H.A. “It is an untold story.  Lines of women…” (3)

Shrine of Shiva in the holy city of Benares (3) –Shiva in Glossary

C.O. Destitution (3)

G.O. “Rands, widows who have escaped the funeral pyre by means of the laws forbidding sati laid down by British administrators in 1829” (3)

G.O. Women who sing…Vaishnnavites (3)

G.O. Brahmin widows (3)

S.B. “The gangplank clacks and swings precariously as the women scramble up onto the deck” (3)

G.O. “Stay one step behind their husbands” (3)

Sugar (3) –Cannes Brûlée in Glossary and Usine Set. Madeleine in Significant Locations

Rands, widows who have escaped the funeral pyre by means of the laws forbidding sati laid down by British administrators in 1829” (3)

Kala Pani, Brahmin widows (3) –Kala Pani in Historical Context

Artist, 1879, 285 women and 159 men (4) –Kala Pani in Historical Context

S.B. The rickety bridge swings (4)

Gainder (4) –Kala Pani in Historical Context

Kala pani (4) –Kala Pani in Historical Context

H.A. “Words are ghosts, ancestors on this side.  They are not symbols” (5)

S.B. “My whole life arches backwards and forwards according to the speed of the gust around me” (5)

Toronto (5) –Carnival and J’Ouvert in Historical Context

G.O. and C.O. Film on lives of Haitian women in Montreal; immigrant life in Canada (7)

Haitian Revolution, Black Republic, French Revolution, Napoleon, Black Jacobins, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines, Henri Christophe, C. L. R. James (10) –Ties to the Past: Significance of Majie the Pig in Historical Context and Haiti in Significant Locations

“Haiti, its poverty, the Western propaganda about its role as the crucible of the AIDS virus, and especially the recent redefinitions of voodoo, now corrected to vodou” (10) –Vodoo in Glossary, AIDS in Historical Context

A manbo named Cecile Fatiman, Bois Caiman ritual, houngan Boukman Dutty, NDG (11) –Manbo and Houngan in Glossary

G.O. and 1. “But even to them her role remained secondary” “The thought of yet another woman edited out of history made me angry” (11)

G.O. “Living together would only tie me up in knots from which I would have to break loose” (12)

C.O. “If you happen to be born into an Indian family, an Indian family from the Caribbean, migratory, never certain of the terrain, that’s how life falls down around you.  It’s close and thick and sheltering, its ugly and violent secrets locked inside the family walls.  The outside encroaches, but the ramparts are strong, and once you leave it you have no shelter and no ready skills for finding a different one.  I found that out after years of trying” (15)

M 1970 emigration from Trinidad to Canada (15)

L Buying back our land on Manahambre Road in Princes Town (15)

L The big row, sugar cane (16-23) Cannes Brûlée in Glossary, Usine Set. Madeleine in Significant Locations

San Fernando, modern way of life (23) –San Fernando in Map

C.O. “Yuh want us to live in backwardness for the rest of our days?” (24)

C.O., M Chinese man (26)

M “Why did people leave the place they were born for an illusion of a better life?  I wondered.  All of us migrants, the Chinese man, the black waiter, Da-Da never finding a place here, Babs turning into a brittle magazine girl, Kello dying – why did anyone leave?” (26)

M Become a lawyer, passage to England (27-28)

M, L Da-Da had to leave Trinidad, I could see that now.  I could understand how life must have been closing in on him….to keep the land.  Everything for the land (27)

Indians in Trinidad becoming Christian converts; middle class arises from formerly doomed to indentured servitude (28) –Cultural Hybridity in Historical Context

G.O. Ramona song– told the sentimental tale of and American Indian girl’s seduction…“Fancy naming me after this girl, destroyed and abandoned!  I’m Mona now, I’ve always been Mona” (28-29)

C.O. “All that backward stuff was best forgotten” (29)

G.O. Education and respectability (29)

“When Myrtle and Mackie walked hand in hand at the edges of the cane fields, they were already several levels removed from anything resembling bonded labour.  It was a time when newly educated people would throw out almost everything Indian at first, and would slowly gather back into their lives only those relics that were essential for survival.  Eating sada roti and tomato chokha, wearing gold churias at weddings, drying mangoes for achar and kuchela, treating nara with a special massage, rubbing down the limbs of babies with coconut oil: all seeping gradually back into Indian life in the towns and all well hidden except at home.  Like their parents before them, abandoning Hindu and Muslim traditions in favour of education, Muddie and Da-Da anchored themselves inside their Presbyterian community, building a slow, deadly respectability” (29) –Cannes Brûlée in Glossary, Usine Ste. Madeleine in Significant Locations, Roti in Glossary, Cultural Hybridity in Historical Context

S.B. “I would be swinging my short legs over the side of the pew” (30)

H.A. No camera for Christmas (33)

M “Indian people from good families should think about settling in Canada because it was such a nice place, with such nice polite people” (35)

