May 3, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
Shaped like a woven basket with a curved handle, the candy-floss well glowed with soft pulsing lights that changed colors at random intervals.
Sparkling gem-covered buckets at the two ends of a rope moved up and down in the clear sunlight. They scooped precious stones from the bottom of the well and poured them back in when they reached the top.
Baby animals grazed alongside their parents on the rolling hills in the background. Patches of clouds floated overhead.
A blemish interrupted the peaceful scene, when a dark speck appeared in the far distance on the other side of the hills.
“Nya!” The girl’s mom called out.
“Coming mom!” The little girl responded. “Bye everyone!” She waved and turned to leave.
A quick glimpse at the black dot rising behind the hills made her nervous. Its ominous presence weighed heavy on her heart.
“Nya! Time to get up!” Her mother’s voice snapped her out of the dream and popped her eyes open.
“Okay Mom.” She rubbed her eyes. The little girl in her dream bore her name and the mom’s voice sounded like her own mother’s. “Come down before your breakfast gets cold.” Her mom paused on the stairs. “You don’t want to miss your bus.”
“Be right down, Mom.” Nya reassured her mother. She pulled her diary from under her pillow to enter the details of her dream. Her heart skipped a beat when she opened the little book. It had captured every aspect of her dream at the point of waking up. She rolled off the bed and tucked the little red book into her school bag.
For the rest of the day, Nya opened the diary and gazed at the dream scene at every opportunity.
At bedtime, she wrote in her diary. After a long gaze at the page with the recorded dream, she pushed the book under her pillow and faded away into sleep.
This night, Nya in the dream had grown into a body double of Nya the dreamer. She wore a t-shirt with a charcoal covered clenched fist painted on the front. The object on the horizon had ascended enough to show the tips of a middle finger and the two fingers beside it.
All the creatures stared at the shadows cast by the fingers at the top of the hill. Nya alternated worried glances between the dark shadows, the well and the golden clouds halfway between them.
A tremor from the sleeping Nya’s pillow jerked her awake with thumping heart. She hopped off the bed with the diary in hand and tiptoed to her writing desk under the bedroom window. She flipped the light on opened the book with trembling fingers. Her heart pounded when the picture in the diary depicted the exit scene of the dream she’d just had. She flipped between the two pages showing her dreams.
After an hour of frustration from trying to decipher the dreams, she trudged back to bed and lay on her back. For the rest of the night, she took turns to examine the dreams portrayed in the book and stare at the ceiling to make sense of them.
Sounds of her mother’s activities in the kitchen downstairs interrupted her musings. Seven hours had elapsed without sleep.
Nya followed the routine of the day before. With homework and supper completed that evening, she battled fatigue to stay awake but succumbed to tiredness around midnight.
The third episode of the dream showed a middle-aged Nya in a long-bleached doctor’s gown. A bright red light emanated through the fingers of her loosely clasped fist.
The dark image over the hills had grown to a height that displayed four straight fingers. They cast long foreboding shadows on the undulating landscape. The grazing animals had abandoned the hills to assemble around the well. The dark shadows from the fingers killed the grass they covered and raced to overtake the light shadows of the gold-dust clouds on the ground.
Nya monitored the race between the dark shadows and the golden clouds, with agitated glances into the well. When she awoke, the little red book had again recorded the dream.
During the bus ride to school, a sudden buildup of dark stormy clouds swirled and blanketed the Earth. The temperature plummeted to zero. The bus grounded to a halt and the engine died, lost in an unknown neighborhood. Howling winds whipped around debris and litter at a hundred miles an hour.
A well dressed old woman appeared at the corner of her eyes. The woman stopped on the sidewalk below Nya’s bus window. Her liquid blue eyes sent a pang of sadness through Nya’s heart.
She dashed off the bus to rescue the woman. Covering her eyes from the stinging sand and gravel, she leaned against the powerful wind and stretched her arm for the woman to grab.
When the tips of their fingers touched, Nya felt a jolt of electricity through her body. The force knocked her to the ground and she blacked out.
