by Ian Thomson
‘I have successfully contacted the pundit,’ the professor said eventually. ‘He will be joining us presently. Another cup of tea?’
‘No thank you, but the food smells delicious.’ A smell of curry was wafting from the kitchen.
‘It is curried potato.’ Mansingh made a temple of his fingertips. ‘And it is excellent.’ While we waited for Pundit Nathan to arrive, we had a conversation about Jamaican food and the unreliability (as Mansingh saw it) of Jamaican ‘servants’. Until recently, six Jamaican staff had cooked and cleaned for the professor and his wife, but they stole the food (even the grandchildren’s milk) from the fridge, as well as, oddly, the plastic models of the Hindu deities. The professor sacked them and employed servants from Mumbai (Bombay) instead. ‘Indians don’t have this chip that they’re being discriminated against - as Jamaicans do,’ the professor explained.
He went on, unstoppably, to say that the Indian influence on Jamaica’s cuisine was not confined to curried goat. ‘All green vegetables in Jamaica - roti, callaloo (what you are calling spinach) - are Indian. In fact,’ - Mansingh sniffed the evening’s cooking - ‘callaloo really developed wings in the 1980s, when it became a regular breakfast option on Air Jamaica. Neither must we forget rice. There was no rice in Jamaica before the Indians came. Only cassava. Only yams. Rice is now the national dish of Jamaica.’
‘And ganja?’
‘One moment please while I continue with the foodstuffs. Mango, jackfruit, tamarind: all are Indian. And now for ganja. Many Jamaicans have reason to regret its importation, everyone is telling you something different about ganja.’
‘What’s your view?’
‘My view? I am believing that ganja has beneficial effects when taken in moderation.’ Mansingh raised his eyebrows. ‘It has been used in India as a euphoriant and as a medicine for over 5,000 years. In Jamaica it has been used for 150 years (not a long time, but long enough). Ganja can create serenity of a high order, and this the Rasta Man also has learned from the Hindu.’
‘But ganja does not always promote serenity,’ I pointed out, pompously. ‘Ganja can, in unpropitious circumstances, promote paranoia.’
Mansingh, glancing irritably at his watch, said, ‘This also the Rasta Man has learned from the Hindu.’
Pundit Nathan was forty minutes late. It would not do to keep the professor waiting. The Jamaicans’ fabled relaxedness was not at all to Mansingh’s liking. ‘Jamaicans have two speeds,’ he told me gruffly, ‘dead slow and stop.’
Mansingh emptied his tea cup, held it upside down a moment, and gazed at the cricket bat ‘Made in India’ resting on his knees. ‘Cricket is also an Indian invention,’ he was saying, just as Nathan Sharma arrived. The pundit got out of his Mercedes and came over to greet us. He was in his mid-fifties, not very tall, and dressed in white trousers and white shoes. A knife scar ran jagged down one cheek and his hair was sculpted into a high-pomaded, Nat King Cole pompadour. I got up to shake his hand. ‘I’m shockingly late,’ he said.
‘Oh sit down, pundit,’ Professor Mansingh said to him irritably. I sensed India’s complex caste separations at work in the way Mansingh had addressed the latecomer. New World Indians like Pundit Nathan - Jamaican by birth - were no longer, in Mansingh’s view, of Asia. Their temples existed, all right, but their languages and rituals had decayed long ago. Pointedly, Mansingh did not offer Sharma a drink.
Instead he said to him, ‘Mr Thomson here would like to hear you talk.’ Sharma ran a finger down the side of his good cheek, looked at me, smiled warily. ‘What you want to know?’ He had a watchfulness that contrasted with Mansingh’s loquaciousness. The pundit explained that he was a government-registered Hindu priest; his grandfather had been a pundit also. From his grandfather he had learned about Hindu ritual and was taught some Sanskrit.
‘Have you never wanted to live in India?’ I asked him.
The pundit shook his head. ‘India is so different. We Jamaican Indians have moved on - but Indians have not. Indian Indians are very, very poor.’ By leaving India, Sharma had reformed but the old country, it seemed to him, had stayed just as it was. The idea of Jamaica - more precisely, Kingston - excited the pundit more than ancestral India. He explained why: ‘Most of us Jamaican Indians have made money and done well for ourselves. You won’t find us sitting lazy on street corners like the blacks.’ The pundit looked nervously at Professor Mansingh, who was glancing at his wristwatch again.
