All Ira's commentaries are gathered and arranged in alphabetical order.
A month in America was more than enough. The longer I stayed, the more layers of sheen peeled off to reveal the rot. It’s surreal to watch a country unravel the way America has. The land of opportunity, technology, the nuclear power, the forays to the moon, the medical research, the protestant work ethic, the meritocracy has been held up like a glittering prize on the world stage.
I saw the unravelling in the face of the woman who was selling jewelry in a tiny shop in New York. I stopped to look (as women do at everything, driving men mad) and the woman surprised me by pulling everything out from underneath the counter and insisting that I try it on. I took it off and made to leave when she shouted out: “For you, I will give you 20 per cent off.” She got more desperate: “40 per cent off, 60 per cent off. Just look, just try, just see you won’t get anything like this anywhere in New York.”
Looking for quality
I felt profoundly sad for her. The last time I heard entireties like that was in India, where vendors hassle you and follow you around in busy markets, in the outskirts of cities, in tourist spots. Not the India of the malls and high streets where prices are now fixed. You don’t expect this in Manhattan. In that jeweller’s face I saw the desperation of people who have to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. She knows when there’s a credit crunch the first thing to go are the luxuries.
It felt like walking around some sci-fi film Speilberg set. Daily, we saw more and more shops having “closing down” sales, restaurants and hotels offering unbelievable deals, counselling for people who had lost their homes in department stores.
The very rich, of course, are still immune as they are in Nigeria, Bombay, Lahore, Zimbabwe. People dressed in furs still walked out of Trump Towers with past obsequious, liveried doormen into their waiting limos.
An exhibition of antique art, which I went to just to look, as that was all I could do, (who pays US$ 250,000 on a deep green emerald ring?) still drew in the hoi polloi.
The very snooty rep standing handling a silver cigarette case owned by Napoleon looked down his nose at me and my question of “are sales dropping after the Wall Street crash with “the people who buy antiques aren’t looking for bargains. They are looking for quality and one Wall Street crash wont affect them.” Naturally it won’t. Especially if they were Wall Street CEOs with their $US 300 million pound bonuses and golden parachutes. They were safe, as the greedy and corrupt tend to be.
The masses that the Statue of Liberty promised protection were the ones who were huddling now. The people lost thousands in retirement savings, their homes, the families who live in their cars, and the ones who are living in $150 boxes, the ones who lost their jobs and will continue to lose their jobs are huddling in what Barack Obama has called the worst recession about the great depression.
What caused it? Greed, yes, but anyone and everyone can be greedy. Really what caused it was lack of accountability, transparency and a conscience. The boys club who drank champagne in one another’s private planes and yachts and colluded to cream off the money belonging to thousands of ordinary folk.
There are parallels at home in Trinidad. Except most of our lack of accountability comes from the Government. And when the oil prices drop, the shake-up will leave just those in power standing while the Cepep workers, the people who should be educated for the jobs now being done by foreigners will be huddling.
Proper jobs
In the hospital where I had a procedure, a health worker called Eva told me she earned US$30,000 a year. Her rent alone in a tiny apartment in a rundown area of New Jersey is US $1,500 a month which puts less than US$13,000 in her hand (she is taxed on that) a year. She is a single mother with two grown sons to house and feed. Neither of them has proper jobs. She could barely make ends meet and started a degree that put her in the red even more.
She works in the day, takes an hour-and-a-half to get home, has classes or studies in the evening and weekends, and lives on fast food. She has put on 30 pounds in the past year. She says she learned in her health education course that American health insurance is a scam, that America ranks the 36th worst in the world for health care out of 100 countries.
We see that at home when young healthy people emerge from Mount Hope in body bags, with no one investigating or held accountable.
When Eva told me she was 37 years old and felt her life was over, I didn’t know what to say. She said it. She is originally from Cuba (where the health care is among the best worldwide), and says the American Dream doesn’t exist any more.