Nya regained consciousness with paramedics hovering over her lying on the sidewalk. She shaded her eyes from the brilliant sunshine for a moment before springing up and rushing into the bus. She pulled her diary from her bag.
The little red book used a few pages to complete the saga of Nya’s dreams. She flipped the pages to follow the new dream sequences.
The gold cloud had won the race to the well and poured its dust into it, giving birth to a bright red and yellow firebird. The rising phoenix floated up to the sky to erase the dark shadow, which retreated and shrunk back to a speck before disappearing beyond the hills. The damaged grassy plains regained their lushness when the light of the beautiful bird embraced them with its emanation of warmth.
The pages that followed rocked her back in shock. Diagrams showed her at the three different ages of her life. She recognized herself as the child, the teenager and the old woman.
Her dreams had projected her a hundred years into the future to connect with herself and change the course of destiny. She had risked her own life to save the old woman, who turned out to be herself.
That single heroic and unselfish act had restored the Universe’s faith in humanity. It rewarded the Earth by powering the phoenix’s ascension into the sky and fueling its flaming heat.
Searing heat from the firebird evaporated the underside of the thick mass of dark clouds that had gathered to block out the sun and plunge the Earth into an ice age. The sun’s heat from above helped to disperse the clouds and save the planet from a frigid end.
That night, Nya’s dream made her smile. Her body double wore a white t-shirt with open palms. A beautiful firebird waved its wings to rise up in freedom.
The last piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Future generations no longer had the threat of Armageddon hanging over them for another hundred years.
By Romeo Kaseram
(Part 2)
Before his short life ended tragically in a ditch among the canefields in McBean Village, Trinidad, Harold Sonny Ladoo wrote two novels, No Pain Like This Body (1972), and Yesterdays, published posthumously in 1974. In his 2010 essay, The Distinctive Indo-Caribbean Art and Voice of Harold Sonny Ladoo, Professor Victor J. Ramraj writes: “Ladoo’s novels focus… on the early indentured East Indian immigrants adapting to their harsh life in Trinidad and to the challenges of colonialism, forced as they were to accommodate themselves to the social, political, and economic imperial demands of a small British colony, and – particularly in the second novel – to enforced religious conversion.
“To come to Ladoo’s novels from those of his fellow Indo-Trinidadian novelists (a group that includes Neil Bissoondath, Rabindranath Maharaj, Ismith Khan, V. S. Naipaul, and Samuel Selvon) is to be made aware quickly of how distinct he is from these writers, how unique he is in his portrayal of a specific rural pocket of Trinidad’s East Indian population in the early part of the twentieth century... Ladoo constructs in his novels a harsh, natural, and human environment of wrenching poverty, peopled by individuals given to violent and abusive domestic and communal relationships. They are perhaps the most appallingly brutal, vulgar, and obscene characters in all of West Indian literature.”
Looking at Ladoo’s “preoccupation with violence and brutality”, Ramraj argues the “recurrence of these elements encourages us to read his novels as illustrations par excellence of the naturalistic novel.” He adds: “The sociological exactness renders them valuable regional documents without smothering their common human import or ties with other naturalistic novels. Ladoo’s rural Indo-Trinidadian characters are very much at the mercy of their natural and human environments; this is particularly true of… Yesterdays, where his language and imagery are recurringly crude and earthy surpassing anything found in [Emile] Zola… Yet, like Zola, Ladoo captures bluntly the harshness of poverty – its filth, prejudice, ignorance, vulgarity, savagery, and sexuality – imbuing this text with a pervasive pessimism. The Indo-Trinidadian peasants are at the mercy of their environment and circumstances, and their lot is nothing but unrelieved suffering, a perspective of life affirmed by the very title of…. No Pain Like This Body (a phrase taken from The Dhammapada: Wisdom of Buddha [verse 202], which means – as other less metaphorical translations of this verse make clear – that there is no suffering like physical existence itself or ‘khandas’ (which includes body, feelings, perception, thoughts, and consciousness).”
