October 4, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
The last train pulled into the station and Gina got on board. At that late hour, she had her pick of seats. The other five or six passengers either dozed, stared with red eyes at their smartphones or read books. Like Gina, most of them had just completed the late shift and now endured the long boring ride home.
At the end of the half-hour train ride, she had to take the last bus for a second half hour ride to her apartment building.
She gasped when a husky voice answered. She apologized for calling the wrong number and ended the call. Her heart pounded when she checked her phone. She had called the correct number!
Having experienced crossed lines in the train before, she waited a couple of minutes for the lines to clear. She pulled up the contact name, ‘Home’, again and tapped the ‘send’ button.
The same raspy voice answered and waited with heavy breathing for Gina to respond. She ended the call without speaking.
Gina jumped and dropped her phone on the floor when it buzzed with a loud ringtone a split second later. Upon impact with the carpeted steel floor, the glass screen shattered and the phone shut off.
She snatched it up and glanced around. The commotion had disturbed some fellow commuters. They showed their displeasure with unfriendly glares at her. After a quick apologetic smile, she stared at the cracked screen on her phone. Her attempts to restart it failed.
Gina’s heart skipped a beat and she dropped the phone again when the screen lit up with the message, ‘Home Calling’. The ringtone sounded louder than the first time. She tried to grab it before it hit the floor but only managed to juggle it a few times before it slipped through her fingers.
Her attempts to catch the phone pushed it further away from her. It came to rest against the large military boots of the passenger seated across from her.
The uniformed soldier had appeared out of nowhere!
Gina reeled back with fright when she glanced at his bony chalk-white face. He grimaced and stared at her through solid grey gray eyes of the dead.
The phone rang loud and the buzzing vibrations pressed it against the man’s steel-toed boots.
Gina glanced around the train. The passengers displayed their displeasure at her and the annoying phone but did not show any signs of seeing the soldier.
Paralyzed from fear, she stared at the phone, afraid to glance again at the man’s ghostly pale face.
“Pick it up!” The soldier commanded in the same husky voice through the phone.
Gina winced and pressed her body harder against the backrest.
“Here!” The phone slid across the floor and rested at Gina’s feet.
The echo from the man’s harsh voice in her head made her freeze.
“Pick it up!” The soldier demanded.
Gina used all her willpower to pull her feet onto the seat and hugged her knees to roll her body into a protective ball. She turned sideways and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Here!” The phone hopped on the seat and buzzed at the toes of her sneakers.
She peered at it through slits in her eyelids.
“Pick it up!” The speakerphone growled. The ghost figure moved to the seat that she now faced.
Gina buried her face into her legs. She made no attempts to get the phone. She shivered and the hair at the back of her neck stood on end.
“Here!” The phone wedged itself between her fingers and her leg.
“Look at it!” The soldier’s voice grew impatient.
Gina opened her legs and stared in horror at the cell phone. The blurred image of a young girl slowly came into focus.
“Your mother as a teenager.” Static zig-zagged on the screen. “We fell in love as two eighteen-year-olds.”
Gina sneaked a glance at the soldier once more, her heart pounding with uncertainty.
“I was stationed at the same military base where your mother worked as a housecleaner.” The raspy voice softened. “I am your father.”
“What?” Gina rotated glances between the phone and the soldier.
“Before we knew she was pregnant, they posted me to another country and I died a few weeks later with a bullet through my neck.” He cleared his throat. “I am not mad at you, I have to shout to get the words out. Each word sends a shocking pain through my body.”
A closer scrutiny of the soldier’s face showed his youth. He had retained his eighteen-year-old image after death.
“Her family disowned her because of her unwed pregnancy. “ He hung his head. “I bound my spirit to earth and suffered constant pain in my throat that drove me crazy but I had to watch over her and you when you came along.” An image of Gina as a newborn appeared on the screen.
“Is mom okay?” Gina dreaded the answer.
“That’s the reason for my urgency.” A painful smile crossed his face. “Mom’s spirit is now free to leave her stroke-paralyzed body after ten years of suffering.” He cleared his throat and grimaced. “The sooner the better.”
“And you will now be set free of your earthly ties and agony.” A tear rolled down Gina’s cheek. “Thank you for never abandoning us.”
“You quit school and worked two factory jobs for the last ten years to take care of me and my expensive medications.” Her mom hugged her dad on the screen and spoke through the phone. She smiled with contentment. “You don’t have to work anymore.” The phone showed a life insurance policy on the kitchen table at their apartment.
“No wonder you never even had the thought of remarrying.” A few more tears accompanied Gina’s grin of discovery. “You never lost your true love.”
Her mom and dad kissed each other and blew kisses at their daughter before soaring away into the blue background.
The phone crackled and died, leaving Gina with mixed emotions of sadness for the loss of her parents and happiness at their reunion in the afterlife after so many years of total dedication to each other and her.
writerly space
By Romeo Kaseram
Lakshmi Persaud was born in 1939 in what was then Streatham Lodge, later renamed Pasea Village in Tunapuna, east Trinidad. Her father was a shopkeeper. Her family were devout Hindus, and Persaud’s home saw regular observances of prayers as pujas and kathas. As a young girl, Persaud attended the Tunapuna Government Primary School. Later, she attended the St Augustine’s Girls’ High School, and then traveled daily to the capital city of Port-of-Spain, where she attended St Joseph’s Convent.
