A Writer's People (10 page)

Our immigrants, few and poor and unprotected, had brought their language, their diet; their many-sided religion, its festivals, its social or caste distinctions; the deities for their household shrines, sometimes proper images, sometimes small smooth coloured pebbles standing (by a further leap of the imagination) for the images; the conches, gongs, and bells associated with worship; other musical instruments; book rests for their bulky holy books; wood printing blocks to stamp designs on cotton; sometimes even everyday objects, brass plates, water jars.

It would have been possible, from the objects the immigrants brought with them, and the religious rites and festivals they carried in their memory—taken together, like a folk memory—it would have been possible for the civilisation to be reconstructed, more than is possible for the Mayan or the Etruscan. So in one way it cannot be said that the immigrants brought little from India: they brought their civilisation. They could not describe it perhaps, except in those details that were available to them—the epics to which they could refer nearly all human behaviour; the complicated rituals and festivals that dramatised the year and kept their calendar separate from the other calendars of the island; and, above all, the deeply held ideas of propriety.

The immigrants lived instinctively; and that undefined instinctive life made it possible for them to travel far from home, in those days without telephone or radio or cinema, with their civilisation more or less complete. It was for that
same reason that the transported civilisation, existing mainly in the mind, was fragile, liable to perish or grow faint after one or two generations. And it was for that reason as well, living with something that didn't need defining, that the immigrants brought with them so few living memories of the overwhelming country they had left behind.

Nothing about the appearance of the land came to me as a child or later. Nothing about the flatness of the plain, the huddle of the villages, the dust thick on the ground or spiralling upwards at a footstep, the long views, nothing even about the famous heat: all of this I had to experience for myself when I went there for the first time in 1962.

I
N 1944
OR 1945
my mother's mother decided to have new mattresses made. We were all living in her house in Port of Spain. This was the last two or three years of our extended-family life. This kind of life was barely possible in a Port of Spain house. It was a concrete house on pillars; the bedrooms were upstairs; the dark space downstairs was a general living and cooking area, and for some also a sleeping area. The discomfort and shame of this arrangement in the town drove everyone to look for his own house; no one looked back; and that was the end of our extended family.

Before that end came my grandmother decided she wanted new mattresses made. She still had (but not for much longer) her half-feudal dependants in the country, and she sent for the mattress-maker among them. He was a thin old man. He came with his tools (tailor's scissors, principally, together with
long dull-pointed metal needles, like knitting needles) and a parcel with a few clothes. A space was made for him downstairs, a little bit away from the usual scrum, where he was to work and feed and sleep until he had done his job. It was the kind of arrangement my grandmother made with some of her dependants when they came to do a particular piece of work; and I imagine (but don't really know) that board and lodge, makeshift and informal as it was, would have counted as part payment.

The mattress-maker seemed quite content. He had come from India, perhaps one of the last recruited as a contract labourer. He was a Hindi-speaker. After all these years in the island he had only a few words of English; and this now kept him insulated from the children downstairs. He worked in silence, in a cloud of fibre dust, with a dedication that I had never seen before, squatting next to a new heap of reddish coconut fibre, loosening it with his fingers, and then stuffing it into the ticking envelope, the left hand pulling at the ticking, the right hand stuffing, until at last the long metal needle was brought into play, pushing through the ticking to get the rough coconut fibre into all the little pockets where it should be, the left hand then patting where the needle had worked.

He worked in his steady, silent way, without apparent fatigue, for as long as the light permitted. That took him up to half-past five. He relaxed then, but was still as self-contained and private as before, exercising his folded-up legs, walking about under the house and at fixed intervals going out to the house yard, lean-limbed but sturdy, never going out to the pavement and the street though, as well drilled in his relaxation
as in his work, talking to no one, answering only when spoken to. When he had eaten what he had been given he had a smoke, squatting on his haunches in his sleeping space, hugging his bony knees, and pulling at his cylindrical clay pipe, which was hot to the touch and at one end wrapped in a strip of cloth.