In her epigraph in No Pain Like This Body, Dionne Brand writes about Ladoo’s invocation of Hindu textuality: “In the ancient text the Ramayana, Rama is wrongfully sent into exile from Ayodhya. He spends fourteen years fighting various battles, the most crucial to reclaim his wife, Sita, from the demon king of Lanka, Ravana and he returns in triumph to Ayodhya to sit as its rightful king. On his return the people light deyas along his way welcoming him home. That epic myth arrived in the diaspora with indenture workers. It was perhaps a source of sustenance throughout their own exile. A return garlanded in the lights of welcome awaited them after the bleak drudgery of a life tied to plantations of cane and rice.
“This epic lies somewhere in the text of No Pain Like This Body. But no garland of light precedes or follows Ladoo’s Rama. A fever burns in him, he is stung by scorpions and eventually carried even further away from mythic Ayodhya. The lights that preceded Rama were supposed to remove darkness not only from homes but also to banish ignorance and hatred from hearts. Ladoo renders a Ramayana steeped in hatred and violence. Plagued by incessant rain (“the rain fell like a shower of poison over Tola”) and a god terrible and indifferent (“God does only eat and drink in that sky”), Ladoo’s onomatopoeic insistencies make more horrifying the action in the novel. His characters’ trusting innocence, their supplication to fate are made more disastrous by his feats of verbal play. Told through the view of a child, nature and human beings are overwhelmingly brutal.”
The brutality is evident in the space of the novel’s circularity, in its alpha and its omega, in its startling opening and ambiguous ending: “Pa came home. He didn’t talk to Ma. He came home just like a snake. Quiet”; its ending sees similar brushstrokes of violence: “The sky twisted like a black snake and the clouds rolled and rolled and rolled as a big spider; the wind shook Tola in a rage and the rain pounded the earth; the lightning came out of the mouth of the darkness like a golden tongue and licked the trees in the forest and the drum ripped through the darkness like a knife. They moved deeper and deeper into the forest, and they felt the rain falling upon their heads from heaven.”
If Ladoo draws from a known world of violence and brutality to make it a constant in No Pain Like This Body, then it is easy to read this textuality into what was the horrific end to the life of this young, promising writer. Ramraj writes of the novelist’s passing: “The circumstances of his death – his battered body was found in drainage ditch – has led some to believe he was murdered. [Roydon] Salick speculates that he may have been killed because he had revealed much that was embarrassing about several individuals, who recognised themselves in his first novel. Peter Such, in an extended account of Ladoo’s last days in Toronto before he made his fateful last trip to Trinidad, wonders whether his death may have been related to the circumstances that led to his mother being ousted from her home and forced to become a street beggar. He recalls Ladoo stomping ‘around grimly,’ on learning that she had been ‘cheated of her possessions’ and ‘was destitute’.”
Such recalled receiving news about Ladoo’s murder: “It was [Ladoo’s wife] Rachel. ‘Harold’s been killed in Trinidad. Someone beat him on the head and left him in the ditch along McBean Road. I don’t know why he was walking there. I want to go there now. I want to go and see him…’
“When I got there, at the apartment, there were all kinds of people I didn’t know. I looked up for his portrait. They’d turned it to the wall. I couldn’t do anything about it, though I wanted to. At this time, like no other, I so dearly wanted to see his face.”
Ladoo was killed on August 17, 1973; he was 27 years old, just starting out on his writing career. His killer has never been apprehended.
Sources for this exploration are: Dr Victor Ramraj, Arts Journal: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, Art & Culture of Guyana & the Caribbean, September 1, 2010: The Distinctive Indo-Caribbean Art and Voice of Harold Sonny Ladoo; Peter Such, The Short Life and Sudden Death of Harold Sonny Ladoo (http://www.pancaribbean.com/ladoo/such.htm); and Dionne Brand’s epigraph in No Pain Like This Body, House of Anansi Press Inc., 2013.