S.O. Uncle Baddall and Muddie (36-37)

H.A. “But I knew that Muddie would say nothing; nobody in our family ever said anything” (38)

G.O. “In all our lives Muddie had been the force holding together the fragments, creating something out of nothing each time.  And this skill she had taught me so well that I often felt I wanted for nothing and I wanted nothing at the same time.  The one thing I did not want was domestic life.  I would not marry Roddy and become his little wife.  All I wanted was to be his love.  And Muddie—what did she want?  She must have wanted love but hardly the labour and pain of countless years of toiling beside Da-Da, the man without a place.  She seemed to love him and resent him with equal ferocity.  She loved Kello purely.  Me, I was her creature totally.  Sometimes I was sure that she did not love me very much and would never like me.  But that did not matter.  I was her creature, her female child, her right hand.  It seemed to me that she had room in her heart for two people only: Da-Da and Kello, her personal bad boys” (39-40)

M “As soon as people got old enough, if they could manage it, they left for England or America or somewhere else…and I too planned to leave Trinidad for somewhere better” (40)

G.O. Escape rape and murder (40-46)

La Pastora Girls’ High school (41) –New Curriculum in Historical Context

S.B. Hand swinging (45)

H.A. “We can’t tell your father.  Promise me that you will never talk to anybody about this.  It too disgraceful.  What yuh think people will say about this, eh?  Answer me.”  She shook me roughly and then stopped, talking almost to herself.  “Nobody will believe you didn’t go with that man under that bush.  You hear me now.  Never say anything about this.  You is such a fool, such a damn little fool.  How you could think that I would know a man like that?  You making me lie to your father.  You know I don’t do that kind of thing.” (46)

Kello has AIDS; promiscuous sex, gay, bisexual; Matthew (47-48) –AIDS in Historical Context

H.A. “But Kell, what will people say?” (52)

L Buying back the land (53)

“I wondered what he thought of an AIDS hospice being planted in his solid neighborhood” (55) –AIDS in Historical Context

L “A powerful masculine drive to possess, to control, even in the face of a terminal illness” (56)

C.O. Stupid bong coolie; “he was white and he could do it” (58)

H.A. “She finished the script, leaving out all the information about Cecile Fatiman.  And so even in a liberating film about the lives of contemporary Haitian women, poor women scratching out a life on the snowbound streets of Montreal, a film made by a woman of the Caribbean, researched by another Caribbean woman, the only woman’s name connected with the Haitian Revolution had no place.  Toussaint, Christophe, Dessalines, Boukman.  No mention of Fatiman.” (61)

H.A. Mementos, letters, prizes from a past time (62)

Indian food (64) –Carilee and Roti in Glossary

“Christian like us” (64) –Cultural Hybridity in Historical Context

Cannes Brûlées (67) –Cannes Brûlée in Glossary and Usine Ste. Madeleine in Significant Locations

1963, independence from England, Hector James “Massa day done,” baccahanal (67) –Eric Williams in Historical Context

Cane-cutter image (68) –Cannes Brûlée in Glossary and Usine Ste. Madeleine in Significant Locations

“Fire (69) –Cannes Brûlée in Glossary and Usine Ste. Madeleine in Significant Locations

Politics (70) –Eric Williams in Historical Context

“He signed the letters with the unlikely name of Nizam Maharaj because he wanted to speak for all Indians.  ‘For all a we, Hindu and Muslim, Indian is Indian,’ he burst out one night to Muddie.  Da-Da was so unexpected, so full of logical argument, so full of inexplicable bursts of fury. Full of Indian pride too when it suited him.  Yet he was a Creole to his heart, as Mama used to say, a real throwback to his wild grandfather on her side.  Drinking, smoking, gambling, loving calypso, steelband, and Carnival – ‘a Creole to yuh heart, mih dear,’ she would chuckle.” (69-70) –Carnival and J’Ouvert in Historical Context

“The historic meetings in 1956 in Port of Spain’s square and San Fernando’s town hall when Dr. Hector James was hailed as our new leader” (70) –Eric Williams in Historical Context

C.O. “Somehow Da-Da refused to believe in racial divisions, even when they were all around him.  He held fast to the romantic idea of a body politic that would accept people of every creed, every race.  He saw himself as an Indian man and a Trinidadian, neither cancelling out the other, a natural inheritor of the Creole culture he loved” (71)

Nationhood, the two chief races in this land are Negro and Indian (73) –Jerningham Junction in Significant Locations

“The principles of democracy are such that we hold these truths to be self-evident.  Our forefathers left behind in India a backward system of arranged marriage and suttee.  We strode forward on a path to freedom and enlightenment in the few decades since we arrived on these blessed shores” (74) –Kala Pani in Historical Context