The pundit, like Mansingh, was careful to make a distinction between himself and Jamaica’s black majority.
‘You can easily distinguish us Indians from the blacks,’ he went on. ‘We have finer features and finer manners than they do. Yes, we’re more ... mannersable.’
Black Jamaicans were characterised by dullness, ‘uncuriousness’ and apathy; they made poor businessmen, and they smoked too much weed. To top it all, they were less ‘progressive’, less ‘ambitious’ and less ‘refined’ than East Indians (as well as presumably Indians). It is well known that Indians living outside India can be rather racist when it comes to other people of ‘colour’, I reminded myself.
At number 114 Hagley Park Road, amid the second-hand Japanesecar dealers, stands Kingston’s Hindu Temple. The temple is a small, hangar-like structure set back from the beep and brake of traffic as it crawls on its way to Tinson Pen domestic airport. A Sunday morning pooja, or Hindu prayer ceremony, was about to begin. The temple was empty except for a Brahmin (high caste) priest in a Nehru-shirt who was sitting cross-legged on the marble floor, lighting incense sticks. Looking up, he seemed surprised to see me.
‘You are coming from - ?’
‘England.’
‘But you don’t look particularly Indian.’
‘I’m not Indian.’
I took off my shoes and, at the priest’s invitation, sat down on the prayer mat in front of him. Ranged on a dais behind him were statuettes of the blue-skinned Krishna and the all-destroying Shiva.
‘England,’ he continued, touching the sandalwood caste-mark on his forehead, ‘and you are in Jamaica?’
‘Yes - I flew in.’
‘Heathrow?’ His eyes, bird-bright behind spectacles, seemed to dance. ‘I have been to Heathrow.’ The Brahmin excused himself a moment later to continue with his pooja directives. I left him in peace, while his voice settled into a drone and he began to sprinkle water round a tiny, sacrificial flame.
At this point Pundit Nathan turned up. ‘You made it!’ he said to me with a smile and, removing his white shoes, sat down on the mat by my side. We watched the Brahmin priest, Dinesh Maraj, continue his recital of prayers to the Hindu divinities. The pundit whispered to me, ‘Mr Maraj is now scooping out ghee to make a flame to represent the human being.’ His cardamom breath was hot on my face. ‘Yunnerstand?’ The roar of an aeroplane coming in to land muted my reply.
The Brahmin, turning his attention to me, now offered a brief history of the British indenture system by way of background information for my book. ‘Your countrymen sent us to Jamaica as paid slaves. We fitted in. We were good agriculturalists. But the blacks were not. They were envious of our cleverness and our financial know-how. They could not build houses for themselves and they could not recite lofty spiritual poetry. And’ - his brown eyes were steady on me - ‘after all these years the blacks still squat on Crown land.’
Incense fumes - a sweet suffocating presence - wafted through the temple as six or seven worshippers, barefoot, arrived to take part in the morning’s invocations and debate. ‘One thing that we’d like you to know, Mr Thomson,’ the Brahmin went on, ‘is that we Indians are a very thrifty people - we save up our moneys. At the same time we generously gave the blacks roti to eat, did we not?’ (‘Roti’ was used here in the colloquial Indian sense, I imagined, of ‘dinner’, not just bread.)
The priest, speaking now to Nathan Sharma, said: ‘Play something for us, pundit. You have done many great deeds in uplifting Hinduism for this island. Play us something for pooja.’ The pundit, nodd
ing gratefully, unpacked the portable harmonium he had brought with him. Soon his fingers were dancing over the keyboard, the harmonium moaning, as he played a devotional hymn, or bhajan, to Ganesh the elephant god. But the Brahmin brusquely interrupted him. ‘I’m sorry - could somebody please plug in the fan to ease the heat?’ A woman in a green sari went over to the free-standing fan, and switched it on. The pundit, visibly miffed, continued his oration to Ganesh.
A boy banged a gong, the signal for the green-dressed woman to bring out trays of saffron-coloured sweetmeats stowed in a cupboard. She began to serve these to the worshippers on paper plates. She did not wait for the men to eat first (that was a thing of the Asian past), but washed the food down with a Jamaican version of faluda milkshake made of Carnation milk mixed with apple juice. Outside on Hagley Park Road, meanwhile, the traffic roared, and the heated air grew hotter, as I took myself back uptown to PJ’s.
