How lucky am I. I got to meet an author whose books changed my life and asked him about another who also changed my life. How can I have so many life changes? Good question.
I think there may be 2 people, apart from my late father who planted the seeds and nourished the growth, who really get how I read. It's difficult to explain. Like most Trinidadians, my introduction to reading V. S. Naipaul was being assigned Miguel Street in Form 2. Poorly taught by a teacher who was probably tired of teaching but still fond of reading, I was very fortunate to have a father who wanted to teach me how to love it. Unfortunately, I did not care for being taught by my father, and was grumpy until he got fed up.
But C.P. Maharaj's little girl Petal was not C.P. Maharaj's little girl Petal for nothing. Stuff stuck and I really had no say in the matter. He had already introduced me to the comic Naipaul because he was teaching a particular favorite of his, A House for Mr. Biswas. Like any good teacher worth his or her salt, he re-read the book every time he had to teach it. So, at least once a year!
He would tell my mother about things he thought she could relate you and there was a lot in Biswas for him, her, and me to relate to. We all had our bodies rubbed with coconut oil as babies. We all knew a man in the area that people said hid his money in his house and was, therefore, rich as Croesus but miserly AF. And punditry. I do know very respectable pundits but it was pretty clear my parents knew the other kind and laughed like crazy over Biswas's internship with a pundit, and Pundit Hari who blighted more than he blessed. And, of course, we built and moved into a house of our own. And never recovered from that.
I had an even closer relationship with Biswas. I hated the houses I live in and wanted to live in my own space. But let me start from the beginning, or what I can remember of it.
I was already an adult when I read Biswas for the first time. I could not put it down. It sucked me in and lit me up like dry bamboo in fire. My father knew those places, described them so that I felt I was there when he was but a lad. When I was small, a lot of Central was still under bush and he once took me there to eat food by some people. When I read Biswas, I could taste the fry bodi I ate there. I still can.
Biswas struck another nerve when I began to work at the Guardian as a sub-editor. I moved in the same halls as Pa Naipaul and Sir Vidia and I felt heady, like there was some kind of secret only I knew, nevermind that everyone and his nen-nen knew. Just like Biswas, I learned why use three words when you can use one and why some pieces tug at the heartstrings more than others. Just like Pa and Vidia, I learned to lay out a page and secretly longed to write the Great West Indian Novel. Here's where Seepersad and I veer off and Sir Vidia takes front and center.
A friend of mine pointed out that Mohun Biswas seems ungrateful. He get house and wife and a work and he just can't be satisfied. I pointed out that I lived somewhere once where I got everything I asked for and I hated every sickening second of living there. It destroyed a part of my soul. I had to get out of a trapping, yes, partly of my own making, but one that was quickly suffocating any life and joy out of me. So I left before I died.
It took a long time to get that joy back. Having Christophene helped, but much like Anand and Savi, he knew where he lived and it wasn't with me. Working at the Guardian helped. I found something I was good at and thought I could build a career my kid could be proud of. Das Derkitude also helped even as I was plunging into one of the darkest periods of my life, second only to the one that I experienced when I moved to NYC.
And moving here, of course. A house of my own. Finally. But also buried beneath obligation, illness, an unstable relationship, and overwhelming sadness. But during this time of despair I identified with this passage more than any other in my life:
".. . he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front fate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night, to hear no noises except those if his family, to wander freely from room to room and about his yard, instead of being condemned, as before, to retire the moment he got home to the crowded room in one or the other of Mrs. Tulsi's houses, crowded with Shama's sisters, their husbands, their children. As a boy he had moved from one house of strangers to anther; and since his marriage he felt he had lived nowhere but in the houses the Tulsis, at Hanuman House in Arwacas, in the decaying wooden house at Shorthills, in the clumsy concrete house in Port of Spain. And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should have been responsible for this seemed to him, in these last months, stupendous."
Take a moment to admire the craft. That is a whole separate blog post. So just take it in.
I am not at all forgetting that my husband is the one responsible for putting his wife in house and that without him, there may not have been a house. And it's not just my house. It's ours. Here is where Biswas and I finally part ways. He and Shama may have struck up some kind of detente, but me and the husband dug in deep and loved each other as hard as we could and made this house a home. I adore him and he thinks about me, which I think is the purest form of love one person can feel about another. I don't just think about him and what he may be doing. I think about a specific time he made me laugh, or a conversation about something, or watching baseball, or the look on his face when I open a gift from him. I learned lessons from Biswas and, as my friend pointed out, the best one was not to take things for granted.
Whatever Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul may have later become, whatever politics he may have subscribed to, whatever people and places he alienated, he gave me Biswas, a book that needs more credit for being in my life than I have ever given it.
For a proper obituary that gives Sir Vidia his due, please read this written by one of those 2 people, my UWI professor, mentor, and friend, Kenneth Ramchand.
