IN THE DAYS after Christmas and New Year, I tend to look back in time and reflect on the more important and weighty issues and events of my life. Why does Frosty live in the middle of the ocean? Because snow-man is an island. Even now when I brave the traffic in Port of Spain, I realized how true that is. There are the storms creating havoc in North America, and here in Trinidad I keep wishing I had a sleigh.
Around this time of year I am very conscious of what the same xmasologists call the three stages of man. First you believe in Santa Claus. In the second stage, you don’t believe in Santa Claus. The third stage is when you become Santa Claus. I now have the figure but not the heart. Now, I have discovered a fourth stage: when you feel like Santa Claus walking backwards. The major symptom is that you say,
“Oh, oh, oh” instead of “Ho, ho, ho.” All it means is that you have more to complain about. In my car on the highway, I thought of a time many years ago when I was on the way to the funeral of a family friend, Merle. She and her husband, Dr Lloyd Webb, had been among the few friends who supported us when we were going through rough times in Trinidad.
I had sneaked a look at the newspapers and was even more depressed. A young accounting clerk of East Indian descent from the Express newspaper had taken her own life. A claim was that it was over her love for a young man of African descent and her family’s objection.
Marriage blessed
It was ironic that Merle and Lloyd faced a similar situation more than 32 years ago when they met.
They got married in 1970, the year of the Black Power Revolution in Trinidad and Tobago. Their marriage was blessed with love and four children, one of whom, Lyndon, was a close friend of my son George. They treated him like a member of their own family. Merle was almost maternal in the way she treated and counselled my wife Indranie.
The two deaths forced me to reflect on my own circumstances. My surname should have been Adam since my family represents a mix of the human race including black, white and brown, Hindus, Muslims and Christians. My Uncle Partap had married his childhood sweetheart Christina, and their first child Clint is my godson. I attended Anglican elementary schools and a Catholic secondary school. I went to school in rural Carapichaima, with its sugar cane fields that brought my ancestors from India, and then Port of Spain in a rural slum area, close to the killing fields of Laventille, named of all things “Picadilly”.
In the intervening years, I have lived in Canada, the United States, Belize and Barbados. I now live in Antigua. I consider myself first a Caribbean person, then a Trinidadian. I am not an Indo-Trinidadian. There is no such thing in my vocabulary.
When my son George was six, I became public relations officer of the national sugar company, Caroni Ltd, and we moved to a company enclave. George went to a school that the company operated on the residential compound. Most of the students were of East Indian descent.
One of the other children, or it might even have been the teacher, informed George that he, George, was Indian. George declared vehemently: “I am not an Indian. I don’t have no feather.”
Twenty-one years later, my four-year-old son Zubin faced the same predicament. He said bluntly, “Don’t be silly. I am not an Indian. I am a Barbadian.” His sister Jasmine supported him declaring, “I am Barbadian too.” They now consider themselves Antiguan.
Christmas is a celebration all Trinidadians share, regardless of race, colour or religion. I walked into the Church of the Nazarene in St James, Port of Spain, the day of Merle’s funeral feeling as lost as a chicken at the North Pole. Christmas had started badly and was getting worse. I had no job and no hope.
The music started and I was made to realize that we were celebrating the life of Merle rather than mourning her death. Then the message of the Nazarene burst forth as bright as the star that blazed over Bethlehem and set me singing with the congregation Joy To The World.
Job or no job, it is the task of those of us who remain to make the world a better place. As I left the church, the salt tears causing my eyes to burn, yet my heart lighter for the love that I shared with a church full of strangers, I clutched Indranie to me and held in my heart my four children, especially George who has continued to live his life without feathers, and Zubin, who realizes that home is where the heart is and not where your ancestors came from.
Tony Deyal was last seen bemoaning that the Caribbean is a geographical expression and not a political reality.