A
T FIRST
I had taken the mattress-maker for granted. But then, perhaps thinking of my father's mother and her brother Ranjit and remembering how much I had already missed of our past, I developed the wish to know his story. I especially wanted to hear about India. The mattress-maker was not a great talker; and language, or the absence of a common language, also lay between us. At last he understood what I wanted; but, eternally busy with his needle and ticking and coconut fibre, he was not interested. I tried to make my questions as small as possible. I asked what he remembered most about India. He thought about it for some time and said, “There was a railway station.” That was all I could get out of him.

Perhaps if I knew Hindi (I had a big vocabulary but didn't know how to make phrases or sentences) he might have said more; but I don't think so. Just as (to jump ahead, to later experience and judgement) readers of novels forget as they read, so I think the mattress-maker lived and forgot. He didn't have the analytical faculty; life and the world, so to speak, constantly went in one eye and out of the other. And I feel sure
it would have been the same with other old India-born people whom we failed to question about the past. India, the past, with these people, had been wiped out, just as the present, Trinidad, was being wiped out. “There was a railway station.” There wouldn't have been much more to say.

Later, especially after the war, people went to India, and so at last we could get details of our private India. There was more to say about the railway stations: the cries, for instance, of the vendors of
bidis
and pan and cigarettes. But the people who brought back these stories had been made by their birth abroad, their education and travel; they could assess themselves, in a way the mattress-maker wouldn't have understood; and this gave them another way of looking. The mattress-maker's way of looking was lost; I could never understand the India he had come from.

I
WAS IN
I
NDIA
when I was planning this chapter. One day I saw, in the literary pages of an important southern newspaper, a review of an autobiography of a man who in 1898 had gone out as a labourer on a five-year contract to Surinam, the Dutch territory in South America. Surinam was Dutch Guiana; Dutch Guiana was next to British Guiana; and British Guiana was culturally close to us in Trinidad. It was an extraordinary piece of luck, coming upon a book from Surinam by a contemporary of the mattress-maker, and from the same part of our private India! The same landscapes held in remote memory, the same weather, the same calendar, the
same ideas of human possibility, the same languages: a little miracle, if the book was what it said it was, a little bit of the past recovered.

The title of the book was
Jeevan Prakash
, “The Light of Life”: religious and high-flown and not a little vain: from my own point of view, a let-down. The author, Rahman Khan, had been born in 1874 in the United Provinces. He described himself as a Pathan, but that might have been only a matter of remote ancestry. Many of the Pathans of his childhood worked for Hindu merchants. There seems, from his book, to have been a composite Hindu-Muslim culture of the region; this composite culture has now vanished. Rahman, remarkably for a Muslim, knew Hindi very well, and was able to read the
Ramayana
, one of the two epics of India, a sacred text. Later in Surinam, long after his contract labour was over, he was still enough of a Hindi scholar, in his own account, to teach the
Ramayana
to Brahmins and pundits in the benighted Dutch plantations.

He had written his book in Hindi in the early 1940s in Surinam. He thought of himself as an Indian religious scholar, and he believed this gave him a certain standing in the Indian villages of Surinam—
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, / That one small head could carry all he knew
. There would have been some local and family support for his writing; but my feeling (from my knowledge of Trinidad) is that people who reverenced him for his learning and his writing might not have always wanted to read him; for these people reverence would have been enough.

I don't think his book could have had much of a circulation.
It would have had far fewer readers than Walcott's 1949 book of poems. Surinam was a backward colony and its population was small, probably half the population of Trinidad. The Indian population of Surinam would have been only half the general population; and it wasn't a reading population. The book would almost certainly have faded away if it hadn't been rescued many years later by some kind of political-academic interest, concerned here as in other Caribbean colonies with promoting local culture and pride.
The Light of Life
, rescued in this way, had been translated into Dutch. This Dutch text, translated into English by some Surinam-Dutch academics and given the sensational title of
The Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Labourer
, had been published by a small Indian publisher and had made its way to the serious review pages of
The Hindu
newspaper in India. Many accidents had lengthened the life of Rahman's little book.