Portland parish, a muggy day in 2007. A spillage of shacks and hutments, with little fenced-off gardens, sheltered the East Indians who had lived in Tom’s Hope village since the nineteenth century. Banana trees, planted three-deep, bordered the village paths. The steamy heat released yeasty vapours: I was in the lush Rio Grande Valley and the morning sun had come up, spreading a lemon glow over the semi-jungle. A far-off concussion of hammers indicated that tinkering was a trade still practised here. Small as it was, Tom’s Hope was celebrated locally for its organic farm, Tamarind Hill, run by Vincent Slimfort and his wife Joanna.
Vincent Slimfort was approaching sixty but he had jet-black hair and plenty of it, with a dark handsome face-a face that was alive. Born in Tom’s Hope in 1943 under his Indian name of Sital-Singh, Vincent had grown up in conditions of near poverty. Child marriage was a commonplace misery for East Indian Jamaicans at the time; it was a world Slimfort knew only too well. His mother, a Hindu, had been married at the age of twelve to Vincent’s future father, a Sikh, then a mere thirteen. As a result Vincent took a very dim view of matters such as child brides, the dowry system, caste, and the abolition of inequalities from which all Jamaican women (not just East Indian women) suffered and continue to suffer.
Above all, Slimfort despaired of the routine degradation of teenage girls in rural Jamaica. ‘Sex is the most powerful currency here,’ he said to me. ‘Older men offer girls food, then go into their houses in return for sex. The girls have a lot of children when they’re young - it’s not good.’
Slimfort’s wife Joanna said, with a concerned expression, ‘It’s the only way these girls have of showing the world - showing themselves - that they’re worth something, that they can do something.’ The more children a girl can bring into the world, the more potent the man feels. For, just as the girl is only considered ‘really’ a woman after she has borne a child, so the proof of the man’s virility is in making her pregnant. An egregious example of this priapism is Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett, formerly the bassist with Bob Marley and the Wailers, who claims to have fathered fifty-two children. (In 2006 Barrett was expunged from the official Marley website after claiming in court that he was owed £60 million in unpaid royalties.) In Kingston I had heard rumours that some Chinese and Lebanese store owners gave girls free food and household items in exchange for sex. Some residents were very upset at the practice, but most others said that it had been happening like that for centuries. Preying on the bodies of girls had indeed been a characteristic of Jamaican slavery. Planters (in the words of one contemporary) preferred ‘goatish embraces’ with their young slaves to the ‘pure and lawful bliss’ of married love. Thus a train of ‘adulterated beings’ - mixed-race Jamaicans - was brought into the world.
‘It’s a really terrible problem,’ Vincent Slimfort continued, ‘and it’s prevalent right across Jamaica.’ Abuse of girls, made worse by its private nature, remains a shameful and buried phenomenon in Jamaica. The collusive silence round the issue protects the abuser and allows the practice to continue. Seeking help from the police is often seen as an act of betrayal; Jamaican girls are expected to bear their abuse. ‘It’s how people do things round there,’ said Joanna. And though it does not necessarily imply abuse, she added, eight out of ten Jamaican children are born out of wedlock.
Slimfort’s grandparents had come to Jamaica in 1913 during the last years of the British labour scheme. At the recruiting depot in Calcutta they had been full of dreams of the easy wealth to be made in Jamaica. On arrival, however, they were forced into a rural hard slog that came close to a definition of slavery: nine hours a day, six days a week, weeding and cutting in the sugar fields.
Religion offered at least some comfort. The Shiite Muslim minority in Tom’s Hope celebrated a dead yard observance called Hosay (or Hussay). For nine days the mortuary rituals went on; Hosay provided an opportunity for an intermingling of faiths and skin colours and cultures, as black Jamaican onlookers were invited to join in with the dancing and drinking. Slimfort is quite moved when he thinks about Hosay today. ‘Where else in Jamaica could you find such tolerance, the old-timers getting up to entertain the young, the Hindus helping the Muslims, and the black Jamaicans united with them?’ Sadly Hosay has all but vanished from the island.