We in Trinidad and Tobago, like the rest of the world, have aped America so long and so consistently, that even if our fundamentals were weak like America we wouldn’t know it.
Out in the country, in Vermont, I encountered racists, some of whom crossed the road when they saw my husband out on a run, and one who told me to my face that there was a time he would not be seen talking to me, that he will be voting for the “N…” Even trailer trash recognise they can’t afford to be racist.
At least the Americans had a solid foundation—a work ethic to start with, invention, opportunity when their bubble burst. Now they need a strong leader to guide them back. Barack Obama, with his focus on the ordinary people, on struggling American families, with his steady, intellectual, non-partisan, humane grip on America is that hope.
What’s ours when our oil bubble bursts? And what do we go back to?
This is the first in a series of vignettes of life in Trinidad, starting with an account by a kidnapped man.
"Three men posing as clients were waiting for me in the reception area at my business. They pulled out their guns and said they came for me. I screamed, then went quiet when they punched me in the stomach.
I was in shock. I was praying my daughter wouldn’t walk in; that they wouldn’t kill my staff. They wrapped me up in plastic material, lifted me up and shoved me in the back of a waiting car.
One guy held a gun at my head, then temple ears, eyes, heart, stomach, shouting obscenities non-stop. The other guy taped me up. Blindfolded, I lost my orientation.
They were driving fast. An hour later, they bundled me into a room. They handcuffed me, tied me up with an electrical cord and put me on a low chair.
They wanted three million dollars. They asked for my family’s telephone numbers.
Negotiations began. I told them the truth. I was heavily-mortgaged. My family was trying to raise the money. Police had an idea where we were, but not the exact location.
I am glad they didn’t raid us, because if anyone connected to the kidnapping is killed, that is trouble. I didn’t want anything to eat or drink for 24 hours.
After 36 hours, I told them I was getting dehydrated; my kidneys would shut down. They brought me water and crackers.
They monitored the news. They didn’t want to kill me; just wanted the money. I told them I would give them $50,000 if they let me go, with no police involvement. They refused. Wanted more.
The hardest thing was being blindfolded, handcuffed and strapped on a nailed-down metal chair for over a week. I couldn’t urinate. I had terrible back pain.
A man with a gun stayed in the room with me. Non-stop, he threatened to kill me.
I got fed up and told him to go ahead. He shoved the gun in my ear and said, 'I am going to leggo this trigger on you.’
I said, ‘Let go, nah man.’
I caught myself. I sympathised with them; said the rich/poor divide was unfair; maybe they were doing the right thing. I was careful not to condemn them.
When I told the gunman he was blessed, and advised him to save and invest the money when they got it, instead of squandering it, he brought a plastic bowl for me to urinate.
He would massage my back. I tried to move around to prevent deep vein thrombosis.
The more you fight, the worse it is. If you bawl and they put duct tape over your mouth you will hyperventilate and choke to death.
They knew what they were doing. Didn’t tie me up too tight. I was lucky. If people die—they die in first half-hour.
Police raids are a bad idea. The victim has to come out alive. Until then, the police hands are tied.
When they got $100,000 they dropped me off. The police picked me up.
Afterwards I sent a message to the kidnappers. I am offering no evidence.
My family was traumatised by waiting, not knowing. Anxiety for one another’s safety is now part of our lives.
I am carrying on like nothing happened. If they want you they can get you. They know my whereabouts. They knew my hours.
On that day, I came into work early. If I had come at my regular hour they would have taken me without anyone knowing. If they don’t get you inside they get you outside.
You can put up burglarproof, video cameras. Nobody is giving evidence. They could come back for me. A different set of people. There is nothing we can do. These days people in business can get shot for cross talk with the customer.
They come back for you. This guy who was renting a car got ten shots.We are living a life of Russian roulette. Who is next?
We have green cards, but gave them up.
Leave for what? To be physically safe but stare at four walls and go to the mall every day? To drive hundreds of miles to see your brother? To dig up a flower garden? My life, family, friends, are here.
