Trinidad - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 101

Not far from the Black Virgin of Syparia, we came upon a large temple of Vishnu, shaped like a jelly
mould, standing under mango and palm trees. Little coloured flags fluttered from poles of bamboo, and
the walls inside were frescoed with the figures of Shiva and Parvati and of her son Katri, and with the
outlines of a lingam and the bull of Shiva.
But at Curepe, on the way back to Port of Spain, we beheld a much more imposing fane. Passant lions
and tigers were painted on either side of the gate through the wall that enclosed the courtyard, and three
towering white domes crowned a temple, on the pediment of which stood an effigy of Hanuman, the
Monkey-God. A little club rested on his shoulder, and one knee was advanced in the first step of a grave
religious saraband. Blue and blood-red peacocks unfolded their tails on the wall of the temple. Entering
the inner chamber through a scalloped archway, we gazed with wonder at the profusion of expatriated
divinities which were frescoed all over the white plaster. A young priest placed his forefinger on them in
turn, and announced their names. Here was Ganesh, all in red, with his grave little eyes and his elephant's
trunk twisted into a question mark, and his multiplicity of arms, one of them grasping an ankus, woodenly
gesticulating. Krishna was painted in blue, with a caste mark on his brow like an inverted horse-shoe, and
a little beaded heart suspended round his neck; dancing, but not, for once, to the sound of his own flute;
three peacocks' feathers were arranged on his forehead in a tiara. How solemnly all these gods displayed
their emblems! Latchmi contrived simultaneously to hold, in the most hieratic of gestures, a cup, a ring,
a flower and a club. Opposite Sita, Hanuman attitudinized in a striped busby, and on Vashti's head a baby
was perilously balanced. Mahadeo wore a cobra round his neck, and on a five-headed cobra next door,
Krishna again appeared, abstractedly dancing. Brahma was gravely seated, and Rawan grasped a club
studded with appalling spikes. 'This is Indra,' the postulant murmured, indicating a strange couple em-
bowered in foliage, 'in the high woods with a Negro.' No, alas, he knew no more. His father had known,
but he was dead; and the Saddhu, he continued sadly, was an away-fellow. An away-fellow? An absent-
ee? A pluralist? He seemed unable to explain.
Under an arch, only a yard away, we came face to face with a live dignitary, dressed in a kind of thin
yellow silk chasuble, squatting motionlessly, peering vaguely into the ether. A chaplet of beads hung from
one wrist, and in his hands was a brass vase holding a red and a yellow hibiscus. He made no answer
when the postulant gently addressed him, but continued gazing into the afternoon haze. The young man
smiled at us in a manner that seemed to beseech forgiveness. A possible interpretation of 'away-fellow'
began to dawn upon us.
It was pouring with rain. The sea, which a few minutes ago had been dark with bathers, was empty, and
the entire amphibian population was sheltering under the trees. Hopelessly ill-informed, we had imagined
Maracas Bay to be a deserted beach, and felt disappointed on arrival to find ourselves swallowed up in
the transports of a Trinidadian Lido. The lids of Coca-Cola bottles sparkled on the sand, and fastened
their perforated rims into the soles of our feet with the viciousness of crustaceans. But once we were in
the water, it was a different matter. The whole atmosphere changed, for the majority of our fellow-bathers
turned out, at close quarters, to be Hindus, many of them dressed in shifts or in dhoti -like underpants
instead of bathing dressed, and our ears were filled with the sound of Hindustani. A bulky old woman,
heavily ear-ringed, with silver bangles from her wrists to her elbows, and her hair uncoiling across her
enormous back in a flapperish plait, wallowed and basked in the middle of her children and grandchil-
dren like a matriarchial hippopotamus. There must have been several hundred people in the water, not so
much swimming as wading slowly out into the sea with their arms akimbo, and standing, as far as the