It was Trinidad-born VS. Naipaul who had famously described the India he visited as "an area of darkness". And, when his younger brother, novelist Shiva Naipaul, travelled to India, he had described its poorest province, Bihar, as "a dying state". Bihar, he stated in an article for the British Spectator, was "the subcontinent´s heart of darkness".
A hundred and fifty years ago others had made a similar journey in the opposite direction. Many of the 134,000 indentured Indian labourers brought to Trinidad after slavery was abolished on the islands came from Bihar.
I was born in Bihar, but the historical connection did not weigh terribly on my mind as I sat on the plane to Port of Spain. Growing up in India, the name West Indies had meant cricket. Otherwise, it figured in barely disguised racist jokes. A dark-skinned cousin in India is called a "West Indian" by my family in Patna. (I found out later that the epithet is returned by people of African origin in Trinidad, some of whom generally refer to those of East Indian origin as "coolie people".) The point, however, is that the early crossings of indentured labourers from India to the Caribbean, was hardly ever mentioned. There is a poem of Derek Walcott´s about Port of Spain. The city evokes in Walcott´s mind a comparison with Jorge Luis Borges´s blind love for Buenos Aires, "how a man feels the veins of a city swell in his hand." My arrival in Port of Spain, however, was as a stranger. I took in the sight of the lights outside the airplane window, and, to the side and in the distance. the glow of the oil rigs near the Ven ezuelan coast. That was in October, a year and a half ago.
The ugly tourist
When I visited Trinidad for the second time this February, the plane was full of American tourists coming in for the carnival. I and my film-maker friend, Sanjeev, spent our time in flight downing glasses of the customary rum punch and taking down names of the carnival bands that were being recommended. There was this person from Indiana repeatedly telling us not to waste time eating oysters in Trinidad because they didn´t really work as aphrodisiacs. He proceeded to inform us that we´d find "a lot of Indians down there… Boy, they´re all over!"