We live with a culture of bad parenting, 5,000 illiterate youngsters entering the underworld and drug trade annually.
We need a thousand Servols countrywide. When last I heard my kidnappers, with government jobs, holiday, pay, got a promotion.”
The world is what it is. It’s the title of the new VS Naipaul biography and captures the fatalism with which we live daily.
By Ira Mathur 2008-06-22
This is the second in a series highlighting daily life of ordinary citizens in this country: “My sister was murdered. She was stabbed in her neck and set on fire. She was 42, the mother of two teenagers. For two years I have been roaming the streets, Charlotte Street, Nelson Street, Independence Square, looking for her killer.
I am obsessed with finding him. I see people and double back to make sure I am wrong or not wrong. It haunts me. Everywhere I go I think I see him. The desperation to find him is so much that I can’t sleep.
I heard of my sister’s murder one afternoon when my older sister called and said she heard our younger sister had died in a fire. Her house was completely burnt, only part of the structure remained standing.
The police told us they found the remains of what appears to be a female and couldn’t identify her, because she was burnt beyond recognition, and that they were looking for the man who was living with her. We told them this man called a neighbour on the morning of our sister’s death saying he had ‘a surprise.’ That evening he called back, saying: ‘You like my surprise? I kill she,’ and hung up. The police's response was ‘OK.’
They repeated they were looking for him, not as a suspect, but as the last person who had seen her. We blew up a photo of him, which the police distributed to other police stations. That was it. They never followed up.
My husband went to the autopsy. I couldn’t face it. She was charred. She had only one part of leg, a wrist was missing, her face gone. She had buck teeth, and that was used to identify her.
Her teenage son is angry; daughter, devastated.
I know my sister lived in a domestic situation she didn’t want us to know anything about. This man alienated her from her family. He controlled her. If he saw numbers he didn’t know on her cellphone, he would call the numbers. She had no privacy. No time. Wherever she went, he went. She lost her job because he was living on the doorstep of the office on Edward Street. He was making himself a nuisance. Her co-workers said she used to look like she was always scared. He is very domineering. She had to change her whole way of dressing; couldn’t wear make-up; couldn’t wear jeans. If he asked her to do something it was: ‘Do it now.’
He would make derogatory remarks to her. One day she went to drop her niece to school. He told our mother, ‘She gone with a man.’ Once he locked her into his apartment and she had to sneak out at 2 am. By 4 am he was on my mother’s porch looking for her. My sister overheard him telling her once: ‘If you leave I will hunt you down and kill you. I know your kids and the school they go to.’
It is heartbreaking to think he put so much fear in her for her children’s lives that she didn’t think she could reach out to us. When we tried to talk to her about it, she said we didn’t understand and got angry. I wish I had insisted. For two years the police have been telling us they are ‘still looking.’ Once they said they ‘heard’ my sister’s perpetrator got on a boat and went on a small island. How do they know he got on a boat? What are they not telling us?
Look at the way they went after the men who recently murdered a soldier. He was one of them. Unless it hits home, the police and military do nothing for citizens. We have no faith in 99.9 per cent of the police. There are countries with zero tolerance on crime where punishment is swift and brutal. Where people don’t spend years and years waiting for justice. That’s the justice we need. We drag our feet on everything.
If I see my sister’s killer I cannot promise myself I won’t go after him. He took my sister’s life for no reason, boasted about it, took everything from my niece and nephew. I have pictures of my sister at home and I can’t look at them.
I live in anger and grief.”
(as told to Ira Mathur)
I live on an island, but my feet had not touched the sand for three years. I had not allowed the sea water to swirl me about. I had not driven to Maracas at midnight to watch the moon reflected in the moving inky slate of water, or wanting to possess the swell of the green hills. The hold-ups, murders, reckless drivers and a punishing degree, kept me away. But after three years, I was going back to the sea. This time, not through rainforest, but on a boat, to a rented house down the islands, snug in the channel between South America and Trinidad.