Persaud left Trinidad in 1957 for Queen’s University, Belfast, where she studied for her Bachelor’s degree. Following this she completed a postgraduate diploma in Education at Reading University. Persaud taught for several years after returning to the Caribbean following pursuit of higher education; however, she then again enrolled at Queen’s in Belfast, where she obtained a doctorate in Geography. In a teaching career that spanned several years and a few primary and high schools in the Caribbean, Persaud taught at Queen’s College in Guyana; the Tunapuna Hindu School, Bishop Anstey, and St Augustine Girl’s High School in Trinidad; and in Barbados at Harrison College and St Michael’s Girls’ High School. She had a career as a freelance journalist in her post-teaching years.
Persaud tells Anita Baksh in a 2011 interview published in Small Axe, she did not originally set out to write: “Unlike a number of fellow writers who say that when they were age six or ten they knew they wanted to write, I wanted to teach… It was a challenge for me to try to ensure that [I] pass on to my students the desire to want to know about our world, how we live in it, about what we have and haven’t, and to ask about how to shape our future… I love teaching. It is a means of communicating a perception, an understanding of things; it is communicating with language, communicating with a motivation and an intent to enable the child to see that [education] is worth having; as I intimated I didn’t see myself as a writer, I saw myself as a good teacher, and was happy to be that.”
She tells Baksh how she came to write was as a response to nightmares that started later in her life about those early years in the rigorous education system in Trinidad, and how its growing demands, particularly in the voluminous required reading of texts, impacted on her as a young girl and a teenager: “I used to [wake] up weeping, and this is how I came to writing. I thought that if I were to write about this, explaining my fears and how I felt at the time, the nightmares would leave me.”
Persaud’s first novel, Butterfly in the Wind (1990), began its emergence in the mid-1980s. Its publication opened up a whole new world for Indo-Caribbean women writing in the Caribbean. Paula Morgan, writing in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, while indicating its semi-autobiographical origin, gives lift to the novel into the writing space of the Caribbean by noting how it “brought to a close the silence of Indo-Caribbean women who were predominantly represented by male Indian writers or writers of other ethnicities as marginalised, passive, idealised figures or repositories of sensuality and exoticised otherness”. Additionally, “Persaud's fictional evocation adds another facet to a multifaceted shifting mosaic and demonstrates the problematic of identifying a quintessential Caribbean woman.”
Morgan adds: “Butterfly presents the divergences between the Hindu worldview and that of mainstream Trinidadian society. Even while the ‘good’ colonial education administered by the Presbyterian mission school creates dissonance, the protagonist's muted internal disaffection with stringent mores within Hindu cultural practices are revealed in a meandering and questioning of an inner voice, which she is constantly seeking to silence. Her fragility, despite strength and desire for freedom/flight, is evoked in the motif of the butterfly seeking escape over a high wall.” Published by Peepal Tree, the novel received enthusiastic reviews in the Sunday Observer and The Sunday Times in the United Kingdom.
Persaud credits Vidia Naipaul among her influences, telling Baksh: “[Naipaul’s] … A House for Mr. Biswas is autobiographical. Before that was written, there was no substantial work of literary worth narrating the lives of Indo-Caribbean peoples. I could see the reality on the written page; you had before you the end product of someone’s creativity, in this case, an exceptionally fine writer. You see, at the beginning of his writing career… Naipaul believed he did not have suitable literary material, perhaps because all the novels he had studied at school and university, and had read for pleasure were from Britain, France, Spain, and the United States. In some ways, someone of his background and upbringing, thinking of writing fiction in the 1940s and 1950s was on his own, for he would have had to find a path to traverse that which in some ways was virgin territory. In one of his attempts at writing a novel, he was fortunate to have given his writings to someone who said to him that what he had written was full of pretensions; this observation may have awakened him to what he should write about, which were things he knew intimately. That then would have meant his childhood, the Trinidad environment of his upbringing, his A House for Mr. Biswas. This novel made me realise that I also had material. We all have material for we are individuals with unique experiences…”
Peepal Tree also published Persaud’s second novel, Sastra (1993). Her third novel, For the Love of My Name (2000) again published by Peepal Tree, was written following extensive visits to Guyana, the birthplace of her husband, Bishnodat Singh. Her other novels are Raise the Lanterns High (2004), which was translated into Italian; and Daughters of Empire (2012). In summing up Persaud's output, Morgan says the “novels are powerful evocations of the pain and potentiality of exile, the challenges of governing minute, multi-ethnic fragile island societies, the challenge of a female embodiment and the compelling quest for a place to call home”.
In recognition of her writing, Warwick University established a ‘Lakshmi Persaud Research Fellowship’ at its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies. In recognition of the 50th Anniversary of the Independence of Trinidad and Tobago in 2012, Persaud was awarded with a Lifetime Literary Award for her significant contribution to the development of Trinidad and Tobago’s Literature by the National Library and Information System. She was also conferred with an Honorary Doctorate, Doctor of Letters (D. Litt.) in 2013 by the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, in recognition of her literary contributions. Persaud lives in the UK with her husband, children, and grandchildren.
Sources for this exploration: Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Second Edition;
http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/interviews/compelled-write-interview-lakshmi-persaud; Peepal Tree, lakshmipersaud.com, and Wikipedia.