I fly to Trinidad when I am ecstatic. I
go there when I am morose. I visit the island when I have nothing important to
do (that happens very often). I am once
again off to Trinidad. My routine there is monotonous. I meet the same people
and visit the same places there but still I never get bored.
I will find Mohun waiting for me in his
Prefect as I will emerge from the airport. He will wave at me and grin. I will
also wave and grin at him in return.
We will drive to Mohun’s house in Sikkim
Street in St James from the airport.
The house can be seen from two or three
streets away and is known all over St James. It is like a huge and squat sentry
box: tall, square, two-storeyed, with pyramidal roof of corrugated iron.
Once I am in the L-shaped drawing room,
I can make out it has been spruced up for me. I find the floor freshly
polished, the curtains rearranged, and the morris suite and the glass cabinet
and the bookcase pushed to new positions. Heaped in one corner of the drawing
room are old copies of Trinidad Sentinel, the paper for which Mohun works as a
reporter. I flip through the copies of the paper as Shama, Mohun’s wife, makes
tea for me.
An article written by Mohun once caught
my attention. It was –
DADDY
COMES HOME IN A COFFIN
U.S. Explorer’s Last Journey
ON ICE
By
M. Biswas
Somewhere in America in a neat little
red-roofed cottage four children ask their mother every day, ‘Mummy when is
Daddy coming home?’
Less than a year ago Daddy – George
Elmer Edman, the celebrated traveller and explorer – left home to explore the
Amazon.
Well, I have news for you, kiddies.
Daddy is on his way home.
Yesterday he passed through Trinidad.
In a coffin.
Mohun will later take me to the Hanuman
House in the High Street at Arwacas. Among the tumbledown
timber-and-corrugated-iron buildings in the High Street at Arwacas, Hanuman
House stands like an alien white fortress.
The house is ruled by Mohun’s
mother-in-law, Mrs Tulsi and her brother-in-law, Seth. The house teems with Mrs
Tulsi’s sons, daughters and sons-in-law – Owad, Chinta, Sushila, Hari,
Govind….Mohun has bitter-and-sweet memories about Hanuman House.
The house has a shop named Tulsi Store
facing the street. Mohun was hired to paint signs (Mohum was a painter of signs
before he became a journalist) for the Tulsi Store. He fell in love with Shama,
Mrs Tulsi’s daughter while painting the signs and wrote a love-letter. The
letter fell into the hands of Mrs Tulsi. But as Mohun belonged to a decent
Brahmin family, Shama was married to him. Mohun’s four children (including the
eldest one, a son, who won the Nobel Prize for literature) were born at Hanuman
House. But it was also in the same house that Mohun was beaten by one of his
brothers-in-law Govind (a cordial relation developed between them later).
The third stop in my itinerary is The
Chase where Mohun tried his hands as a shopkeeper. The Chase is a long,
straggling settlement of mud huts in the heart of the sugarcane area in
Trinidad. Few outsiders go to The Chase. The people who live there work on the
estates and the roads. The world beyond the sugarcane field is remote and the
village is linked to it only by villagers’ carts and bicycles, wholesalers’
vans and lorries, and an occasional private motor-bus that ran to no timetable
and along no fixed route.
The Tulsis had a shop there and beyond
it, a house. Mohun lived in The Chase for some time before moving to Green
Vale. It was in Green Vale that he decided to have house of his own. (The
result is his house in Sikkim Street). Mohun tried to build a house in Green
Vale but was unsuccessful and had to return to the Hanuman House. Mohun moved
to a couple of more places like the Shorthills and Mrs Tulsi’s house in Port of
Spain. I want to visit those places but I am too tired. Also, Mohun has
arranged a grand party for me. The occasion is special. His son, VS Naipaul is
turning 81 on August 17.
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