It was exhilarating, this short ride from Chaguaramas (thick with yachts in this hurricane shelter) to an island on the southern tip of Gasparee Island. The sea played itself as West Indians like to say: green gold waves, as pleasing as a mermaid’s tail, bob and dapple with the sun, then it changes, hardens as dark clouds gather and drill the depths, into a moving slab of cement that can crack the hardiest ship and swallow humans. The people of this country own this, a millionaire’s paradise, I thought, from the verandah, in dazzling morning sunlight and a dolphin’s leap raised delighted screams from the swimming and floating children. I could stay here, without newspapers, the Internet, computers, clocks and calenders, as the days and nights seamlessly merged together.
But the tide could not contain itself. It had news for us. In the form of the garbage, it brought into the small enclave, created partially by a magnificent tall rock (reminiscent of the nearby Gasparee caves, with its dark wizards jutting stalagmites its shallow green pool)and partially by the man-made stairs and wall of the house. The flotsam was a slap in the face to the panoramic beauty about us, the devil in a church, all plastic and glass, large industrial-sized bags, ripped carelessly, bottles, smaller bags, collecting like a Jumbie’s brew. We looked in dismay, disappointed that even here, there was no escape. Everyone looking on had something to say. “The garbage has come from the beaches.” “It has come from the drains in the villages, towns and cities. People throw out their KFC boxes, plastic bags and sweet drink bottles out the window, on the streets. When it rains the drain carries it into the river, and the river brings it to the sea.” “Don’t the people who litter realise that it causes flooding in their areas?” “Plastic takes a thousand years to degrade. In the meantime, the marine life is poisoned, the sea polluted. ”
“The Government should embark on an enormous campaign, educate the people, put up signs everywhere. Don’t litter. Use bins. Recycle. Litter creates flooding.” A woman said quietly: “I am so ashamed of being a citizien of Trinidad and Tobago. How can I feel proud? We are told we are oil rich; that we should loosen our belts; that we are literate, and developed; that we are Trini to the Bone. If that is the case, why are we so filthy? Why do we have no civic sense? Why don’t we care about the filth in our tiny islands?”
A man answered: “ Forget recycling, forget the waste of plastic, paper and glass—the Environmental Management Authoritiy does nothing about it. We accept we will never get there. How can we when we haven’t even got to the stage of putting garbage cans strategically in public places. There are laws, but nobody enforces them. If nobody enforces traffic laws, where do you think that leaves the litter laws?” Someone suggested we start a citizens clean-up group. But no one believed it would get anywhere. Everybody thought of the news of the two men who died on the road the day before. The plastic garbage was crashing about in this poetic area up, floating, forming a circular macabre grin, leaping with the waves with a grotesque playfulness. Then I saw the glove. A long white plastic glove that would cover a man’s right arm, groping its phantom hand in the water. Where did that come from?
I thought of the papers that came with the fisherman that morning. The brutalised face of a Chinese man, the headline of a man murdered in his bedroom. Did the man who bashed him wear the glove? Or was it a gang leader? A rapist and murderer in a country where women and girls often just “vanish.” We could have turned our backs. Pretended the glove wasn’t there lapping at our feet. We do that all the time. We follow our indifferent leaders. Our Prime Minister says we should loosen our belts. And we turn our backs on the old woman who stands in a corner in the supermarket deciding between a can of sardines with a loaf of bread. She can’t have both.
The National Security Minister pretends that crime is under control. So we pretend it is too. Forget about the murder or two a day, and go out at night, take a chance. The Governor of the Central Bank says our economy is under control. We pretend not to see the hundreds of shacks in the East West Corridor, the abject poverty in our rural areas. The Minister of Education says we have over 90 per cent literacy, but the adult literacy NGO says that 400,000 people can only read signs, and we just have to hear the average Trinidadian speak, write, or read to know just how illiterate we are. Down the islands, on the beaches, in our waters, in the forest, and in our rivers, in the villages, in the city, behind gated communities, and high-rise buildings, the glove waits for us. There is no escape from menace of indifference.
