CHAPTER 3

Trinidad: Guarding the Colour Line

Roopdian Rampersad offers me a glass of Ciroc, a vodka infused with amaretto. He swears by it and takes it neat; I’ve never tried it, but something tells me on the rocks may be the wiser choice. It’s just before 5 p.m., and drinking on an empty stomach will go to my head—a head that for the past two hours has been trying to keep up with the I-did-it-the-brown-way business stories of this seventy-five-year-old Indo-Trinidadian patriarch.

We’re sitting in his family room, an extension off the main living room, with its mismatched sofas and chairs, a corner dining table that doubles as a diaper-changing station and a giant TV for the grandchildren to watch their stash of animated movies, DVDs of which are strewn about the room. Today it’s not the ubiquitous Frozen but the original Cars that the youngest granddaughter insists on playing. She has seen it about two hundred times, her grandmother tells me. I detect a note of exasperation, but you can tell she dotes on the girl—and on her brother, who is finally waking up from his afternoon nap and showing the telltale signs of either crankiness or the terrible twos.

I feel like I’ve seen this movie before. Not Cars, but this family drama. It’s a scene that plays out daily in many brown households, in both the diaspora and the home countries, where generations of the same family live together and grandparents turn into childminders. I’ve seen it in my own immediate family over the years, in Yemen and in my late aunt’s house in Liverpool, England (a place she shared with her son and his children). Indian communities rarely hire other brown nannies or help, preferring instead to keep the childcare in the family.

The all-purpose room—in the central Trinidad town of Chaguanas, once known for its sugar estates and farmland—is the nerve centre of the Rampersad business empire. Nowadays, the lanes off the main road are largely swamplands or patches of neglected fields punctuated by gated mini mansions. The sugar and cocoa estates have been gone for a long time, replaced by an array of local businesses, temples and mosques. I could hear the clanking of tools in a neighbouring tire shop, also owned by the Rampersad family, and at around 3 p.m., the call to Asr (late afternoon) prayers from a mosque inexplicably located at the end of this long country road.

Roopdian and his wife make no concessions to the symphony of tools in the workshop or the amplified prayer call by pausing or adjusting their voices. Business and religion, even when it’s a religion other than their own, flow seamlessly into the life of this extended Hindu family. As such, they strike me as typical of the Indo-Trinidadian community that dominates the central and southern parts of this Caribbean island. Small businesses of every imaginable kind—from food sheds selling Indian delicacies to auntie-and-uncle clothing stores to (numerous) mobile phone kiosks—jostle for space on the very narrow main road in this neighbourhood. My guide, Collin, a former schoolteacher who now runs a family business, tells me that this part of the island with its busy commercial streets exemplifies modern-day Trinidad, but it also carries on an older tradition of the various faith communities within the Indian diaspora living and letting live. But what about relations between those in the Indo-Trinidadian community and other citizens?

I decided to visit Trinidad because I wanted to know what it is like to grow up brown in a country whose politics have been dominated by a black narrative. I also wanted to test a personal theory—that brown people get the benefit of a lighter skin when compared to or competing with black or African communities on their home turfs. I’d never visited a country where blacks form a majority, so I wondered how my brownness would make me feel in this context. Would I relate to the lives of brown people there? South Asian (and Indian, in particular) people have shared lands and social turmoil with black communities in East Africa, South Africa and the Caribbean. I realize that each country or political situation has its own dynamics, but some themes do recur in the brown-black encounter, particularly in the Caribbean and East Africa. In both these settings, the brown community is often perceived to be the market-dominant one, with racial relations following a familiar path: resentment escalates into violence against brown people or gives way to nationalist policies that exclude them or turn them into the enemy of black independence, an obstacle to self-determination. Grand-scale expulsion, as happened in East Africa, is a third, more extreme response.

But I’ve also become aware while writing this book that brown communities can exhibit a toxic form of racial prejudice, particularly against people of darker skins. We seem to have internalized the worst of colonial-era skin-tone classifications, long after they’ve been discredited. In Trinidad, brown hostility to the black community stems from decades of power struggle between the two and colonial manipulation of both. To give one crucial example, Trinidad’s embrace of creolization—the process by which new identities are born out of synthesizing traditions from the Old, Indigenous and New Worlds in the colonies—was premised on the exclusion of the Indian community. Imagine a multicultural project that embraces all ethnicities but one. Then imagine being that one excluded ethnicity. How do brown people remain invested in their community when they are constantly reminded of their outsider status? And how can they show good faith and willingness to cooperate when some of their own views remain mired in racial stereotypes?

