A Fictional Memoir
By Ameena Gaffoor
KADIR, broad shouldered and all of six foot two inches, moved towards the eastern window. Pushing open its two crevice-filled, weather-beaten silverballi halves held together by a short rusting hook and corresponding eye, he stood there and gazed outwards, the palms of his hands pressed upon the windowsill, pondering on his vivid dream that evanesced as quickly as sleep ended. A cool north-eastern breeze rushed in to soothe his furrowed brow.
Not a single star could be detected in the pitch blackness of the eastern sky, no fireflies dancing under the calabash tree, only the haunting perfumes of jessamine and raat ki raani (queen of the night) wafting in the pre-dawn breeze and the whining of a hungry mongrel somewhere in the night.

After a while Kadir stepped back from the window, gasping at a ghastly image in the dressing table’s mirror staring back at him, its eyes like two sparks of burning coals glowing in a pale bearded face.
A Jones pedal sewing machine with a small bench-seat stood along one wall of the bedroom where Zainab sat and stitched boys’ and gents’ shirts. Next to that was a small table on which the finished shirts rested, as well as a quaking-grass basket holding washed bed linens converted from flour bag sacks.
A Qur’an and tasbee (prayer beads, equivalent to the Christian rosary) rested beside the miniature lamp on the mahogany dressing table. An overhead shelf held at least two more Qur’ans, a Hadith, a Taleem Islam, and two more piles of Islamic instructional books in Urdu and Arabic, including the alphabet: Alif, bay, thay and so on. It was all the treasured possessions this emigrant had chosen to tie in his jahaji bundle eighteen years ago. He had safeguarded them from philistine minds and hands on the longer-than-expected voyage to the New World sugar plantation, the damp of the seas, as well as the heat and the rodents in the logie, and in the transition to the village. Many of his jahaji bhais had brought clay gods as their religion warranted, but kept them out of sight in their bundles; they prayed and performed their rituals in secrecy within the walls of their logies lest they be deemed pagans by the estate managers and their equally uninformed underlings.
The sight of mandirs and mosques were by now familiar in the colony as places of worship. Nonetheless, Indian culture, customs and dress consisting of, in many cases, the dhoti, the kurta, the sari, the gangri and the rumal, were then considered by both the colonials and by creole society as uncivilised, primitive and pagan. Most women still wore barries (small circular silver earrings, about four or five, each ear pierced in about four or five places), churia (bangles), tilaree (neck rings), and silver anklets; men wore their kurtas and pyjamas (pronounced pai-jamas). Even though the East Indian had come to the West from a civilisation whose rich customs and traditions were thousands of years old, having come as lowly indentured cane workers did not give him much confidence to take his place in the colonial society unless he would forcibly turn to the Christian faith and away from his coolie religion, rituals and strange dress. Later, some Indians came unfettered by indenture contracts and turned to shop business, lumber, rice-milling and tailoring. Many Indians by now wore European styles of clothes and attended Christian Churches of various denominations to which they had been converted. The offspring of all indentured labourers attended colonial schools, dressed in the western style. The Indian would later discover that exile brought its own peculiar conflicts of identity within family and society.
A glass tumbler half-full of uncooked rice in which stood three half-burnt sticks of agarbatti (incense) also found place on the shelf, as did a writing tablet of onion skin leaves, a fountain pen, a bottle of blue Quink ink (perhaps attesting to the fact that Kadir was a literate man). There was also a white knitted skull cap, one of two that he wore to the farm from day to day, and to the mosque in the evening.

About the Author
The late Ameena Gafoor is the Founder of The Arts Forum Inc; the Founding Editor of The Arts Journal; and author of Aftermath of Empire: The Novels of Roy A.K. Heath (2017). She received two National awards as well as recognition from the Guyana Indian Commemoration Trust and the Guyana Cultural Association of New York for her outstanding contribution to the literary arts of Guyana and the Caribbean. She also received an award from Caribbean Voice for her social work with Support for Vulnerable People through The Gafoor Foundation. Her critical articles are published in selected Journals.