Of the Government, of the tired community groups which realise that they will remain powerless, of the individuals who know the voices of an entire country have been silenced. It is only a matter of time that the long arm of the phantom plastic glove will eat through the institutions that now ignore the people, – government institutions: health, education, business. The arm will eventually get at them; eat away at them, and us. If its ugly arm is groping about in the loveliest, the remotest bits of our islands, in our very waters, there is no escape.
By Ira Mathur
This is the third in a series highlighting daily life of ordinary citizens. Whenever it rains, a 14-year-old feels the steel plate in her thigh expand, dig into her flesh, throb painfully. She can no longer run or jump.
It took a split-second decision by a driver, knowing his recklessness will never be called to account by a clogged court system and unmonitored roads, to damage her life, irrevocably.
This is Angel’s story as told by her and her mother Joan (names changed).
“Angel is my only child. I am a single mother. I live with my widowed father and younger sister. I have worked very hard to give Angel opportunities I never had.
With her own determination Angel came in the top 100 in SEA and passed for a prestige school.
On September 29, 2006, my sister was taking Angel to school in a maxi-taxi. It rammed into a wall while trying to overtake a van. Angel lurched forward with the impact, breaking her leg. Almost everyone was hurt. Angel’s injury was the worst.
A policeman told Angel he would get in touch with her. He never came for the month-and-a-half she was at the general hospital. Three months later, the police took a statement from her. Nothing came of it.”
Angel:
“I broke a thigh bone and had to undergo emergency surgery on my leg where traction, weighing 15 pounds, was drilled into my leg for a week. I then had surgery to insert a steel plate from my thigh to the tip of my knee.
When it rains the steel in my leg ‘inflates.’ I can’t concentrate in class with the pain.
I am angry with the driver. He doesn’t have to go through what I do every day. He got away. It’s really unfair.”
Joan:
“We never heard from the maxi-taxi driver after it was established he was wrong.
After surgery, the therapist showed Angel how to use crutches. After that she was abandoned on the ward for weeks. Her doctor said he wouldn’t send her home until she could raise and bend her leg. But no therapist came.
I did my own therapy on her. After she was able to raise her leg, the doctor discharged her without giving us access to a government therapist.
When we went home, her leg stayed straight. It wouldn’t bend. She was in continuous pain.
We took her to a private therapist. It was expensive. We had to hire a taxi for her each time.
Dr Toby, who met Angel at the general hospital voluntarily, did a free procedure at Princess Elizabeth Centre that helped a lot. People like him give us hope.
She’s traumatised by the whole thing because of the constant pain. She is upset she can’t play netball, or run. She still walks with a limp.”
Angel:
“More than missing my netball, I worry about criminals because I can’t run, escape or defend myself if something happens. In most countries after such an accident people get their driver’s permit taken away but he is still driving. Every day when I travel to school I see at least one driver break a traffic light.”
Joan:
“It was the maxi-taxi driver’s fault. You have passengers’ lives in your hands and that’s what you do? Insist on overtaking a van? For what?
Angel was in Form 2, prevented from going to school, missed exams, at 14 lives with the steel in her leg.
The driver who is responsible is now driving a white bus and illegally carrying passengers around. He says if gets into an accident he has nobody to compensate. He still thinks he is right, that everyone else is wrong.
People live and drive like there is no law. It’s true. There isn’t.
I have no confidence in the police or courts. Even if people do something terrible, at most they will spend a day or two in jail and they are out. They are quite happy with that. That’s why Trinidad is the way it is.”
It’s amazing what stress can do to your body. For some six months I have had the taste of apple cider in my mouth. Doesn’t sound bad for a few minutes, but on a prolonged basis it can drive you crazy.
I’ve had every test done. Scans everywhere. Nothing showed up.
