I want to imagine a bullock cart wending its way in early morning’s light, rolling along a dusty country road from Ghatempur to Kanpur train station. A father drives his stubborn pair of bulls forward, one eye on the monsoon gathering behind dark clouds in the east, the other on ruts in the dirt road. He leaves soon after his daughters are safely aboard the local to Lucknow. There they will take another train south, eventually travelling the East India Railway to Calcutta. Ramdulari is happy there are other children on board with time to play. Some children are crying due to the hot carriages while others after their mothers’ discipline for running about in the narrow aisles. The mothers are nervously responding to their husbands’ terse instructions, and everyone is carrying a bundle no matter how small. Ramdulari hefts hers onto her lap with the ease of a water carrier and sits next to her big sister. Inside her bundle are clothes and a bowl of white rice. 

I begin this imagined journey as a child, travelling backwards until I arrive in 1891. I comb through yellowing ledgers, dissect inconsistencies on social media until my purpose is birthed. Once, my mother, in response to an urgent question I posed when I was seven, said:  

‘Your father’s mother was a tiny woman from India.’  

She said it as if she knew her. The question and what prompted it have faded, but her answer sent wheels spinning in my head. Faces flashed like a quick reshuffle, a deck of cards— 

Wait a minute! My father? Who is he? He has a mother too. 

On Friday afternoons, an army of country cousins came to town. They travelled early to grab choice spots at the Castries market for Saturday mornings to sell fresh produce that ranged from legumes to casava. I knew them all by their first names. My mother’s mother Ada regaled me with stories about ancestors from West Africa and Ireland, but she never forgot to mention her mother was a kabwès who married Pa Paul Afwitjen, my great grandfather. She told me that he did not know his own age but remembered the day slavery was abolished. It hurts writing this as I still don’t know enough about my father’s lineage, some malevolent spirit having erased them from record. 

Granny welcomed every opportunity to teach me her family history (it was compulsory education growing up – absorbing those details) while I was still in infant school. By seven, I was fully versed in everything there was to know about my mother’s side of the family. I knew the scamps and I knew the gentlemen. However, as I matured, I came to realise my father was never in the chatter; his name was not mentioned in the house unless I asked.  

When I was 12 years old and attending secondary school at St. Mary’s College, I stumbled on the essay ‘Hunting the Octopus in the Gilbertese Islands’ by Sir Arthur Grimble. Reading that, my mind drifted back to that earlier conversation with my mother. I understood that those islands were in the East Indies, in the Pacific, and my father’s mother came to mind. She was much closer than I was to those islands; maybe she visited them, just as my mother visited Barbados and nearby Martinique to trade in fresh fruits, spices and condiments. 

A new interest stirred in my subconscious. I became curious overnight about my father. I wanted to know who he really was and who his parents were. Until then he had been the little man my mother met while on shopping trips downtown. Even though she would go to great pains pointing him out to me, I never saw him at home. When I asked why, Granny’s face flashed red, more in pain than any ill will.  

‘Mind your own business, child. Your mother doing well enough as it is without problems.’  

I imagined there were things Granny did not want me to know about. As she would say: Wait till you get big, child. 

It is not unusual for children to grow up without fathers; in fact, it was common in our neighbourhood. I knew enough to know my mother could not have made me alone, and the urge to discover this man gnawed at my insides like a tapeworm; it became an obsession. It led me to neglect my studies, daydreaming about him day and night.  

Granny died two years after our house at 99 St. Louis Street burnt down. My mother moved us to Arundell Hill, at Marchand, where she purchased a small two-room wooden house. Our new home was a stone’s throw from Victoria Park, a recreational centre and grazing ground for people living in the vicinity and beyond.  

At 14, I began to enjoy the greater freedoms of teenage years. My mother felt I was big enough to be on my own, and so, in mango season she would go to Barbados for weeks to sell fruit. It was usually August, summer holidays, and with sufficient dry foodstuff in the house, I enjoyed fending for myself. The years had flown by; I was a senior in long pants, feeling mannish enough to cheekily suggest visiting my father sometime. I was a bit nervous, dreading a scolding, but, surprise, surprise, a broad grin covered my mother’s face. Her eyes swept me from head to toe, assessing how much I had grown under her nose. 

‘Get ready on Sunday morning early; I will take you …’ she murmured. 

