I NEVER thought I could have fallen in love so immensely with a place, the moment we drove through the wrought iron gate of a small island on a former sugar estate. The curving driveway was bordered on one side by bougainvillaea in vibrant colours, all the way to the colonial house.

I was not sure at that moment how that incredible rush filled my heart, for we had looked at several grand houses with an interest to buy, but though they were all beautiful, none spoke to my heart until I came here.

Something told me, as I looked at the landscaped garden and the flowering shrubs along its borders, that this place was different.

“What wonders or mysteries does it hold?” was my questioning thought as I stepped onto the long, tiled patio.

It was furnished with intricately woven Amerindian tibisiri chairs and two centre tables.

“This is quite lovely,” I expressed.

An hour later, after inspecting the house, my husband looked at me and asked, “Well, is this the one?”

A slight wind blew across the garden, lifting the sweet scent of the chameli flowers around the patio, and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My heart had spoken to me, and opening my eyes after a brief moment, I smiled and said, “Yes, I love this one.”

At that moment, light seemed to filter across the grounds, giving life to everything, and the realtor, looking a little amazed, said, “I really do think you have made a great choice.”

Five months later, after cleaning and repainting, with no changes to the beautiful colonial architectural structure, we moved in.

It was one of my most memorable days, mainly because my two young children were happy about their new home. In the following days, after my husband had left for his business enterprise in the city, I began settling down with my children. The house was a combination of simplicity and grandeur, with polished wooden floors and timbers, an entrance hall, and a prominent wooden staircase, but what impressed me most were the two extensive patios.

On the lower flat, three double sliding glass doors opened from the living room to the patio that overlooked the sprawling lawn and garden, and on the upper flat, one bedroom and a small sitting area opened onto a sunroof that overlooked an extensive area of the estate grounds.

In the house, there were several pieces of antique furnishings we bought with the house, for I loved historical artefacts. I added my touch with my own collection and some modern pieces. It was simply beautiful!

I employed the old house staff, who were quite happy being there again, and I listened with interest as they told their own little stories.

Strangers who would become close in a place that was now home.

On the second weekend there, the middle-aged East Indian gardener, who told me he had worked there since he was a boy, took me on a walkabout on the estate grounds. That overwhelming feeling of falling in love filled my heart again, and I wondered about the occupants of the long-gone past. There were still distinctive patterns of colonial life: the relics of the bird bath and fountain, large pots and urns in rustic earth tones, subtly arranged as though time itself had framed them all in portraits.

There was an outstanding variety of flowering plants, crotons, ferns, and shrubs bordering the lawn, and for a garden lover like me, it lent a blush of romance. The gardener educated me on the names of the tall flowering trees as we continued the walkabout, some of which I had never seen before.

“De missus bring dem from England,” he told me.

“Quite interesting,” I responded.

We stopped at a narrow waterway and walked across an old wooden bridge into a section of the ground that was an abandoned tennis court.

He and his friends, the gardener told me, young boys then, used to pick up the tennis balls hit out of the court.

“You would come all the way from your village to do that?”

“No,” he replied, “abee used to come fuh pick cane from de punt to eat, and running tuh pick up de balls was fun.”

“Yeah, I can just imagine,” I said, smiling.

“De missus was a nice lady,” he said. “She always give abee biscuits, sweet roll, and tea.”

I looked at him and saw the glint of admiration in his eyes for his colonial mistress. I had seen it before among people in the villages, and it always amazed me how some of these past masters and mistresses left a deep impression on those who worked closely with them.

As I stood in the middle of the lawn tennis court, I smiled to myself, amazed, for as a schoolgirl I couldn’t have afforded to buy a racket to join a club, but today I had my own tennis court to play on with family and friends.

“We have come from such a long way,” I mused. “Once upon a time, we were mere servants.”

We didn’t complete the garden tour that day because my in-laws arrived just then from the airport, back from a holiday in Dubai. They wanted to spend a few days at the new house we had bought. I sighed in anticipation of the veiled, condescending comments my mother-in-law would make. She was an authoritarian woman and never stopped reminding me subtly of being a primary school teacher and my family’s lower financial status. Over the years, I learnt to tolerate her negative comments because I loved my husband and we were happy.

Three days later, my mother-in-law commented that we had made a bad choice by buying that property and that she had a bad feeling about the place.

“Well, I love it,” I said to her with a smile. “It has an interesting history, and there might be one or two colonial ghosts on the grounds.”

That scared her a little, and they left that same day, much to my relief. That night, my husband looked at me suspiciously.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I answered innocently.

“I know that mischievous glint in your eyes,” he said.

I took a sip of wine and said with a little laugh, “I think she’s scared of ghosts.”

He shook his head in mock reprimand and said, kissing me lightly on the cheek, “Thanks for being tolerant and patient with her.”

The next day, I resumed my tour of the garden with the gardener, but this time he took me to another part of the grounds. A wooden bridge over a wider waterway took us to that section, and I gasped in awe at the huge, flamboyant trees that bordered the ground. The floor was carpeted with fallen blooms, and walking under the canopy, I scooped up handfuls of flowers and let them fall slowly through my hands over my head.

The gardener looked at me, bemused and said quietly, “De white missus loved to do dat too.”

I looked at him and smiled slightly, but said nothing, for it was his reflection of the past.

The present was me.

Two women from different ethnicities and cultures, centuries apart, with the same love and passion for one thing, and I said silently, “I feel to myself, there’s some kind of deep mystery here. I wonder what.”