“Let’s put it this way,” said one doctor. “You are an A-type person. You are always wound up.” That explained the acidity, he said. Bizarrely, when I was looking outwards to the world, I never felt it. When I was socialising I forgot about it. I felt it in most acutely the quietest moments. Before falling asleep. Driving. Working.
“I don’t feel I am stressed,” I told one doctor.
“But your body does,” he replied.
Around that time I began hearing all kinds of stories surrounding stress. One woman went totally bald after her divorce while still in her 20s. Another women, not yet 30, lost all her teeth.
Stressed out
She woke up one morning and they fell out. Another was convinced, given the ferocity of her headaches, that she had a deadly brain tumour, to discover that “all” she had was stress.
The doctor asked me what I was stressed about. Nothing, I said. I am in my final year of law. “Ah,” he said. “I treat most lawyers and many judges with acid reflux.” I was astonished. We were all stressed and didn’t know it. Our bodies did.
People tell me to take deep breaths, to do yoga, to meditate. I am sure all these activities have their place. But they don’t work for me. As a “doer,” I cannot be still and kept asking myself why, why, why?
I realised then how important it is not to shove issues under the carpet. They fester and grow there and emerge as unrecognisable physical symptoms.
I found some answers and made a few major changes in my life, really hard ones. The biggest change was learning to let go, of children, and letting them be, to allow them to make their own mistakes; to let go my parents, and letting them be as well.
I couldn’t follow my diabetic mother around, lecturing her all day about how this one had to have a leg amputated, that one had to go on dialysis, this one had a stroke, all because they didn’t have the self-control to ensure low sugar levels in this very preventable lifestyle disease.
My fear of flying was irrational. I really couldn’t do anything about the turbulence. I would rather boil my head than stop travelling. I had to let that go as well.
I have never been a great believer of organised religion, and new-age philosophy mostly fills me with horror.
I am, in short, a cynic, but a fraudulent cynic, because despite the madness of our age, the stuff of epic movies, the crashing of Wall Street, the daily rat-a-tat of terrorist attacks, of crazed men going amok shooting wildly at students in schools, in the USA, in Europe.
I believe in destiny. I hold the highly irrational belief that every step I choose to take, every door I open is taking me towards my destiny. I choose my destiny every day.
So, that day when I went to the doctor with an ear that was buzzing (another manifestation of stress?), I was told that I had a highly-treatable, but uncommon, condition in my inner ear that would require an operation.
Must let got
If I left it alone, it would eventually damage my brain or paralyse my face. So here I am, in New York, waiting to do this surgery that I’m told will take four hours, next Tuesday.
Should I be thanking all the people and events that stressed me out, leading me, eventually, to the doctor who diagnosed my condition?
Yes! Because this inner ear infection has been festering in me since my childhood and has no symptoms.
I went to the doctor for something else. Have I also been destined due to this watch close up, in New York, what greed, speculation, living on credit beyond one’s means can do to hundreds of thousands of people?
Maybe because I am seeing the human faces of the Wall Street crash, that led to the domino crashes in banks in Europe, that led Ireland to take the extraordinary measures of guaranteeing capital in their banks.
I’m seeing friends having to pack up and leave New York, no longer able to afford the big rents, no longer eligible to stay. They are applying for jobs in Singapore, Hong Kong, anywhere a job takes them, shocked at the upheaval.
When I was disembarking at Kennedy Airport, I heard one American woman who had obviously had a hard time in Trinidad say:
“Whew! No more kidnapping threats, no more being afraid to walk on the streets, no more dead bodies in the front pages of the papers.”
Sadly, the voices calling for focusing on education, prudent spending, self-reliance, diversifying, developing a work ethic that doesn’t create a red army of puppets are getting weaker, knowing no one is listening.
Perhaps, I think, it’s time to let go. Maybe we, like America, like the stressed out people in the world, need to fail badly in order to do some real soul-searching, which will eventually lead to our cure.
