Looking at roots

Bhookh na jaane baasi bhaat (Hunger knows no stale rice)
neend na jaane tooti khaat (Sleep knows no broken cot)
preet na jaane jaat kujaat (Love knows no barriers of caste)
Bhokpuri poem

I was sent to live with my Nana and Nanie at the age of six and a half, a decade after India had been granted independence and not long after our 1957 elections that would augur the split of our country and the village of Uitvlugt that was my world. Even though it was simply a move to another section, it could as well have been to another village. Even in a single section, “East was East and West was West and never the twain did meet.” Their second and last child, my aunt, had been married off in Dec 1957, and my mother decided I could assist with chores for the “old people”. “Yuh guh fetch watah fuh dem” was how it was phrased even though water now came through a standpipe half a block away, rather than, as in the past, from the irrigation water canal some distance away. This practice was not uncommon, and in fact three of my Nanie’s friends in the weeding gang in which she worked at Plantation Uitvlugt also had grandsons living with them.
In my Nana’s home, India was a living presence, none of that “Area of Darkness” Naipaul was to write about. India was vibrant and palpable as my Nana – born in 1896 – and friends would gather daily to conduct arcane exegeses and argue the philosophy of the “Ramcharitmanas”, chant the martial ballad of “Alha Udal” and sing the story of young Krishna in the “Prem Sagar”. All of this was woven into the struggle for India’s independence, which they had followed avidly in the local press – conveyed by Hari, who could also read English. Its influence on the current political struggle in British Guiana could not be missed. Hadn’t the now political rivals, Jagan and Burnham, flown to India to meet Nehru after their Government had been ousted four years ago?
But for my Nana, his father, Rambishun, was his main connection to a living India. Nineteen-year-old Rambishun had arrived alone from India in 1888 to work on one of the sugar plantations of British Guiana – Plantation De Willem on the West Coast of Demerara. He had no way of knowing he had arrived during one of the deepest and most prolonged depressions in the sugar industry. The working conditions of the indentured and time-expired workers became even more abysmal at the same task rate of one shilling as in 1838. Rambishun completed his five-year indenture but did not exercise his option of returning to India to his wife and child. He passed away in 1944 when he was 76, and WWII would soon end. My mother, then engaged to be married at fifteen, remembers him always wondering about his family in India. My Nana and Nanie were full of stories and anecdotes about his life and times, which they would regularly recount.
The last ship bringing indentured labourers to Guyana, the SS Ganges, had arrived in 1917 with 26 persons bound for my village of Uitvlugt, and a few of them were still living at the end of my street 40 years later. A friend’s grandfather from the adjoining street reminded us regularly that he had fought in WWI’s disastrous Mesopotamian Campaign with the British Indian Army by periodically marching around the village with his staff across his shoulder. In 1938 my Nana and some friends had travelled to Georgetown to participate in the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Indians to Guyana and the 50th anniversary of his father’s arrival.
One of my grandparents’ favourite stories was trotted out whenever I complained about some bruise or nick I may have suffered while performing a chore on our farm. I was regaled about how “the old man” had dealt with a deep gash on a finger while cultivating his rice field adjoining the new WC railway line near his logie. He simply went to a rail, placed his injured finger on it and lopped off the damaged portion. I was in awe of Rambishun ever after and pestered my Nana for more details. Years later I would appreciate his single-minded insistence on “getting the job done” if a person or a people wanted to move on.
His motto seemed to be, “I work, therefore I am.”