For Roopdian, Chaguanas sets the scene for his family’s struggle not to be left out of Trinidad’s story or its economic transformation. Here, three generations of Rampersads—including Roopdian’s nine surviving siblings, his five children and their own offspring—have staked a claim on Trinidad as both their homeland and their national, political identity. Roopdian’s grandfather came from India to this Caribbean island in the early twentieth century, having been lured by the British government with promises of money and opportunities that sound eerily similar to the enticements used to attract Filipino and Sri Lankan workers to Gulf countries today. An estimated 144,000 men and women from India made their way to Trinidad and Tobago between 1845 and 1917, when indenture was abolished. Other Indian and South Asian nationals were indentured into nearby islands and states, including Guyana, St. Vincent and Grenada—mainly to replace the newly freed slaves whose own ancestors had been shipped from West Africa two centuries earlier. (Prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1498, the indigenous Taino and Kalinago people lived on the island for centuries. The Spanish conquered Trinidad in the late 1500s and ruled until 1797, when the British seized the island. In 1889 Tobago was amalgamated with Trinidad, creating the united colony of Trinidad and Tobago. It gained its independence in 1962. I call the country Trinidad throughout in part because that’s the more familiar name, and in part because it’s where my reporting takes place.)

Roopdian can’t recall what prompted his grandfather to leave his community and move to Trinidad. “Probably for work or money,” he says. However, it’s not the grandfather’s arrival that haunts this family but the mysterious circumstances of his journey back to India many decades after the end of his five-year indenture period. The same man who uprooted himself and started anew in the Caribbean returned to India at some point in the early 1930s, severing all ties to Trinidad, including any contact with his wife and children. For decades, Roopdian’s older brother Sat tried to reconnect with the man he had known briefly as a child. Sat even made his way to India in the early 1960s to explore his grandfather’s life before and after Trinidad. All attempts to track his whereabouts or to find out if he was still alive failed. Sat’s death in 2013 snuffed out the last connection to the original indentured Rampersad.

As they got older, Roopdian and his siblings lost their bonds to India and became more firmly attached to Trinidad. Roopdian’s transformation from a brown minority living among a predominately black majority to a Trinidadian citizen materialized as his business took off in the late 1950s. He was in his teens and early twenties, and his coming of age coincided with the Indo community’s political and economic maturation. After decades as subordinates to white colonizers and then black nationalists, Indo-Trinidadians had emerged as a dominant force in social, economic and cultural terms.

With another of his brothers, Roopdian left central Trinidad and headed north to the city of Port of Spain to start a customs brokerage business. For a fee, the brothers would clear customs for wholesale merchandise imported from or exported to Trinidad. The job included loading and unloading containers, warehousing goods and distributing them to wholesalers. Their biggest investment was an American-made truck that Roopdian drove up and down the island. The truck sits in the driveway of his Chaguanas home to this day, a symbol of his go-getting younger self and a reminder to his children and grandchildren of the Rampersad (and by extension, brown) tradition of hard work and thrift. (And, Roopdian insists, it drives better than the new models he’s burned through over the years.)

At around this time, many Indo-Trinidadian families began to take over local businesses, moving from their traditional enclaves in central and south Trinidad into the black-dominated Port of Spain in the north. Tensions between the Indian and black communities rose as a result. “Black people did the more laborious work,” Roopdian recalls, referring to tasks like unloading shipping containers onto trucks—the literal heavy lifting. Afro-Trinidadians had developed a reputation for being physically imposing, and there was an understanding on the island that Port of Spain “belonged” to them, says Roopdian. Many blacks resented being employed in lowly positions by Indian citizens, whom even the country’s “father” and first prime minister, Eric Williams, referred to as “transient” and not true Trinidadians—nearly 120 years after their arrival on the island.

“We had run-ins,” Roopdian adds, refusing to elaborate on the nature of these encounters. He admits only to name-calling, with each community putting the other down using racially charged language: blacks were called “niggers,” while Indians got stuck with “coolies” (a word from the original Tamil that refers to wages paid to people doing manual labour). The two communities, one brought to the island as slave labour and the other as indentured labour, were free people now, but their history of subjugation set them on a collision course that continues to this day in Trinidad.

Even though a 2011 UN demographics study places the two groups at a statistical tie, with the Indo-Trinidadian community slightly ahead (at 37.6 percent to the Afro-Trinidadian community’s 36.3), the country as a whole would strike a casual observer or a tourist as predominately black. That was certainly my impression of the capital city of Port of Spain.

