Literary Occasions (12 page)

And there I discovered that to my grandfather this village—the pond, the big trees he would have remembered, the brick dwellings with their enclosed courtyards (unlike the adobe and
thatch of Trinidad Indian villages), the fields in the flat land, the immense sky, the white shrines—this village was the real place. Trinidad was the interlude, the illusion.

My grandfather had done well in Trinidad. He had bought much land—I continue to discover “pieces” he had bought; he had bought properties in Port of Spain; he had established a very large family and in our community he had a name. But he was willing, while he was still an active man, to turn his back on this and return home, to the real place. He hadn’t gone alone—a family secret suddenly revealed: he had taken another woman with him. But my grandfather hadn’t seen his village again; he had died on the train from Calcutta. The woman with him had made her way to the village (no doubt reciting the address I had heard my mother recite). And there for all these years, in the house of my grandfather’s brother, she had stayed.

She was very old when I saw her. Her skin had cracked; her eyes had filmed over; she moved about the courtyard on her haunches. She still had a few words of English. She had photographs of our family—things of Trinidad—to show; there remained to her the curious vanity that she knew us all very well.

She had had a great adventure. But her India had remained intact; her idea of the world had remained whole; no other idea of reality had broken through. It was different for thousands of others. In July and August 1932, during my father’s first spell on the
Trinidad Guardian
(and around the time I was born), one of the big running stories in the paper was the repatriation of Indian immigrants on the S.S.
Ganges.

Indian immigrants, at the end of their contract, were entitled to a small grant of land or to a free trip back to India with their families. The promise hadn’t always been kept. Many Indians, after they had served out their indenture, had found themselves destitute and homeless. Such people, even within my memory, slept at night in the Port of Spain squares. Then in 1931 the
Ganges
had come, and taken away more than a thousand. Only
“paupers” were taken free; everyone else had to pay a small fare. The news, in 1932, that the
Ganges
was going to come again created frenzy in those who had been left behind the previous year. They saw this second coming of the
Ganges
as their last chance to go home, to be released from Trinidad. Many more wanted to go than could be taken on. A thousand left; a quarter were officially “paupers.” Seven weeks later the
Ganges
reached Calcutta. And there, to the terror of the passengers, the
Ganges
was stormed by hundreds of derelicts, previously repatriated, who wanted now to be taken back to the other place. India for these people had been a dream of home, a dream of continuity after the illusion of Trinidad. All the India they had found was the area around the Calcutta docks.

Our own past was, like our idea of India, a dream. Of my mother’s father, so important to our family, I grew up knowing very little. Of my father’s family and my father’s childhood I knew almost nothing. My father’s father had died when my father was a baby. My father knew only his mother’s stories of this man: a miserly and cruel man who counted every biscuit in the tin, made her walk five miles in the hot sun to save a penny fare, and, days before my father was born, drove her out of the house. My father never forgave his father. He forgave him only in a story he wrote, one of his stories of Indian village life, in which his mother’s humiliation is made good by the ritual celebration of the birth of her son.

Another incident I knew about—and my father told this as a joke—was that at one time he had almost gone back to India on an immigrant ship. The family had been “passed” for repatriation; they had gone to the immigration depot on Nelson Island. There my father had panicked, had decided that he didn’t want to go back to India. He hid in one of the latrines overhanging the sea, and he stayed there until his mother changed her mind about the trip back to India.

This was what my father passed on to me about his family and his childhood. The events were as dateless as the home
events of my own confused childhood. His early life seemed an extension back in time of my own; and I did not think to ask until much later for a more connected narrative. When I was at Oxford I pressed him in letters to write an autobiography. This was to encourage him as a writer, to point him to material he had never used. But some deep hurt or shame, something still raw and unresolved in his experience, kept my father from attempting any autobiographical writing. He wrote about other members of his family. He never wrote about himself.

It wasn’t until 1972, when I was forty, and nearly twenty years after my father’s death, that I got a connected idea of his ancestry and early life.

