A tale of two countries

To leave a country and go to another, even if it is a land called Chini-dad or the land of sugar, is to leave behind more than just a country. It is to let go of your food, your language, your status in a social hierarchy... almost all the markers of identity. And so the indentured labourers who went on to the ships (or jahaaj) formed a new identity they were jahajins and they tried to hang together regardless of what had separated them in India.

There are three intertwined tales in Jahajin. There is a folk tale of Sarongs, a princess torn between a monkey who was her lover in a past birth and the prince of her present birth there is the narrator's tale, a descendant of a jahaji family which had converted to Christianity a generation or two earlier facing the usual torments of the home and the world and there is the 110-year-old jahajin of the title, Deeda alias Parbati.

Deeda was one of the single women who came to the Caribbean with only her son. These women were the reason that the Indian community survived in Trinidad they were the stabilising influences, the family-makers. Her story begins in Bhojpuri. She tells her story straight and it seems as authentic as 'faction' (there is no indication anywhere whether this is fact or fiction) until the moments when Mukoon Singh, a widower Deeda might have loved, breaks down and weeps and Deeda says, &ldquoAt first he cried in relief...&rdquo Then a little later she says, &ldquoHe cried in outrage...&rdquo And finally, &ldquo... he was crying for everything he was about to lose...&rdquo This is not to deny Deeda her emotional acuity it sounds suspiciously like the impulses of American fiction, psychobabble meeting ontology.

But by then we already love Deeda and so we don't mind this mangling. And by the time the narrator is in India, Deeda has finished her tale, and the monkey lover has found his true reward, we are willing to let much go for the details such as the naming of Langoor Mama, the carrying of mango seeds and hardi seedlings, the songs that are sung, the rhythms of a labourer's life.