Trinidad likes to think of itself as the embodiment of multiculturalism long before the concept entered North American and European consciousness. In addition to the two major ethnic groups, the island has been home to migrants from China, Syria and many European countries, including Spain and France. (Most plantation owners were in fact French.) The government buildings next to my Port of Spain hotel display murals and sculptural engravings that emphasize tolerance, diversity and harmony. But the symbols of black culture, from calypso music to the annual Carnival, dominate this representation. You can spot the odd depiction of Chinese musical instruments or South Asian dancers, but the story of the country, even in this creative attempt at racial integration, is the story of its Afro-Trinidadian citizens. To be brown in Trinidad is to be a majority and a minority at once—to occupy a space in the national dialogue that is powerful economically but marginalized culturally.

In this landscape, multiculturalism means adhering to the dominant black culture. “I still don’t see equality,” says Darrell Baksh, a Toronto-born academic of Trinidadian origin, during a stroll along Port of Spain’s Ariapita Avenue, home to the high-end bars and restaurants that middle-class Trinidadians frequent. “I see the Indian culture second to black culture. Black culture is understood as the mainstream.” Baksh was working on a PhD on how local music—including chutney, a genre that originated within the Indo community—underscores issues of identity and nationalism on the island.

Being a distinct and separate group forced members of the Indian community to look inward for support. “We’ve connected because of family relations,” Roopdian recalls. “We didn’t know anything about India.” The various groups of the Indo-Trinidadian community—Muslim, Hindu, Christian, from different geographical regions within India—bonded with each other through the common grounds of family and the experience of indenture. Admittedly, tensions sometimes developed along the lines of class, caste and even skin colour—dark versus light brown, as I show later in this chapter. But despite all the factors that pulled the community apart, physically and culturally, its members were united by their past (indenture) and present (tensions with the black community). The story of Indo-Trinidadians is one where power and class intersect with skin colour—brown skin colour. But unlike Tanzania or Uganda, Trinidad hosts two groups of people who have migrated from or been forced out of their ancestral homes, leaving them to duke it out on a third and faraway land.

MISUNDERSTANDING AND DISTRUST BETWEEN the Indo- and Afro-Trinidadian communities began almost as soon as Fatah El Rizk, the first ship carrying indentured labour from Calcutta, docked in Port of Spain in 1845. The African community had been emancipated since 1838, and as the long-accepted version of the history goes, planters faced a massive labour shortage. In the past two or three decades, historians of the Caribbean—including Viranjini Munasinghe, author of Callaloo or Tossed Salad?: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad—have advanced the revisionist theory that the newly emancipated refused to work on the plantations for what the colonial masters were willing to pay. This forced European planters and British emissaries in the Caribbean to look for a “new system of slavery.”

Moving labour from one part of the empire to another could solve that problem, and it had the added advantage of avoiding negotiations with neighbouring countries in the Southern Hemisphere or competing empires (French or Dutch). India seemed like the most likely source of new labour. Not only was it overpopulated and suffering under poverty levels that the British couldn’t dream, and had no intention, of alleviating, but its people had acquired a reputation as both hardworking and docile—in other words, efficient and controllable. In addition, the tropical heat of the Caribbean wouldn’t affect the productivity of Indians, who grew up in a similar climate.

It was meant to be a simple and natural solution, except that the black community viewed the Indian indentured workers as scabs used by crafty planters to drive wages down. The two groups indulged in stereotypes almost from the start. Blacks were said to be lazy and violent, Indians devious and money-oriented and transient. Their temporary status gave them no right to equal treatment, or so the thinking among the black community went. The original indenture agreement stipulated that each labourer had to work a minimum of five years. At end of his contract, a worker was given a choice: a return passage to India; money to stay behind and continue working on plantations; or a grant of five acres of farming or agricultural land. About a quarter of the indentured chose to take the passage to India; the rest settled in Trinidad, suggesting their adaptability or their grim prospects back home. Either way, the workers formerly known as indentured began accumulating land and turning small profits.

In the Afro-Caribbean narrative of Trinidad, the post-indenture land grant gave brown people an unfair advantage, since no similar arrangements were made for the freed slaves earlier in the nineteenth century. This reading often underplayed the fact that while Indians may have signed on to indenture, it doesn’t mean that migration was entirely of their own choosing. Many workers were trapped in cycles of underemployment, famine and environmental disasters that made leaving India for an unknown land the more appealing, or only, alternative. In many ways, not much has changed in nearly two centuries; modern-day migrant labourers from South and Southeast Asia are often motivated by a similar note of desperation.

