A Ghost Story

November 1, 2009 by Ian Ramjohn

My grandmother grew up on a cocoa estate in Piparo.  Even today, Piparo is still distant - in the second and third decade of the twentieth century, it was truly remote.  Her father had come from India as a child, worked as an indentured labourer, and eventually bought a cocoa estate from a Spanish family.  He was well enough off that he sent at least three of his sons to attend Howard University.  Her mother, his third wife, was Trinidadian-born, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants.

As the story goes, she was sitting in the gallery with her baby brother when an older Indian woman, all dressed in white with bangles to her elbows, came up to her and asked to have the baby.  My grandmother refused to give her the baby, but she was insistenty, and even tried to take the baby away from her.  There was no one else in the house - the nearest adults were in the kitchen, which was a separate buliding, detached from the main house.

Eventually the woman relented, and left.  I'm not too clear about that part of the story.  But when she later related the story, the woman fit the description of a childless aunt* to whom my great-grandmother had always promised "the next baby".  The aunt had died, and the story was that she had come to claim "her" baby.

That night, my grandmother related, she came down with a high fever.  She may have imagined the whole thing.  But that's really the key to a good ghost story - not a bold claim, but rather, a story that asks the question "what is imagination?"

Trinidad today doesn't need ghost stories.  Real monsters lurk in the shadows.  But even as so much of the country is always illuminated by street lights, security lights and the headlights of cars, there are still places where as you pass the old woman walking along the side of the road, not a house in sight, you wonder why she keeps one foot in the grass...

*I've always assumed an aunt of her mother's, although to be honest it could have been some other relative, perhaps an aunt or sister of one of her father's first two wives.

Permalink