The week took ages to turn to weekend. When the weekend came, it took a year until Sunday morning. We left town at six-thirty in fair weather on a seven-mile walk to Ti Colon to my father’s place, the sun rising above the hills to the east warm on our backs. I never found out if she told him we were coming, but it seemed strange that he would be by the roadside at the exact moment we completed our journey.  

As we sat together on the veranda, I was fascinated to be in his presence. Meanwhile my mother helped his girlfriend of the moment shell buckets of green pigeon peas in the kitchen. I was soon to discover he was neither the bore nor villain I had conceived in my head. He served me a glass of cold coconut water from his kerosene fridge – the house was not wired for electricity – and it tasted like nothing I had ever sampled before. I remember wanting the taste to linger forever on my tongue. He asked about school and sports, and when I told him I was average in both, he doubted me.

He grinned before letting me know that through their children, his friends kept him abreast of my development. He’d heard I was a cricketer and very intelligent.

I wanted to pounce on him the instant the conversation allowed me leverage. There were questions to ask, things to know. Encouraged by his convivial spirit, my tongue loosened as my imagination unwound. Images of a tiny Indian woman entered the frame …  

‘My mother’s name was Ramdulari; in her language it means beloved of God.’ 

At last, I had a name. 

*

A diminutive woman in a saffron-stained sari comes trudging through the canes on Caroni plain. Her brood of five sons and two daughters huddle close. It is not a vision. My father Ernest holds her hand; his younger brother Henry is asleep in her arms. I want to believe I know her, but she died the year I was born.  

Pride blossomed on my father’s face remembering his mother. He told me she landed in Port-of-Spain from Calcutta on October 9th, 1891. She had travelled with an older sister – Rampiari, nicknamed Reema – whom he didn’t know much about. His older brother George had told him that Ramdulari remembered the voyage, although only seven at the time. But he could not answer several of my questions, and I am indebted to his older cousins who like George had heard Ramdulari’s story. Hers was a narrative that mirrored many.  

By the time I was old enough to travel to Trinidad, my grandmother’s generation was passing on, their memories long gone. The reminiscences I was able to collect remain vivid. They conjure scenes of the 19th century – of the dust of wagon-track country roads from Kanpur to Calcutta. All my life I have traced her route in my mind back to Uttar Pradesh. Maybe Ramdulari will guide me, retracing her journey along railway tracks, through crowded cities whose names have changed over the years. Back to a countryside with bullock mills grinding the corn and wheat, rice winnowing at the hands of threshers. All this happening in fear, before the monsoon comes.  

There is a marked silence in family lore which bothers me: why did these sisters, 17 and seven, travel across two oceans to a land and a life they could not know? Nevertheless, had Ramdulari not come, I would not be here. Her indentured certificate states the family name: Lalkhan. But names have limited use, for the English language officer would have written what he thought he heard. Coming from that tiny village somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, it was more than likely to be Pathan, one of the dominant tribes in the area at that time. I must enter a child’s mind, piecing the patches of stories, of memory, together until I can stitch them into a quilt. Ramdulari and Rampiari, little sibling and big sister, petrified, alone among so many men, crossing the kala pani. The officer stamps their papers and gives them back to big sister. He admonishes the girls not to lose them. I can see his brick-red moustache twirling into a handlebar as he looks down with disdainful eyes on the pair. 

Kala Pani. The women in her village mentioned it in fear. They spoke about black water that swallowed men whole, those who ventured beyond the horizon in search of a better life. She knew it as a dark malevolent spirit, mother of all waters. The fortunate few who came back spoke of unbelievable riches, but they were older and poorer than when they left. There were no family members on the docks to wave goodbye to them as they faced the blackening waters. Only big sister brought comfort, Rampiari, beloved of Ram. Her name appears in the register of arrivals in Port of Spain, Trinidad, but nowhere else. 

My grandmother did not know how long it took to reach Calcutta, but the story I received, passed from mouth to mouth, vividly describes her entering a wooden shed. There she meets a fair-skinned man dressed in military khakis with a rusty, but neat, pencil moustache. He is a doctor. After he examines her sister, he takes the same instrument and rests it on her chest to listen to her heart. It feels cold. He prises her mouth open with a wooden spoon and informs Rampiari in broken Bhojpuri that they are both in good health. Years later, Ramdulari would tell her son George that the doctor was not from Uttar Pradesh; he was too red to be Indian. She believed he was chosen for understanding the several dialects spoken in her region. 