I was in Trinidad. In a Port of Spain shop one day the Indian boy who sold me a paper said he was related to me. I was interested, and asked him how—the succeeding generations, spreading through our small community, had added so many relations to those I had known. He said, quickly and precisely, that he was the grandson of my father’s sister. The old lady was dying, he said. I should try to see her soon. I went the next morning.

Thirty years before, her house in the open country near Chaguanas had been one of the fairytale places my father had taken me to: the thatched hut with its swept yard, its mango tree, its hibiscus hedge, and with fields at the back. My father had written a story about her. But it was a long time before I understood that the story had been about her; that the story—again, a story of ritual and reconciliation—was about her unhappy first marriage; and that her life in that fairytale hut with her second husband, a man of a low, cultivator caste, was wretched.

That was now far in the past. Even the kind of countryside I associated with her had vanished, been built over. She was dying in a daughter’s house on the traffic-choked Eastern Main Road that led out of Port of Spain, in a cool, airy room made neat both for her death and for visitors. She was attended by children and grandchildren, people of varying levels of education and skill; some had been to Canada. Here, as everywhere
else in Trinidad, there had been movement: my father’s sister, at the end of her life, could see success.

She was very small, and had always been very thin. Uncovered by blanket or sheet, in a long blue nightdress and a new, white, too-big cardigan, she lay very light, like an object carefully placed, on her spring mattress, over which the sheet had been pulled smooth and tight.

The cardigan, in the tropical morning, was odd. It was like a baby’s garment, put on for her by someone else; like a tribute to her death, like the extravagant gift of a devoted daughter; and also like the old lady’s last attempt at a joke. Like my father, whom she resembled, she had always been a humorist in a gathering (the gloom, the irritation, came immediately afterwards); and this death chamber was full of chatter and easy movement. There was even a camera; and she posed, willingly. One man, breezing in, sat down so hard on the bed that the old lady bumped up; and it seemed to be one of her jokes.

But her talk to me was serious. It was of caste and blood. When I was a child we hadn’t been able to talk. I could follow Hindi but couldn’t speak it. She couldn’t speak a word of English, though nearly everyone around her was bilingual. She had since picked up a little English; and her death-bed talk, of caste and blood, was in this broken language. The language still strained her, but what she was saying was like her bequest to me. I had known her poor, living with a man of a cultivator caste. She wanted me to know now, before the knowledge vanished with her, what she—and my father—had come from. She wanted me to know that the blood was good.

She didn’t talk of her second husband. She talked of the first. He had treated her badly, but what was important about him now was that he was a Punjabi brahmin, a “scholar,” she said, a man who could read and write Urdu and Persian. When she spoke of her father, she didn’t remember the miserliness and cruelty which my father remembered. She wanted me to know that her father lived in a “galvanize” house—a galvanized-iron
roof being a sign of wealth, unlike thatch, which was what had sheltered her for most of her life.

Her father was a pundit, she said. And he was fussy; he didn’t like having too much to do with the low. And here—since her face was too old to be moulded into any expression save one of great weariness—the old lady used her shrivelled little hand to make a gentle gesture of disdain. The disdain was for the low among Hindus. My father’s sister had spent all her life in Trinidad; but in her caste vision no other community mattered or properly existed.

She took the story back to her father’s mother. This was as far as her memory went. And for me it was far enough. With no dates, and no big external events to provide historical markers, I found it hard to hold this relationship in my head. But this story contained many of my father’s sister’s other stories; and it gave me something like a family history. In one detail it was shocking; but it all came to me as a fairy story. And I shall reconstruct it here as a story—momentarily keeping the characters at a distance.

About 1880, in the ancient town of Ayodhya in the United Provinces in India, a young girl of the Parray clan gave birth to a son. She must have been deeply disgraced, because she was willing to go alone with her baby to a far-off island to which other people of the region were going. That was how the Parray woman came to Trinidad. She intended her son to be a pundit; and in the district of Diego Martin she found a good pundit who was willing to take her son in and instruct him. (There was no hint, in the tale I heard, of sugar estates and barracks and contract labour.)

