A Caribbean Elegy
Grace Segran
I tucked the well-thumbed, yellowing copy of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible into the side pocket of my hand-carry as I headed out to Logan Airport to catch my flight to Barbados.
My fascination with the Caribbean Island began four and a half decades ago while Raja, my husband, and I were in high school. We acted in Miller’s four-act play in our provincial hometown of Alor Star in the northern Malaysian Peninsula. He played John Proctor, the protagonist, and I Tituba, the slave from Barbados. The beloved play stayed with us and became an ongoing banter that we would visit Barbados together one day.
Barbados remained on our radar through the years like a flickering firefly - luminescent when her cricket team played on the world stage, hovering patiently in the background as Raja and I managed careers and family. The island finally came up on my bucket list this year – however, I was going alone. I had lost Raja in an open-heart surgery several years earlier. We must have romanticized Barbados through the years and my vision of it was so idealized that it wasn’t worth getting my hopes up. So I went with no grand scheme other than to chill, reread The Crucible, potter around the island and absorb its culture.
I crossed the parking lot at Barbados’s Grantley Adams Airport and headed towards the bus shelter, as the information booth hostess had directed me. “Alternatively, you could take a taxi…” she added as a last-ditch attempt to persuade a single, senior Asian woman not to take the local bus in a foreign land that may be vastly different from hers. The taxi cost $35 and the bus $1.75 for the 15-minute ride. For me, it was an easy decision.
The ZR (pronounced “Zed R,”) a private minivan service, came along almost immediately, heading in the direction of St. Lawrence Gap, where I was staying. I confirmed my destination with the driver through the passenger window and took the only seat available at the back. Luckily for me it was by the door, where there was a wee bit of space above the step for me to place my knee. I hugged my suitcase tightly to keep it upright as the ZR hustled along to its destination.
The ocean appeared on the left, its turquoise water whooshing gently on the pale cream sand. The heat and humidity, the narrow oft-patched asphalt road, the simple wooden houses punctuated by the occasional hotel with its blaze of blue parasols all felt surreal, strangely familiar. It reminded me of Batu Ferringhi in the northeastern part of Penang Island, sixty miles from our childhood home on the Malay Peninsula. Barbados felt like a rerun of an old movie I’d acted in before: our adolescent years when we went to church camp in Batu Ferringhi, eager for friendship and maybe to find love. Our college years when Raja and I met up in Penang where I was in nursing school, away from my mother who didn’t want her Chinese daughter marrying an Indian man – I mean, what would her friends say? The summers while we were based in Europe, when we brought our young daughter, Elizabeth, to the Golden Sands Hotel here, hoping to introduce her to Malaysian culture.
The ZR sped past chattel houses in St. Lawrence Gap. These were simple homes which were originally found in plantations occupied by the working class. They were moveable in the event of disputes between landlord and tenant, or when the family found work in another plantation. I noticed they were similar to the houses our families lived in when Raja and I were growing up, except ours were on stilts while these sat on a concrete base. Raja’s grandparents came from Tamil Nadu, India, and mine came from Fujian province in China as indentured laborers to work in the rubber estates and tin mines, respectively. We were the hoi polloi. Of humble beginnings that we never forgot, even as we moved from Brussels to Paris to Jakarta to London and across the globe.
My room at the Yellow Bird Hotel reflected the 60s of my childhood. Time stood still for 45 years in the room. Looking around at its original wooden mid-century fittings, I was overcome by hiraeth, a deep longing for my homeland, where I’ve not been for over two decades. And for Raja.
Before I went to sleep that night, I opened the 2020 bucket list on my phone and inserted at the top: #1 Malaysia.
Raja was a lean sportsman, playing competitive cricket for the state team. He was an all-rounder with a medium-fast swing, and often opened the bowling. He had a knack for the game and was able to match the situation to the bowl, switching from disciplined defense to attack as the occasion arose. His claim to fame was that in 1972 when he was 17, he was the top scorer with 54 runs. That year, his team won the Malaysian Schools Cricket Championship.
After we were married and moved to Singapore, I joined him for cricket matches at the local recreation club on weekends or when he played for his company. I helped prepare trays of cucumber sandwiches and industrial kettles of strong, sweet tea for afternoon teatime, and sometimes I sat in as scorer. I loved to see him in his cricket whites as he padded up to bat or when he walked to the pitch to begin the game, rubbing the dark red ball that the umpire had just given him on his white pants to polish it. The permanent red stains were a source of pride for me for the many wickets he had taken.
In the mid 80s, his team played the West Indies on our home ground and we met people from the Caribbean for the first time. “Let’s go to Barbados, John Proctor,” I said after that weekend of matches, resurrecting the age-old banter. But life got in the way, then he was taken too soon and we never made it there before he died, at 55. He would have loved being among the Barbadians who ate, drank, and slept cricket. To walk where his hero, Garfield Sobers, the world’s greatest all-rounder, walked. To be intoxicated, not by rum, but the famed speed of Barbadian bowlers.
