The Dead Yard by Ian Thomson

Author:Ian Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2011-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

At number 114 Hagley Park Road, amid the second-hand Japanesecar dealers, stands Kingston’s Hindu Temple. The temple is a small, hangar-like structure set back from the beep and brake of traffic as it crawls on its way to Tinson Pen domestic airport. A Sunday morning pooja, or Hindu prayer ceremony, was about to begin. The temple was empty except for a Brahmin (high caste) priest in a Nehru-shirt who was sitting cross-legged on the marble floor, lighting incense sticks. Looking up, he seemed surprised to see me.

‘You are coming from - ?’

‘England.’

‘But you don’t look particularly Indian.’

‘I’m not Indian.’

I took off my shoes and, at the priest’s invitation, sat down on the prayer mat in front of him. Ranged on a dais behind him were statuettes of the blue-skinned Krishna and the all-destroying Shiva.

‘England,’ he continued, touching the sandalwood caste-mark on his forehead, ‘and you are in Jamaica?’

‘Yes - I flew in.’

‘Heathrow?’ His eyes, bird-bright behind spectacles, seemed to dance. ‘I have been to Heathrow.’ The Brahmin excused himself a moment later to continue with his pooja directives. I left him in peace, while his voice settled into a drone and he began to sprinkle water round a tiny, sacrificial flame.

At this point Pundit Nathan turned up. ‘You made it!’ he said to me with a smile and, removing his white shoes, sat down on the mat by my side. We watched the Brahmin priest, Dinesh Maraj, continue his recital of prayers to the Hindu divinities. The pundit whispered to me, ‘Mr Maraj is now scooping out ghee to make a flame to represent the human being.’ His cardamom breath was hot on my face. ‘Yunnerstand?’ The roar of an aeroplane coming in to land muted my reply.

The Brahmin, turning his attention to me, now offered a brief history of the British indenture system by way of background information for my book. ‘Your countrymen sent us to Jamaica as paid slaves. We fitted in. We were good agriculturalists. But the blacks were not. They were envious of our cleverness and our financial know-how. They could not build houses for themselves and they could not recite lofty spiritual poetry. And’ - his brown eyes were steady on me - ‘after all these years the blacks still squat on Crown land.’

Incense fumes - a sweet suffocating presence - wafted through the temple as six or seven worshippers, barefoot, arrived to take part in the morning’s invocations and debate. ‘One thing that we’d like you to know, Mr Thomson,’ the Brahmin went on, ‘is that we Indians are a very thrifty people - we save up our moneys. At the same time we generously gave the blacks roti to eat, did we not?’ (‘Roti’ was used here in the colloquial Indian sense, I imagined, of ‘dinner’, not just bread.)

The priest, speaking now to Nathan Sharma, said: ‘Play something for us, pundit. You have done many great deeds in uplifting Hinduism for this island. Play us something for pooja.’ The pundit, nodding gratefully, unpacked the portable harmonium he had brought with him.

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