Fourth in a series of columns on the daily life of citizens in this county: "My life is here. My husband runs our family business, which we have built up over a lifetime, but I am preparing to leave this country with my children.
My husband will join the growing ranks of Trinidadian business people who shuttle between their families abroad and their businesses here.
My husband told me ‘if you take our 12-year-old daughter to Canada, I will miss out on the best years of her life, and she will grow up not knowing her father.’
It’s also heartbreaking to think our teenaged son may not be able to take over his own father’s family business. But with the crime like this, do you think I want our son to live here? I don’t want to lose my child at 19, being robbed and killed and shot. I thought I would miss him when he went away to university, but I was relieved. He was safe.
Whenever my son leaves the house, I give him a kiss, because I never know what will happen. I tell him ‘call us when you’re driving to Zen; call us when you are parking; call us when you get there; call us when you leave for home; call us.’ I want to know which route he is taking, so I will know where to look for him if something happens. I can’t sleep at night waiting for him.
We are cornered. It’s a Catch 22 situation: stay and live in fear or leave and break up your family, friendships, allow your children to lose their birthright, their fathers businesses. Leaving is never an overnight decision. Fifteen years ago on Old Year’s I was held up at gunpoint outside my grandmother’s house in the east at 7pm.
Two men were walking on the street as I was getting out of the car to open the gate. They pointed a gun at me and said: ‘Get out. This is a hold-up.’ I had to beg them to allow them to take my two-year-old child out of the car. They said ‘Leave him. We don’t have time. We will take him.’ I told them ‘If you have my son, I will have to go with you.’ They let me take him out and drove off. I was in shock. Two days later the car was found stripped, in Morvant.
Ten years later at 9 am, I was held up and robbed outside a gym in Petit Valley. I came out of my car and a regular-looking guy saw me, pushed me down, yanked off my bag with my credit cards, money and personal details and ran off with it.
It is scary living in a country where everyone looks normal, well-dressed, but could be bandits. You can’t walk the streets anymore.
The police called me three weeks later to say they found a suspect who was robbing people in the area. I asked for a one-way mirror. They said, ‘No; you have to go and touch them.’ I said, ‘No. I don’t want to.’ If I identified him he would go to jail for one month, six months, and when he gets out, he knows where I live. You put your whole family in danger. There is no justice.
Two weeks ago in Diego Martin, a man got furious because I parked on the road. He was driving past me and proceeded to turn around his vehicle and park in front of me. He waited for me until I came out of the pharmacy and came out of his car towards me threateningly, shouting obscenities. I got away. If I saw him in the bank or grocery I wouldn’t have thought he would be an attacker.
Now I live in fear. When I come out of a mall, I run into the car, I look around suspiciously. In Canada, even in a poor neighbourhood you feel much safer. You can walk in the night. A woman I know who is abandoning her father’s business to migrate wears running shoes to work, because if she is attacked she wants to be able to run.
This is what we have come to.
I used to love Trinidad. But stay for what? The crime? Health services? The court system? Lawlessness? Obnoxious people who attack you for working hard? Business people are being destroyed. Nobody has our back.”
As told to Ira Mathur
By Ira Mathur 2008-07-20
With an unemployment figure of over two million people, a sinking pound, a crumbling property market and crashing banks, I expected some kind of post-war depression when I arrived in London, last week.
But my first sight was spring sunshine, heavy boots of builders simultaneously crushing daisies, hooting cheerily at a woman with a saucy walk, while shovelling down hefty ham sandwiches. The hoteliers didn’t seem bothered about reducing their prices. The men smoking their hookahs closed their eyes as the sun warmed their faces, and apple-flavour tobacco penetrated their mouths. On the tube, parents were telling their wiggling, screaming children to stop mucking about, shut up and eat their chips while they read the sports pages.
Books, blogs
And nurses sat demurely in a park eating their biscuits on their break.
I forgot about Westminster Abbey’s church bells. Also, how fast people walk. Old women, children, people in wheelchairs, women with prams, men with sticks pass us on the pavement, brisker than the sudden gusts of wind.