The best place to eavesdrop or participate in cricket conversations in Barbados was in the rum shop, where there’s usually an ongoing match on the radio or TV playing from England, South Africa, Australia, or India, depending on the time of year and time of day. Here Barbadians talk cricket with as much keen insight and fervor as any live commentator I have heard. Except this was in rapid Bajan dialect – which is similar to Malaysian pidgin English where “that” is pronounced “dat” and “thing” becomes “ting,” and full sentences flow into one long word like “whahappen?” when the person misses the action and supporters cheer on screen. Someone in the rum shop cheers: “Ya mon,” the ubiquitous phrase using the dialectal variation of “man,” affirming the batsman on screen who just hit a six. Another punches the air, shouting “He shining!” as the happy batsman goes around high-fiving his teammates.
To memorialize my trip for Raja, I went to the Cricket Legends of Barbados Museum at Herbert House in Fontabelle. I peered through glass at the ball bowled by Wes Hall in the first ever hattrick by a West Indian, and the bat autographed by the first West Indies team to tour England after the region gained test status in 1928.
Then I crossed the street to the Kensington Oval. Standing on the outfield of this famous cricket ground, I felt tightness in my throat – Raja and I had watched many test matches played here on our TV screen in London, the summers before he died. Then, suddenly, the Barbados team came into the field for practice! I settled into a seat in the grandstand and indulged myself, thrilled by the sound of the leather ball against the willow bat which I hadn’t heard since Raja died eight years earlier. I savored the action, tempered by feelings of guilt that I was doing it alone.
I rode the ZR for the next seven days. It became the highlight of my trip. Raja and I had been in trishaws and sampans in Alor Star as children, tuk-tuks in Bangkok, jeepneys in Manila, auto-rickshaws in Mumbai, even the little old Amby with our suitcases strapped to the roof as we trundled from Chennai to Pondicherry. But none had festive Caribbean music like the ZRs. Every driver had his favorite radio channel, blaring with island vibes.
I knew I was in for a good ride every time I hailed a ZR. I loved the camaraderie; it felt like we were all one family riding together. There was always someone who shimmied to the beat or sang quietly to the song that was playing, oblivious to the audience. And sometimes not so quietly and with gay abandon--like the driver’s assistant who sat at the back with us and whose job was to collect the fare, open and close the door, solicit customers as we whizzed past a potential one walking in the same direction as the bus, and help folks carry shopping bags while they tumbled into their seats in the van. Everything worked like clockwork in the 18-seater. When the empty spots in the bus began to fill up, passengers moved silently and with the precision of working a Rubik’s cube to achieve a perfectly filled van. And they did it happily; no huffs or sulks because someone with too many bags from the market was cramming their space.
I did not meet one Asian person in Barbados. There were plenty of Afro-Barbadians and a sprinkling of white and biracial people, but no Asians. On my fourth day in Barbados, I went to pick up a jerk chicken cutter from the famous Grill Kitchen truck on Pebbles Beach. I was the only customer there, so I chatted with the owner while his wife prepared my sandwich.
“How’s business these days?” I asked.
“You white Americans love to come to Barbados and that’s what’s keeping us in business.”
I almost cracked up but kept a straight face when he referred to me as “white American.” I was clearly brown skinned and spoke English with a heavy Sinitic slant and Asian overlay. He was clearly blind to skin color and accepting of people who were different, traits that were becoming rare in the U.S., my adopted country. He was unfazed by my brownness and mangled enunciation of the English language. I envisaged Raja quite at ease being Indian in Barbados.
I closed The Crucible and sat motionless in the twilight. The reading left me reeling from its visceral power. Darkness engulfed me as the sun dropped rapidly into the Caribbean Sea, just like the fear and despair that engulfed Salem in the book. The waves crashed loudly on the rocks below me, like the hysteria that ignited Act One and swept relentlessly through Act Four, heightened by the recall of the script we had memorized decades ago. I heard the great speeches in my mind and imagined Raja in character in front of me, reciting John Proctor’s plea at the end of the play: I have given you my soul; leave me my name! Reciting Proctor’s script ad lib was something Raja was wont to do from time to time when so inspired.
My mind turned to the week that was coming to an end. The memories that took me like a wave, pulling me back and forth. Surrendering to them. Not shutting them out. Letting them wash over me. The same way I’d been dealing with my grief since Raja died.
I flagged the ZR for Grantley Adams Airport the following day. The ZR operator pulled my suitcase up as I climbed in, while she sang contralto to homegrown Rihanna’s “Diamond” streaming from the radio. The sea glistened in the noonday sun on my right, and the warm dusty air blew gently in my face. We made it, John Proctor.
