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Apr 07, 2013 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev
Last week, my wife’s Ajee, Etwaroo, passed away. She had been born in 1911 and was 102. Now that is quite a feat – to make it through all that transpired over the last century in Guyana. She was born before the end of indentureship – which came in 1917. She was therefore very familiar with individuals who had just arrived from India and spoke Hindi (in its Bhojpuri dialect).
As a child, she would have survived the flu epidemic of 1918 when Indians died like flies as the death rate skyrocketed almost seven times the average rate. So too the malaria that festered in the logees of ‘Nigger Yard’ at Uitvlugt. The living conditions there were not much different from the days of slavery when it had gotten its name. The workers were all removed from around the sugar estates in the 1950s, by which time she had married and given birth to her four sons and two daughters.
Uitvlugt’s housing stock by then was divided into several distinct sections. The oldest, Casbah, had been formed after the abolition of slavery and grew out of the houses the newly-freed slaves had built along the Public Road. Even as it expanded in the next century, it remained overwhelmingly African. But this is where she and her husband built their home and raised their children. Her husband, Puran Persaud, had been the first Indian to become an ‘engineer’ in the sugar factory, joining the elite ranks of skilled artisans/tradesmen who were either Mulatto or African.
I grew up with my Nana and Nanee, on the street adjoining south Casbah and closer to the sugar factory, in the section called (most inspiringly) Uitvlugt Pasture, from its old function. As a boy attending the Primary School on the Uitvlugt Public Road, I had to pass by her very large (for those days) two-storeyed house. The yard was always filled with fruit trees, flower plants, and at the back, pens for cows and goats.
She always proudly spoke of herself as being an “Ahir”, that is, a member of the cow-rearing, agricultural caste. Even though she did not have to work any longer on the sugar estate, she laboured even harder on her animals. Her sons, two of whom were soon sent off to England by the early sixties, were allocated the task of cutting grass for the animals. I would not doubt that she provided a source of income to her family as great as her husband, who would have been one of the higher paid employees then.
In 1964, when Uitvlugt became an epicentre of the racial violence that swept the country as Jagan tried to extricate his party from the implications of “PR”, the grand house was burnt to the ground, on April 24. This was ironically the date of her wedding anniversary – and the birthday of one of her sons. I remember as a boy, looking on from my boarded (actually ‘zinc-ed’) up home, as the flames reached for the skies. For over a year, Casbah was to become off-limits to me, by which time new schools had sprouted in the other sections.
She remembered being warned of the imminent arson by her neighbours, so the family had left by the time of the conflagration. Within a couple of years, she and her husband built another house in a newly-opened section of Uitvlugt and this is where she spent the rest of her life. She continued rearing cows until she was well into her nineties and was invariably in her yard among her beloved flowers.
As my daughter remarked at the ceremony before the cremation, when her body itself would become an offering to her gods, her strongest point – apart from her refusal to stop working – was her observation of Hindu practices. She performed her oblations daily, did her pujas regularly and in her younger days, sponsored yagnas. She loved singing bhajans (in the old traditional ‘airs’) as well as the almost all but forgotten ‘sohars’, ‘biraha’s” and other songs suitable for the various life cycle occasions of the Hindu. One could tell that as a young woman, she was full of life: at her 100th birthday celebrations, she insisted on singing and got up and danced.
The reminiscences at the farewell ceremony were telling. One neighbour from across the Public Road, observed her every morning – even into her late 90’s pulling at the ‘bush’ always attempting to encroach on the order she had created in her yard. She refused to be ‘bent with age’ and in fact compensated by tilting her body slightly backwards when walking. Her iron will was her trademark characteristic, and even on her deathbed, refused to go ‘easily into the night’.
They don’t make ‘em like they used to, any more.
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