The railings of churches are filled with notices of concerts to come—Vivaldi, Bach, the Gregorian chants. The tube stops in a tunnel for no reason and everybody tries to look at nobody. Thousands of shoes chorus up stairs in rush hour. A beautiful girl in tall shoes and short skirt and red, red lipstick steps out an elevator and kisses her waiting boyfriend. This is London. The same as it always was. Yet, it’s not. Nothing will be the way it was.
Somewhere, in the last decade, between the terror attacks in London, Mumbai and New York; between the crash on Wall Street and the rise of the reality show celebrity; and the worldwide phenomenon of Facebook and blogs, the world shed yet another skin and changed for all of us irretrievably. We are looking at one another’s lives through machines, use fewer words to write, need to read less, surf more to get by. Still, it’s England, and here in a sleepy station in Hassocks, where friends meet us with warm hugs, the air smells of freshly cut grass, streets are cobbled, lanes are narrow, homes are 16th Century, and we feast on pub lunches of fish and chips and sticky toffee pudding.
In an Oxfam shop back in London, a woman tells me that more than 13 million people in the UK live in poverty—that’s one in five of the population. Many people can’t afford essential clothing, or to heat their homes. hildren go to school hungry, or to bed without enough food. It’s not so different from Mumbai, where the slums are hidden from tourists, or the sad trailer parks in the US. The old rules are changing irretrievably. The old world is peeling away from us faster than we know.
President Barack Obama is the leader of the free world today, and in England, where people from all over the Commonwealth sent their children for a solid education and the Queen’s English, the Education Ministry is phasing in a new curriculum for primary students to learn how to twitter and blog and podcast. In Cambridge, things appear unchanged. In this magnificent seat of learning, a university made up of many colleges, Trinity alone—founded by Henry VIII—produced 31 Nobel Prize winners.
Unending possibilities
Amidst the students flying around on their bikes, their coats and skirts whipping in the wind, hands-free; where spring rages in a dusty gold in college gardens sprung with daffodils, beds of bluebells and fresh vines entwining ancient trees, it is still easy to think of a life of unending possibilities.
In the courtyards, Gonville and Caius (founded in 1348) in St Johns Clare’s, St Catherine's, Queens, Corpus Christi, and Pembroke amidst vast wooden gates, gargoyles, cobbled lanes suffused with the spirit of Isaac Newton and Darwin (girls oblivious of their beauty discuss Milton with their tutors on the street), it is easy to be a voyeur of timeless England.
Even Cambridge tutors embrace the influence of Jane Goody, a school drop-out, whose parents were on drugs, and who died recently of cervical cancer. She was so uneducated, she thought East Anglia was another country, was called a racist and bully on talk shows, but somehow, her honesty, curiosity, and willingness to learn, apologise and educate millions of women about cervical cancer triumphed over ignorance, as did her drive to sell her story while she was dying to create a fund so her two small sons “would have the education she would never have.”
When Goody died this month, a public death at age 27, her obituary was on the front pages of every newspaper in the country. She left £100,000 to children’s charities in India. She overcome class, socio economic odds, to become England’s sweetheart, defied by many, the princess of Bermondsey. There are so many ways of giving back to this world, chief among them dying courageously at 27, providing for your children’s future, publicising your experience so others would be spared of the same fate simply by doing a Pap smear.
The Brits are, I am happy to report, best foot forward, chin up, stiff upper lip and all that, but seriously, embracing the new, keeping the old, taking the recession with stoicism and quirky wit of remembered post-war years.
So, I close with a recipe for hard times pulled out of the Guardian from Heaths Good Potato Dishes, which the writer called a genuinely exciting discovery:“Bake some large potatoes in their jackets, cut them in half and scoop out most of the flesh. Put in a layer of spinach puree, break an egg, into each, season them and bake them in the oven until the egg is ready.”
By Ira Mathur 2009-03-29