The Ascent of Man
‘Trinidad was named after the Divine Trinity,’ said Ishmael Angelo Samad. ‘What else does Trinidad mean? It means the meeting place of three continents, of three great faiths. This is where they converge.’ He leaned to one side and shot a glance over his right shoulder. He was driving a battered Mazda with broken lights, shaking parts, and — hence the craning of the neck — no wing mirrors. I was conscious of the car’s intense rattling because we were passing the shanty town that had sprung up by the Beetham highway on the edge of Port-of-Spain. Motorists were terrified of breaking down here, I’d heard, and would abandon their vehicles rather than stick around for the repair truck. ‘But this land of the trinity,’ Samad continued, ‘is where they hang men in threes: three a day, on three consecutive days (except Sunday). They hanged on a Friday, the Muslim day, and on Saturday, the Jewish day, and they hanged against the wishes of the Catholic Church. The government ran roughshod over three religions. With these hangings,’ Ishmael Samad said, ‘the trinity has taken on a very macabre meaning.’
Samad was a trim, bespectacled man in his mid-fifties. He had a high forehead, grey hair, a moustache, and a tuft of grey hair below his lips. He spoke with a soft, slightly quavering voice and possessed a remarkable facility for lengthy, orderly monologue that had been developed, I imagined, from years of ideological argument. But he wasn’t, I was relieved to discover, a haranguer. Samad practised a kind of fluent openness, an out-loud musing that disclosed concerns ranging from his sadness about the massacres in Central Africa to his trouble with the Virgin Birth to the joy that filled his heart when he saw a grape-like mass of clouds tinted pink by the sun. He was thoughtful, emotional, receptive, dogged, religious and obsessive. Things delighted and amazed him.
‘In spite of the barbarity, Trinidad is a wonderful little island,’ Ishmael Samad said. ‘Because I make my living showing people the birds and plants of the island, I perpetually see my country through the eyes of foreigners and perpetually discover new things. Take the roosting of the scarlet ibis: visitors are absolutely overwhelmed when they see the scarlet birds against the green mangrove. It’s been described as the most awesome display in the avian world — and yet we take it for granted.’ He glanced at me. ‘We’ll go to the Caroni swamp together to watch them, if you want. I’ll happily take you there tomorrow.’ He was, he said, a great birder. When a Jabiru stork was spotted recently in Trinidad for the first time since 1988, he had got up at five in the morning to see it in the Caroni rice fields. I made a mental note not to allow myself to be dragged into any kind of nature expedition.
‘We have all been diminished by these hangings,’ Samad continued. ‘I have been diminished, too. Before the executions, I wrote to the Attorney-General Ramesh Maharaj saying, “If you must hang, then hang Dole Chadee and his hit man, Joey Ramiah. Spare the others.” I wrote a letter to Chadee, too: “Conscience demands that you publicly acknowledge and confess your guilt and take responsibility for that horrendous crime,” I wrote. “Conscience demands that you declare you are deserving of the death penalty but that the other eight men be spared so cruel a punishment. I therefore call upon you to steel yourself and bravely face your fate, cruel and barbaric though it is, but before doing so publicly request of the State that the lives of the other eight be spared. Then and only then will you be able to walk bravely to the gallows.” I never got a reply. Right to the very end, Chadee refused to confess.’ Samad shook his head. ‘I’m disappointed in these guys. Not one of them confessed. Not one.’
We drove on for a time. It was a humid day of pale grey clouds. In the distance to our left was the Northern Range, the mountains that surround the corrugated roofs of Port-of-Spain and give the city the appearance of an enormous, brimming handful of gravel. We were on the airport road where, decades ago, Ishmael Samad and other schoolchildren would be lined up to wave at royal visitors from Britain driving into Port-of-Spain. In between advertising hoardings for Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken, vendors of watermelons, okra, bodi beans and pineapples operated from carts by the highway. Samad gestured at the flat farmland to the south. The Caroni plain, he said, the breadbasket of the north. He confessed that he grew particularly excited at this time of year, which marked the transition between the dry months and the months of rain. Everything was turning green, insects were coming out, and the flamboyant trees (native to Madagascar, he said) bloomed with scarlet or yellow flowers. ‘It’s a privilege that I am able to see all this, to be alive,’ he said. Staring at the road ahead, he added, ‘Since those hangings, there’s an intensity to my being. I cherish every moment, I try to do every good that I can do.’ Samad looked at me. ‘It’s been a very defining moment in my life.’
We continued deeper inland. The Beetham Highway became the Churchill–Roosevelt Highway and the roadside commerce dwindled. The scenery became distinctly rural: orchards, vegetable gardens, luxuriant grasses, tropical thickets, rows of tall palms. Small bungalows and sheds and outhouses appeared in clearings. I’d been told in Port-of-Spain that people got up to no good in this thinly populated part of Trinidad, where, it was said, incest and witchcraft were common. The farmhouses were vulnerable to banditry; recently a whole family had had their throats slashed.
‘Here we are,’ Ishmael Samad said. ‘This is Cumuto.’ We had come to a concentration of detached houses and a pavement. Samad stopped the car alongside a goat, and we got out. It was hot and quiet. A burst of squawking came from overhead: red-bellied macaws, Samad said. The Northern Range was clearly visible: steam had snagged on its dark green slopes like huge wisps of cat hair.
