Come to The Garden

Nana and Nani bought a sugar cane estate in 1945.  The purchase price for the 365 acres was $9500.  They put a down payment of $4000 and paid 6% interest on the balance.  Nana related to me that he paid about $1000 annually and paid off the loan in about six years.  The math is a little fuzzy but demonstrates the tenacity of our indentured servant predecessors.  Indentured servitude is a euphemism for slavery.  You essentially sold yourself to a plantation owner for five years and lived in inhospitable barracks on the property for the duration of your contract. The indentured servants traveled in the belly of former slave ships, in cramped, insufferable conditions but because they were coerced or volunteered, did not have to be chained. My maternal grandmother (whom we called Nani) was born, on the ship, on the six month voyage from India to Trinidad. I don’t know much about her childhood other than the fact that she and Nana were betrothed as children and then, as adults, after they established their household, she and Nana continued the tradition of their parents and worked as laborers in the sugar cane fields in Trinidad. They were required to cut “a task” of cane which would take all day, and be paid .30c, only if they finished.  Most days Nana could finish his task then go help Nani so they would earn .60c daily.  If you do the math the down payment of $4000 requires about 13,000 hours of labor.  However, sometime early in their marriage they bought a small board house, as Nana called it, in McBean Village, Couva for $65.  This small wooden house was converted into living space and a dry goods store and that’s where the bulk of their money was earned.  They bought this house during WWII when commodities were scarce  The shop did so well (there were rumors about Black Market business) that bureaucrats came to investigate one year, but upon seeing the run down shack of a store, resolved that it was probably a mistake and left our grandparents alone. The estate purchased was called Mayvale and was bought from a German by the name of Major Kendall.  The white house on the property dated from the 17^th century and had a cistern and wraparound verandah.  Mammy recalled, as a child, she would run around the rooms and get lost because the house was so large.  The estate’s main crop was sugar cane but there were also mangoes, pineapples and cashew trees as I recall.  Nana turned the barracks, formerly occupied by slaves and then indentured servants, into a pig pen.  When the other villagers heard about the purchase they teased Nana saying, “Ramserran buyin’ jungle” but he worked tirelessly seven days a week to make it prosper. 

We called it The Garden because to grow things back then was called, making garden.  We visited The Garden most Sundays driven by our Tanti Basdai in her old Morris Minor.  It fit 10 comfortably if we sat on each other’s laps, the floor and lay across the back window.  If you sat on the floor you had to be careful not to stick your hand or foot through the holes in the floorboards.  We’d travel with all our supplies to cook a delicious meal, and if we were lucky, make some coconut ice cream in the hand crank barrel.  The colonial mansion was long gone by the time we enjoyed Sundays there; replaced by a less elegant two story stilt board house built with no sense of architectural design or safety.  Under the house was crowded by tractors, machinery, tools and the not unpleasant smell of dirt, grease and sweat. Just outside the house lived the towering derrick for hauling cane.  Upstairs was a living room, bedrooms and a floating kitchen.  I call it a floating kitchen because it protruded out from the living room like an appendage, anchored by nothing and at one point, understandably, started tilting downward to earth.  We kids were not allowed in the kitchen due to the danger and I remember sitting in the living room watching as the adults carefully scurried around preparing meals on the sloping floors.  It was a given that the kitchen would eventually fall and when it did no one was surprised and miraculously no one was hurt.  The notion was that things were used until they were no longer useful then left to go back to nature.  The estate was littered with rusting, obsolete machinery, material, and the structure of a fallen down old kitchen, baking in the sun, waiting to be swallowed up by the jungle.  Nana was a no nonsense guy therefore his bedroom was spartan and dominated by a bed on blocks.  Nana elevated the bed so he could watch the fields at night through the bedroom window.  He was nighttime security.  A sardine can was placed under each of the four legs of the bed to prevent insects from crawling up. The can was filled with water (or maybe pitch-oil) so that any insect that tried to crawl up the leg into the bed would fall into the can and drown.

Our Sunday visits…to be continued