Trinidad, land of Nobel laureates, hummingbirds & steel pans

Preeti Verma Lal

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Inside the paperback, A House for Mr Biswas, a nondescript house is crowded with superstitious men, crabby women and a man named Mohun Biswas, who struggles to find his freedom and a house of his own. That ‘house’ created by Nobel laureate Sir Vidia Surajprasad Naipaul might be fictional but the white house, which was once the family home of Trinidad and Tobago  Guardian writer and author Seepersad Naipaul and wife Dropatie (VS Naipaul’s parents), still stands in Port of Spain’s St James’ neighbourhood.

A plaque hangs outside Naipaul’s childhood home, which was built in 1926 by Pandit Capildeo, who had arrived as an indentured labourer from Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh) in 1894 at the age of 20. Today, the house stands desolated. There’s no din from the paperback house of Mr Biswas. A metal lock holds the iron gate, glass windows are shut tight and black electric wires hang menacingly over the balustrade. The quietude is belying — it is not hard to imagine a complicated narrative unfolding behind the white walls. Naipaul lovers manoeuvre their way through the one-way street to pay homage to the Nobel laureate.

In the crowded bylanes of Port of Spain, Naipaul is not the only Nobel laureate whose name is whispered, his aren’t the only words that get repeated. Derek Walcott, who moved from St Lucia to Trinidad in 1953, is a bigger inspiration and nostalgia in the Trinidadian capital, where he worked as a theatre and art critic and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop.

Words of a writer are not the only chirps in Trinidad, the southernmost island of the Caribbean that sits incredibly close to Venezuela. The earliest settlers were Amerindians who named it ‘Lene’, the land of the hummingbirds. They considered the hummingbird holy and anyone who killed the bird was believed to have assured himself a place in hell.

Even today the hummingbirds lend a musical score to Trinidad. In Yerette Hummingbird Sanctuary (Maracas Valley), hundreds of the tiny hummingbirds flit in and out, sipping nectar from red feeders in Gloria and Theo Ferguson’s pretty home. Of the 17 species of hummingbirds, at least 13 can be found in Yerette. They flit around in such haste that it is difficult to catch the iridescence of the yellows, greens and blues of their feathers.

Musical notes

The chirp of the hummingbird can get drowned in the beat of the steel pan, the only musical instrument invented in the 20th century. Many decades ago, someone picked a 55 gallon chemical container and hit the first note. The twang must have enthralled the pan player. Soon, the hearts of the discarded gallons were beaten hollow to create music with rubber-tipped straight sticks. The percussion was so alluring that Trinidad soon had deft pannists creating an orchestra out of industrial drums. Today, Trinidad is synonymous with steel-panning where steel bands re-interpret the year’s calypso for carnival performance. Another musical genre born in Trinidad is Chutney Soca, a form of music that combines English, Hindi, Hinglish, Bhojpuri to create an unusual melody and lyrics, a combo of calypso with Indian musical instruments.

At night, one can leave behind the steel pans and head to Matura Beach to watch the rare leatherback sea turtle swim ashore from the Atlantic Ocean and lay soft-shell eggs in the warm Trini sand. One of the largest sea turtles, the 800-pound leatherback has called Trinidad its home for millions of years. The female leatherbacks arrive between late April and end-August to lay eggs and return.

At Port of Spain’s Queen’s Park Savannah, the world’s largest roundabout, one can bicker about Naipaul and Walcott’s Trinidad thoughts. “Trinidad may seem complex but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society,” VS Naipaul had famously said. Most disagree with Naipaul’s ‘philistine society’ and prefer to reiterate Night in the Gardens of Port of Spain by Derek Walcott: Night, the black summer, simplifies her smells into a village; she assumes the impenetrable musk of the negro, grows secret as sweat, her alleys odorous with shucked oyster shells…