Samad pointed at a puddle-pocked track that ran off at a right angle from the main road and continued into the forested distance in an eerily straight line. ‘This is the Old Train Line,’ he said. On the right side of the track was thick greenery in which moriche palms and papaya trees and parts of shacks were visible. On the left side was a dense plantation of Caribbean pines.
A man riding a child’s bicycle approached us out of curiosity. We asked him about the murder and he said that he remembered the night Sylvia Maraj died. He’d been at the ‘Country View’ cinema, watching an Indian movie along with everyone else from the village. He knew exactly where it happened. He could take us there right now.
We followed him up the Old Train Line. The road — which was little more than a broad footpath — was covered unevenly with pitch, but back in 1985, according to our guide, it was just a gravel path. The nights were very black in those days; there was no electric lighting and the pine trees were taller and shadier. We walked for a couple of hundred of yards, passing a few small houses set back from the path. I noticed a toucan in the trees. Then the villager said, ‘This it.’
Ramnath Harrilal’s shack and latrine had been razed. In their place stood a small concrete cabin with a sloping roof that extended beyond the frontage of the house and, supported by two poles, formed a porch. The property was surrounded by a tall fence with improbably grand, and locked, entrance gates. At the back were a few banana trees, a vegetable garden, and some hens. The present occupants of this land, although wealthier than Harrilal had been, evidently existed on essentially the same economic plane: working in the forests and growing subsistence crops in a garden.
I turned to look at the pine plantation on the opposite side of the Old Train Line. There was an overgrown track leading to the interior of the plantation, the kind of trail — for all I knew, the very trail — down which Ramnath Harrilal had carried Sylvia Maraj’s one-armed torso in a plastic sack and dumped it under the large frond of a moriche palm.
Ishmael Samad led the way through the damp knee-high grasses. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing at an enormous butterfly. We walked on. All kinds of grasses and shrubs and woody plants grew among the pines, and my bare arms were brushed by sticky, disconcertingly unfamiliar textures. Insects buzzed in my ears, and small black tunnels gaped in the mud underfoot: snakes? Birds called and called. Then, no more than fifty yards into our walk, the plantation suddenly gave way to a soaring wall of broadleaf trees and strangler figs and creepers and palms with stupendously large fronds, one of which became detached and fell to the ground with a thud. A thick flutter of wings came from somewhere inside the jungle. I looked at Samad expectantly. He was staring in wonder. ‘This is a remnant of the primary forest,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it absolutely magnificent?’
We headed back and spoke to a few people in the village. They remembered Harrilal, but not very well. The most detailed recollections belonged to an old fellow with an immense grey beard. He recalled Harrilal as ‘a constructive man’ who’d been very helpful in building the cinema (which had since burned down) and had worked very hard in the forests — harder than he got paid, the man observed. The man didn’t remember Sylvia Maraj, though. He wasn’t alone in his ignorance. We could only find one villager, a man who lived on the Old Train Line, who could speak about Sylvia Maraj. She was a very respectable woman, the man said.
Finally, we went to Cumuto police station, the small concrete bungalow set back from a dusty yard where Ramnath Harrilal had been taken and first interrogated. None of the policemen who’d worked on the case was still around. The only thing that the officers now on duty could remember about the case was that it had involved a woman’s head being chopped off.
When we stepped outside the police station, Ishmael Samad told me that he often brought parties of birders here. The tall and rather tattered Caribbean pine that stood in front of the station, he explained, was the nesting site of a notable colony of yellow-rumped caciques. ‘Take a look,’ he said, handing me his binoculars for a better view, and I complaisantly looked at the zestful little birds flitting in and out of their nests. My appreciation was clouded, however, by an anxiety I’d contracted on the Old Train Line and not entirely shaken off. The scrappy, ravaged forests I’d seen here depressed me. The trouble was the ongoing struggle between man and nature, an apparently interminable conflict of hacking and chopping that had become linked, in my mind, to the crime of Ramnath Harrilal.
Before we turned back to Port-of-Spain, Samad drove me a few miles to the Arena Forest nature reserve. The trees here, I learned, included mahoe, crappo, olivier, matchwood, jereton and balata. As we walked along a trail, Ishmael Samad told me about the violaceous trogon and the glittering-throated emerald hummingbird and red-rumped woodpecker that lived thereabouts. He identified the calls of jungle wrens and woodcreepers, and alerted me to the love cries of a little hermit hummingbird. At one point he wandered off the path and pulled a handful of leaves off a tree. ‘An incense tree,’ he said. He crushed the leaves beneath my nose, and the forest smelled like a church.
Samad told me that, as it happened, a church had once been built in this forest by Spanish Capuchin monks engaged in the conversion of native Amerindians to Christianity. In an uprising against the colonists in 1699, Amerindians killed a Spanish priest and waylaid the Governor of the island and his party, killing all but one. A reprisal force was dispatched to Arena and there ensued a massacre of Amerindians that had never been forgotten. It was remembered, in particular, that natives who were not killed in the fighting were captured, tried, convicted, hanged and dismembered.