Jahajin by Peggy Mohan

Author:Peggy Mohan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-9-3513-6050-6
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

BON BON

NA-NA! HUM SAB NA MAANGI OHI KETAARI KHAAE! HUM sab maangila Bon Bon!’

No-no! We don’t want to eat that cane! We want Bon Bon!

I could hear Sunnariya outside the barracks talking to Langoor Mamoo, laughing. She was talking like the other cane cutters talked now, the way people talked in Trinidad. She had been spending time with Janaki-didi and the children, and she had started talking the same way as the other children who spent more time together than with their families. She now only spoke Khari Boli in the evenings with her father.

Or when she was disturbed about something.

Bon Bon was a thick juicy kind of cane they had brought from Martinique. They didn’t use it in the moulin to make sugar. Some of the overseers and the boss had their own patches of it behind their bungalows. Bon Bon cane was only for eating.

The only way to get this cane was to go and steal it from an overseer’s yard. But why should that bother Langoor Mamoo? It would only make him more excited. All through, since the first day I had met him, he had been stealing things and giving them to the children. And sometimes even to us.

A whole year had passed since the first crop season. Now we were almost done with the second crop.

Most of us had stopped wearing saris. What we wore now were ghangris, long skirts, jhoolas, long blouses, and orhnis. We would tie one end of the orhni around our waists, and throw the other end over our heads. It didn’t look too different from the saris we had had on before.

Some of the time-expired women who came in to work during the crop season used to go a step further: they would tie their orhnis only over their hair, and roll both ends around their juras, the buns they made in the back. They didn’t cover their necks at all!

Some of the women had also started doing cutting work, and used to tie cutlasses at the waist to go into the fields, just like the men.

The moonsie had found a girl to marry, from the same caste, a Kayat, a scribe. She was on another estate, where her parents were indentured. A nau had made inquiries and found her, and they were going to get permission to have a sagaai. Then they would get married in three years’ time.

Chirag Ali and Jaitoon were expecting a child.

Many people were also tying up without taking any help from the nau. Like Acchamma: she had run away from her husband in India, and found herself in Madras. Then when she reached Trinidad she got married again, because she said she didn’t think she could manage by herself, without anyone at all. And she was not the only one.

And the men were happy for that. Most of them had come as moglasiyas, leaving their wives behind in India. They were thinking now that they didn’t want to even consider making that trip back in the boat.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.