The years passed. The boy went out into the world and began to do pundit’s work. He also dealt, in a small way, in the goods Hindus used in religious ceremonies. His mother began to look for a bride for him. Women of suitable caste and clan were not easy to find in Trinidad, but the Parray woman had some luck. It happened that three brothers of a suitable clan had
made the journey out from India together, and it happened that one of these brothers had seven daughters.

The Parray boy married one of these daughters. They had three children, a girl and two boys. They lived in the village of Cunupia, not far from Chaguanas, in a house with adobe walls and a galvanized-iron roof. Quite suddenly, when the youngest child, a boy, was only two, the young Parray fell ill and died. Somehow all the gold coins he had hoarded disappeared; and the aunts and uncles thought the children and their mother should be sent back to India. Arrangements were made, but then at the last moment the youngest child didn’t want to go. He ran away and hid in a latrine, and the ship sailed without them.

The family was scattered. The eldest child, a girl, worked in the house of a relative; she never learned to read or write. The elder boy went out to work on the sugar estates for eight cents a day. The younger boy was spared for school. He was sent to stay with his mother’s sister, who had married a man who owned a shop and was starting a bus company. The boy went to school by day and worked until late at night in the shop.

The Parray woman lived on for some time, mourning her pundit son, whom she had brought from India as a baby. She always wore white for grief, and she became known in the country town of Chaguanas: a very small, even a dwarfish, woman with white hair and a pale complexion. She walked with a stick, and passed for a witch. Children mocked her; sometimes, as she approached, people drew the sign of the cross on the road.

The Parray woman was my father’s grandmother. The Parray man who died young was my father’s father. The elder boy who went out to work in the cane-fields became a small farmer; when he was old he would cry at the memory of those eight cents a day. The younger boy who was spared for school—in order that he might become a pundit and so fufil the family destiny—was my father.

It is only in this story that I find some explanation of how, coming from that background, with little education and little
English, in a small agricultural colony where writing was not an occupation, my father developed the ambition to be a writer. It was a version of the pundit’s vocation. When I got to know my father—in Port of Spain, in 1938, when he was thirty-two and I was six—he was a journalist. I took his occupation for granted. It was years before I worked back to a proper wonder at his achievement.

THE MANAGING
editor of the
Trinidad Guardian
from 1929 to April 1934 was Gault MacGowan. I heard his name often when I was a child: he was the good man who had helped in the early days, and I was told that I had been shown to him as a baby one day in Chaguanas.

The Hindu who wants to be a pundit has first to find a guru. My father, wanting to learn to write, found MacGowan. It was MacGowan, my father said, who had taught him how to write; and all his life my father had for MacGowan the special devotion which the Hindu has for his guru. Even when I was at Oxford my father, in his letters to me, was passing on advice he had received twenty years before from MacGowan. In 1951 he wrote: “And as to a writer being hated or liked—I think it’s the other way to what you think: a man is doing his work well when people begin
liking
him. I have never forgotten what Gault MacGowan told me years ago: ‘Write sympathetically’; and this, I suppose, in no way prevents us from writing truthfully, even brightly.”

MacGowan seems to have understood the relationship. In a letter he wrote me out of the blue in 1963, nearly thirty years after he had left Trinidad—a letter of pure affection, written to me as my father’s son—MacGowan, then nearly seventy, living in Munich and “still publishing,” said he had always been interested
in the people of India. He had found my father willing to learn, and had gone out of his way to instruct him.

An unlikely bond between the two men was a mischievous sense of humour. “Trinidad Hangman Disappointed—Robbed of Fee by Executive Council—Bitter Regret.” That was a MacGowan headline over a news item about a condemned man’s reprieve. It was the kind of joke my father also relished. That particular headline was brought up in court, as an example of MacGowan’s irresponsibility, during one of the two big court cases MacGowan had in Trinidad. MacGowan said, “Doesn’t the headline tell the story? I think that just the word ‘robbed’ is out of place.” Publicity like this wasn’t unwelcome to MacGowan. He seems to have been litigious, and as a Fleet Street man he had the Fleet Street idea that a newspaper should every day in some way be its own news.