She remembers little about boarding the ship and her first night, except that it was cold. To stay warm, she cuddled under her sister’s armpits, like a chick under its mother hen. The two of them lay on the bottom berth of a bunk that was a bit too short for Rampiari whose legs dangled over the wooden frame into the narrow passageway separating the two rows of beds. The women were kept apart from the men at nights but met on deck during the day. When the sun was at its zenith, everyone queued at the stern for meals, the children and women lining up ahead of the men. There was a long table with large pans of hot white rice the sailors had cooked and were on hand to serve. But Ramdulari could not enjoy the half-cooked rice which irritated her gums. She told her sons how much she feared the sailors and the way they looked at her. 

Each was given a pewter plate for the voyage along with a pail and a stained woollen blanket. Among Ramdulari’s chores was to wash their plates in the sea water. Fresh water was for drinking. I would have loved to hear her describe the sailors, but that is lost to time. My imagination, however, runs unbridled – I perceive lecherous eyes piercing through the thin cotton fabric of a child’s sari. Ramdulari wincing under the intense savagery of their stares, praying: Dear Ram, save me from evil. 

Everybody was vomiting.  

Our heads spinning, the ship bobbing like a matchstick in a washbasin of water. We stay in the hole below deck on our bunks and couldn’t go out for fresh air.  

The sailors come and force us to get up; they know we wouldn’t be able to sleep when night come. The place thick with the smell of vomit and stale food in the bedclothes.  

My knees too weak to stand.  

I piece together her voice, listening to her grandchildren and imagining I knew her.  

The sea quarrel with itself for weeks; we lose count of the days. The first stop was Mauritius. Some men leave the ship with their haversacks full of food. They did not come back.  

After the sailors load bundles of wood, they sail on, following the sun. 

If the journey from India to Mauritius was rough, nothing seemed to compare to rounding the Cape. They say she cringed whenever she mentioned it.  

My sister say, the sailors warn us we at the mercy of God. 

The huge iron ship leapt into the air before crashing into the waves. She must have felt the landings in her gut. I imagine them both below deck, the air thick with waste and sweat, nothing left in her stomach to vomit other than bitter bile. 

Ramdulari huddled against Rampiari’s breasts and cried. There could not have been any water left to moisten her cheeks. Night came. Pitch black, below deck, she belched, and air replaced the bile inside. After three days without food or sleep, the sea miraculously turned placid as ice. The voyagers climbed on deck to marvel at the endless miles of blue ahead. A woman told Rampiari it was like when the monsoon was about to burst – steaming, stifling and still. The sun rose fast above the horizon. The ship’s wake, the water’s sole disturbance. My grandmother did not forget to tell her children these were her happiest days at sea. She roamed the deck with other children, creating games to amuse themselves. They had no dolls, balls or other toys, only themselves. A happiness adapted to their condition.  

A child’s mind homes in on matters of interest. Details outside their understanding are washed away. None of her recollections speak to deprivation during those three months at sea. I would have believed, without the hindsight of history, that her journey was tolerable in those cramped quarters. But I know temperatures soared in the fetid, stagnant air. That the women emptied their slop buckets at night, interrupted at times by the splash of a dead body eased overboard. This precocious seven-year-old girl child remembers all this.  

I reach Port-of-Spain full of hope. I was too young to think about a future in this new country where rain does fall every five minutes. 

The Rhone came alongside the pier in Port-of-Spain in a heavy squall. Ramdulari’s first sight of the place after the rain stopped was a dirty white sheet, lifting like a veil over the hilltops. Everything seemed dark green except for the orderly rows of houses, in straight lines like corn, bordering the sea. Two things she remembered were the church steeple sticking up in the air high above the brown slate roofs and the little red seeds dotting the hills from a distance, peeping through the greenery. I am told she remembered them to the end.  

I can see her traipsing down the gangway in a light drizzle, holding big sister’s hand. Her small bundle is on her shoulder, the bowls of white rice gone. She follows Rampiari into a cabin where an officer collects their plates, blankets and pails to reissue to the next crop of passengers. I laugh, learning the officer examined her plate for rice grains she may have missed. Rampiari did all the haggling, presenting papers to officials in Trinidad and selecting the estate she was going to live on for the next five years. She told strangers that Ramdulari was her child.  

Footnotes:

Kala Pani: The great black water that is the sea where souls are lost while journeying across. 

Kalinago: A tribe of early settlers in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. 

Kabwès: Of mixed race. Mainly European and Kalinago. 

Indentured Certificate: An identity certificate issued by the British Administration in India 

Island Writings