipher and raised Nayan’s ire. He started going to Rio Claro on his own, the excuse being that he was leaving to go there from some other work-related location that made it inconvenient for him to come all the way back to Chaguanas to fetch her. In response, Anick asked for a driver to take her there in the daytime when Nayan was unable to be present. The idea appalled him. If she went to Chayu without him, she would be walking among construction workers who had no loyalty to him. She would be tying up a driver that the company would likely need. She would be in the way of the architects and the contractors. She would make him feel small, as if his wife were in control, and among men like these, this would not be understood. He took her, instead, on weekends when there were no workers around except for a watchman. He took note of her suggestions, likes and dislikes, and on his week-day visits he passed on the ones he felt had merit.