Slimfort’s life-story offered a curious assortment of social self-improvement, ambition and immense love. As soon as they could afford it, Slimfort’s parents had gone to London. Their aim was to make enough money there to pay for their son’s education at a good London school. They were able to put a deposit on a house in Willesden, north-west London, and two years later, in 1955, young Vincent was summoned to join them. He had scarcely berthed at Liverpool when his father died. He was fifty-seven. ‘Every life,’ Slimfort stated axiomatically, ‘is marked by tragedy.’ His mother, alone in the Willesden semi-detached house, was more than ever determined to do right by her son: social self-improvement was her ambition. At Ebury Technical School in Victoria, then at Westminster Grammar, Vincent excelled in maths.
Bullying and racist slights were frequent, but Slimfort gave as good as he got. ‘Don’t forget - I was physically fit from my childhood in Tom’s Hope, swinging from the banana trees.’ (That, of course, was what his tormentors said of West Indians: they were ‘monkeys’ up the trees.) Laughter, said Slimfort, kept him sane in those far away, trying times in 1950s London; that, and study. Hoping to develop a ‘top-carat’ public school accent, he attended night classes and learned all there was to learn about dukes and lords and princes. He changed his name from Sital-Singh to Slimfort and considered himself a genuine colonial, striving towards metropolitan ‘sophistication’ and a certain image of England.
Vincent could not suppress a smile at the memory. ‘I had this ... avid yearning for knowledge.’ Kilburn Library was ‘ransacked’ by him. Etiquette books. Social case histories. ‘All kinds of stuff.’ His East Indian background, he explained, encouraged a desire for social betterment. ‘I was planning to be a very intellectual and progressive person. I didn’t allow myself to take even one day off studies.’ He taught himself Latin and he lifted weights like a man who will never be strong enough - body-building night and day. After school he got a job as a laboratory technician in the Cancer Centre at Hammersmith Hospital, mixing doses of radioactive Strontium 90 for £16 a week.
Coming from a British dependency, Vincent had always been fascinated by the British armed forces. In 1961 he began a three-year course in guided Bloodhound missiles at RAF Weston-super-Mare. The Cold War was on. The clock was running down fast on British rule in Jamaica and Slimfort believed he was guarding British shores against Soviet attack. (‘The Russians are Coming’, Val Bennett’s rocksteady interpretation of ‘Take Five’, is a classic of Jamaican Cold War phobia from the 1960s.) In Slimfort’s mind, Britain’s technological pre-eminence coincided with her greatness as a nation, and in 1964 he enrolled at an Officers’ Training College in Bedfordshire, where he arrived equipped with his primers on English etiquette. Not surprisingly he was viewed with suspicion by the other West Indian trainees.
‘They thought I was a swot,’ Slimfort recalled. ‘Yes, a swot. But the Jamaicans, they didn’t have too much brain. Always bragging they were, always womanising.’ Slimfort was seen by his compatriots as an ‘honorary white’; each night they threw firecrackers under his bed. Having discharged himself from the army, Slimfort got a job for Burroughs in data processing in London. He installed the Police National Computer Unit and, more prosaically, he computerised the Spiller’s dog-food factory in Catford. His secret ambition, though, was to retire to the West Indies in comfort.
In 1983 he opened a hotel in the British Leeward Island of Nevis, and invested in properties there. After eight years on Nevis he met his future wife Joanna Bulova, who was there on holiday. Born in England of Austrian refugee parents, she was a scion of the Bulova jewellery firm. For her, England was the West End of London, a world far removed from East Indian Jamaica. She and Slimfort could not be more different: he, a talkative, twinkling man; she, poised and reserved, with just the wraith of a smile.
Slimfort took Joanna back to Jamaica where in 1990 they got married. Born at the war’s end in a ‘bamboo hut’ in Portland parish, he had come home as a man ‘re-made’ in England. A very West Indian story, this, in its racial and social admixture, and its collision and cohering of roots and cultures. I wondered, did Slimfort think of himself as Asian Jamaican? Indian or British? ‘None of those,’ he said. He saw himself as beyond and above them, a new kind of fusion. Imperial Britain had given Slimfort an education in Shakespeare and Tennyson, Clive of India, Kennedy’s Latin Primer and the Anglican Lord’s Prayer, and he was grateful for it. Yet he said he was less beholden these days to the idea of England. The British monarchy only served to maintain the delusion about Britain’s great place in the world. ‘It’s a bit of a con, really,’ said Slimfort, with rapidly blinking brown eyes. ‘But I bear no grudge. I’m the man who would be English.’