Douglarization, dougla (75) –Dougla in Glossary

Carnival (75) –Carnival and J’Ouvert in Historical Context

C.O. “I have been passed over recently for my fourth promotion while a less qualified, less experienced person of another racial group received the promotion in each instance.  The same has been true of training opportunities.  Scholarships are advertised in the national newspapers daily.  I have applied for several, but I have never made it even to the interview stage.  Friends on the government side (and I have many) have insisted that all I have to do is to get a party card.  Sir, I cannot in all conscience join a party that is bent on keeping my people in second-class positions.” (76)

C.O. “I believe in equal rights for all.  Is it unusual to think that these equal rights also include me?” (76)

M “But the late sixties migration seemed to all of us to be an Indian exodus” “Separation from the earth that had made him” (77)

M, L “Tiny Daisy’s navel string under the caimite tree in Iere Village is marked by a yellow croton bush, planted by Grandma Lil so many years ago to mark the birth and death of her firstborn.  All our navel strings are buried in that Manahambre land.  I remember Da-Da digging the hole in the back of the house the night Babsie was born, sweating because of the unaccustomed labour” (77-78)

C.O. “But against the Canadian landscape I saw only a brown Indian man, his impeccable sense of style unnoticed, his appearance ordinary.  An elderly South Asian man, I thought, that’s all this country can ever make of him” (79)

G.O. “Local girls from respectable families were ‘dating, necking, and petting,’ with Yankee boys, sometimes even ‘ging all the way,’ while their behavior with local boys was different.  With local boys they used to go out, kiss, feel up, but then hold out and ‘not give nutten till they get de ring’” (80)

H.A. “He had to let go; the story was now mine” (81)

C.O. “We had reproduced our very early life here in many ways…All it took then in Trinidad was looking Indian; all it took now in Canada was skin colour.  We had not moved one inch” (81)

“The Canadian missionaries had brought sweetness and light to us on their terms, wrapping us in a tight cocoon while they enjoyed the privileges of whiteness in a colonial society.  New converts were not allowed to smoke or drink, a rule probably established to rein in the estate drunkenness of Indian labourers on payday and to quiet the night-time cries of beaten wives” (81) –Cultural Hybridity in Historical Context

G.O. Wife beating (84)

L Living lab (84)

S.O. Sex (83, 85)

S.B. “Roam freely but remember not to go further than the swingingbridge” (85)

Country girl from the South, even though I lived in La Plata now, a modern fast-growing new suburb in San Fernando (85) –San Fernando in Map

S.B. Swingingbridge (85-87)

S.B. “The swingbridge hung over the river, suspended by delicate filaments above the water rushing downstream.  It reminded me of a spider’s web – as transparent and as fragile. Every morning we walked down to the swingbridge, collecting playmates on our way from the other houses, all separated by wide orchards and landscaped gardens” (85)

S.B. “I made for the bridge and ran smoothly along until suddenly the spiderweb began to rock violently from side to side.  The ropes at the side picked up speed and swung high in the air – exactly like a swing.  A swinging bridge” (86)

S.B. “The bridge stayed solid and I never got the chance I wanted to swing my enemy up into the air, much higher than he had flung me.  It wasn’t just his swinging of the bridge that enraged me; it was his little mannish attitude, as if he was sure that he was better than I was and would be” (87)

C.O. She had no feelings of shame about Indian food (89)

G.O., S.O. “Gokool beat her regularly, he said, and most times, even after the beating, he would force her. Force?...None of it made sense to me, especially the way Jasmine complained daily about his beatings and about being forced at night while she continued to look so pretty and so happy” (89)

“Kala pani, the crossing of the ocean from India to the islands of the Caribbean.” (89, 92) –Kala Pani in Historical Context

S.B. Springbridge – the swinging bridge” (92)

S.B. Swingbridge (92)

C.O. Chinese store fire (92)

M Was coming to Canada worthwhile? No (95)

Calypso (97) –Calypso in Glossary and Carnival and J’Ouvert in Historical Context

Carnival (98-99) –Carnival and J’Ouvert in Historical Context

M Migration (104)

Indian influence (103-104) –Cultural Hybridity in Historical Context

C.O. “Keep Canada White” (104)

C.O. “This place is so deep in race” (105)

G.O. Women knew their place (109)

G,O. Baboonie (109)

H.A. “I listened to music and a story, till then unknown to me, coming through the wailing voice of an old beggar woman, crying through the rain, breaking up the classical words of the Ramayana with her own tale of exile and banishment, and in broke chords of unexpected riffs telling the story of a race.  Of racial and tribal grief, of banishment, of the test of purity.  The words had scant meaning to me at the time, solidly implanted as I was in my own family, for whom Hinduism had already become a relic” (113).

H.A. “But now, lying in the darkness of the sleeping house, pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place.  How Baboonie must have had no real name, and how much cruelty must have gone into naming her Baboonie, meaning young girl.  How she was singing Ramayana alone in Toolsie’s hut, singing of such abandonment that words lost their power and only raw sound could capture it, pelting the browken shards of that holy text into the night, singing her grief.  And I listened again, as though to a blessing, hearing Baboonie’s strong voice, washed in rain” (114)