Ties That Bind: An Indian Traveller In Guyana

Of Land, Water and Poetry

As the Caribbean Airlines flight descended slowly, one could see a long ribbon of a river surrounded by dense forests on either side. Half of my mind was in disbelief. It was the Amazon rainforest that I was glimpsing through the plane’s window, beyond the southern border of Guyana. After flying halfway around the world, with a stopover in freezing Amsterdam, spending a night in Trinidad and Tobago and then taking a short flight to Guyana, here I was, walking down the stairway, breathing in warm and humid air, feeling the wind on my face. The runway, with its red laterite soil and mukkutti (Little Tree) flowers, reminded me of what Calicut—my hometown—airport used to be 20 years ago.

The roads to the city resembled our fishing villages. The Demerara River, rising from the central rainforests of Guyana, with its faintly reddish waters feeding a whole ecosystem before flowing into the Atlantic, was no different from our Nila in Kerala loosening her girdle in the monsoon. Rivers flow through our bodies as much as they flow through the earth, feeding ecosystems and poetry.

The sky was blue and the clouds shone with brilliance. However, all of a sudden, it would grow cloudy and overcast, and a mild drizzle would follow. It tended to stop as abruptly as it started. The shallow pools of water everywhere had manathhukanni (a freshwater fish) floating on their surface. It was nearly delusional to look at the sky and the dark clouds and to not think this was Calicut.

The Burden of History

Guyana is also called the Land of Many Waters. One could almost believe that water slept beneath the soil, waiting to emerge wherever the earth opened.

On the long flight from Amsterdam to Trinidad and Tobago, I had accidentally switched seats with a gentleman, both of us blissfully unaware of the faux pas. This led to a conversation with a bright young lady seated next to me. Livia was travelling to Trinidad and Tobago. She had partial roots in India and recounted how Holi was called ‘phagun’ and chhole bhature had a Trinidadian version called ‘doubles’. In Calicut, underneath Elathur Palam, one came upon a fresh harvest of oysters and mussels, a rarity in southern Kerala. The rest of the country labelled them under the exotic name ‘seafood’. Livia seemed to know mussels and oysters the way I knew them, though our recipes were different. In Calicut, we used shelled mussels, whereas in her recipes, they were served in a thick sauce with shells left open. The two of us parted at the Trinidad and Tobago airport, hoping to meet another time.

In Guyana, I could easily connect to the Indian-origin names. Generations ago, their ancestors had arrived as indentured labourers on sugar plantations under colonial rule. Fried plantains and boiled cassava (tapioca) were eaten much the way they were in Calicut. The streets came alive to the rhythm of chutney music—a fusion of Indian folksongs and Caribbean beats—and to the chatter of people speaking in Creole. St. George’s Cathedral, the largest wooden church in the world, stood solemn and beautiful in the dark.

However, it was the poets I was looking for, whether in Trinidad and Tobago or Guyana. It wasn’t long ago that I had read Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert set in Trinidad and Tobago. I came to learn about Mahadai Das, a prominent Guyanese poet and one of the earliest Indo-Guyanese women writers to speak about the racial and gender issues faced by Caribbean women. I discovered the works of Rajiv Mohabir and Shivanee Ramlochan, contemporary poets from the region. I was told that the place I stayed in, Hotel El Dorado in Georgetown, Guyana, had once hosted the poet, Grace Nichols. I didn’t know how true this was, but preferred to believe it. My room had the portrait of an African woman in a stylish hat, holding a book. It held the burden of history.

The long Atlantic coastline had a seawall to protect the land from the rising sea. On a full-moon night with the waves crashing over the rocks and light falling on the flame-coloured leaves of almond trees, I thought I was sleepwalking on Calicut beach by the Arabian Sea. In my ears resonated Mahadai Das’ lines:

‘They came in ships/ from far across the seas/Britain, colonising the East in India…they came in fleets of ships/ they came in droves/ like cattle/ brown like cattle/ eyes limpid, like cattle/remember one-third quota/ Coolie woman/ Was your blood spilled so that I might reject my history.’

Smitha Sehgal is a poet and legal professional