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Ladies IN RED?
No, no! The Trinidad Carnival, The Mass on, well, Horseback and stilts?
their trip to Trinidad & Tobago in the early 19th Century.
Orientation and Identification
The East Indians of Trinidad are descendants of indentured laborers who were brought to this southernmost island in the Caribbean from the South Asian subcontinent during the second half of the nineteenth century. They were called “East Indians” by Europeans to distinguish them from Native Americans.
GRANDAD AND HIS EARLY WAYS
My Grandfather was received as an Indian and a Coolie in the 19th century, a weird response to the end of the African slave trade and the end of slavery. While Indian indenture were drawn from agricultural and laboring, Edmund Narine wrote bestsellers. He never knew me as a magazine writer or a warrior in the Vietnam WAR, though he and my Dad and his brother would shoot the breeze about any and every horse race in the contry that were entwined in their heart.
THE OTHER SIDE OF LIFE
When the few years of fruit had ended, the local harvest receeding in distance all the way to the horizon, and even below it, there was nothing for him to equate with life in the field, those East Indians that my grandfather, born in Calcutta, had — within the psychic space nature had allowed him to roam — across the small hills in Trinidad, in the valleys, to itself and all the rest of that Eden that nature had endowed him.
The Horse racing field, too, had a form about it that was magical, surreal, ethereal. Relaxed.
THE MAGIC OF THE CARNIVAL
Back then, he knew why even in laughter that the heart is sorrowful. The fields, too, laughed with him in their ripeness and, with the bounty leaving him withered like parched cane stalks, it was about those memories that took him from one…