It is a primitive piece of book-making. It begins with a plea for forgiveness for writing an autobiography: he is only, after all, “an insignificant soul.” There follows, as an introduction to his story, a history of India in fifty-five short paragraphs, each paragraph reading like a school note that Rahman might have taken down from a teacher at his school in India sixty years before or—his memory is prodigious—remembered from a basic history text book of that time: a British text book, it may be, Indian history in these notes being, principally, a list of Muslim emperors, and then a list of British governors. British rule in India is regarded as something settled. Rahman is a complete colonial, loyal always to the ruler.
The Light of Life
ends with a poem in Hindi in praise of the Dutch queen,
Wilhelmina, “Maharani Queen Wilhelmina Sahab Bahadur”; if Rahman had stayed in British India something as loyal to the British sovereign, and as fulsome, might have come from his pen.

The autobiography proper, less than two hundred pages long, comes between the fifty-five paragraphs of the history of India and a polemical fifty-page account of a childish religious dispute with a Brahmin in Surinam. It would seem, from these “fillers,” that Rahman didn't feel his autobiographical material was enough for a book. And, indeed, he doesn't have a great deal to say about India outside school and family. He tells us about his family connections, his family's rich patrons, his schools; and he talks at length and very precisely about his examinations, still important to him after fifty years (this no doubt explains his lasting memory of his history lessons). He has much more to say than my grandmother's mattress-maker, but as a narrator he has something of the mattress-maker's incompleteness. He has no feeling for the physical world about him. It is quite startling to see a photograph of his school in India (provided by the book's editors); nothing in Rahman's words suggests a fine decorated brick building, as this is or was; without the photograph we would have been free to create anything we wanted. He has no sense of the passing of time, or cannot communicate it. Once he allows himself to be recruited by the Surinam agents he is moved from depot to depot; he gives no description of these depots, judging each only according to the quality of the food given out.

But his narrative tools are suited to his vision. His world is full of religious rituals, of vows made and then carried out. He
deals in wonders: men who fight tigers, men who suffer from dreadful maladies and are then cured by wise healers, both the details of the maladies and the extraordinary cures clearly remembered fifty or sixty years later. For one cure a big tortoise had to be brought to Rahman's father's house. It was easy enough for a fisherman to catch a tortoise. But then the tortoise had to be made to urinate; and then the urine had to be collected and mixed with the powder of a baked earthworm. Rahman's father didn't know how to get the tortoise to urinate. But the wise and famous old hakim, who had prescribed the cure, laughed and told Rahman to bring a stove, a pan, and some firewood from his mother. Rahman did as he was told. The firewood was lighted, the pan was put upside down on the stove, and when the pan was sufficiently heated the hakim put the poor tortoise in the pan or on the pan and pressed him down with his shoe. Sure enough, in this story, the tortoise urinated, and the urine was collected in another pan. Rahman was then sent to dig for three earthworms (three: Rahman is as precise as this, fifty or sixty years later). He brings the earthworms to the hakim, who (with a similar precision, and for an unstated reason) bakes only two and a quarter on the pan. From the mixture of the urine and the baked worm three tablets were made, and the patient (an assistant to a rich Hindu landowner) was told to swallow one tablet a day.

He was cured, of course. But it did him no good. Part of the cure was that the patient should abstain from dairy products for six months. This was not easy in India, where milk and milk sweets, curds, and cottage cheese are important parts of the vegetarian diet. The patient somehow abstained. Until one
day, or late one evening, when he was tired and hungry after a day's hard travel on a palanquin (carried by four men), he sent his servant to the bazaar to get something to eat. It was eleven; most of the market stalls were closed. The servant could only find a milk sweet. It cost four annas, something between a penny and twopence. The servant took it back to his famished master. The master was tempted. With the first mouthful of the delicious sweet he remembered what the hakim had said. He should have stopped, but he didn't. He ate to the end and—this is an Indian story—began to prepare for his death.