The indenture system itself developed after several attempts to bring in workers from China or Europe had proven unsuccessful. The harsh tropical climate may have played a role in why people from both races failed to meet the productivity test. However, the racialist ideology of the nineteenth century also made it difficult for planters to import white people from Europe as labourers. How can people from a continent that has claimed the top spot in racial hierarchy, beauty and moral fortitude be employed in work previously undertaken by blacks? It made more sense to import people whose skin colour differed from that of their masters. If blacks would not do the work for the wages offered, then people from the next group down, the brown race, would. Not only would this solve the labour shortage, but it would keep wages down and increase the bargaining power of the planters. If this sounds familiar to us in North America today, it’s because a similar logic is at play in the Temporary Foreign Worker permits that many neo-liberal governments love to issue. At least that’s how unions see it.

The resentment blacks felt toward the Indian arrivals meant that the two ethnic groups led largely separate lives, marked by the occasional physical or rhetorical “run-ins” (to use Roopdian’s understated expression). The separation took a physical form as well, with the Indians “confined” to the lower central and southern parts of the island, while blacks congregated in the north and the urban centre of the vast Port of Spain. Each community also adopted different national identities, with Mother India and Mother Africa as the spiritual homeland of each. The path to racial consciousness differed for each community, too.

The path to greater racial awareness for Afro-Trinidadians followed the American model of black consciousness and the Black Power movement, helped by editors of Afro-Caribbean newspapers, who used their publications to promote social change and the uplift of the black community. The end of the First World War marked a turning point in the racial awakening of the black community, as soldiers from the British West Indies Regiment returned home “bitter, radicalized and more race-conscious than before,” and took part in the labour unrest and anti-colonial violence that swept Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean in the 1920s. By the 1950s, a full-fledged Black Power initiative based in the Caribbean had branched off the Civil Rights Movement in the US. In his analysis for the UNESCO General History of the Caribbean, Tony Martin argues that African consciousness treated its Indian counterpart with “benign neglect” or incorporated it into a larger struggle against the colonial regime. Indian consciousness, Martin suggests, focused on the African as the adversary, sidelining the British or European planters who used the Indians as a “buffer” between themselves and the increasingly agitated blacks.

At the heart of this white-brown-black colour line was a racial belief in the superiority of browns over blacks—a belief built in part on contemporary European racialist theories and in part on the colonial connection between India and the United Kingdom. This connection led many Indo-Trinidadians to act as if they occupied a special place within the empire—a position not as high as whites but not as low as blacks. Brown was the acceptable middle ground. Affluent black Trinidadians have even taken to describing themselves as brown because the colour serves as a “category of middle-class status,” writes anthropologist Aisha Khan in her essay for Shades of Difference.

The Black Power movement in the 1960s and early 1970s extended an invitation to the Indian community to join the project of post-colonial nation-building. Many Indians rejected the offer because, historian Bridget Brereton writes, “it subsumed their ethnic identity under a blanket term always primarily associated with people of African descent.” The roots of this resistance could be traced to the caste system (in which lighter skin was held in high regard) and had something to do with the geographic origins of the initial indentured labourers, who mostly came from the northern regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (where lighter skin prevailed). Later waves drew on labour from the southern parts of pre-partitioned India, including the darker-skinned Madrasis. Skin tone turned into another way of differentiating among people in the Indian community—or discriminating against them.

Although Eric Williams, Trinidad’s first prime minister, wanted to create a multicultural, hybrid community with no Mother India or Mother Africa but a Mother Trinidad and Tobago, his People’s National Movement aligned itself with the black movement, often at the expense of Indians. The country’s first Indo-Caribbean prime minister, Basdeo Panday of the United National Congress, was not elected until 1995, more than thirty years after independence. Any jubilation at the political ascendency of Indo-Trinidadians was short-lived, however, as his reign lasted a relatively brief six years and may have triggered the worst spate of crimes against the community.

In the first decade of the twentieth-first century, and particularly between 2002 and 2007, a wave of kidnappings for ransom swept through Trinidad, with most of the victims coming from the Indo-Trinidadian merchant and business class, and the alleged perpetrators (few cases were brought to justice) coming from the black community. As I was walking with my guide, Collin, the one-time teacher, on my first full day in Port of Spain, we ran into a former student whom he hadn’t seen for over a decade. The student was now running his own IT business outside Port of Spain, but he said he’d kept his visits to the capital city to a minimum ever since he was kidnapped there in 2005. “I was victim number eighty-two,” he told his old schoolteacher, adding that he was lucky to be held in captivity for just two weeks. His family paid his ransom—these ranged from half a million to five million Trinidad and Tobago dollars (about US$80,000 to US$800,000)—and he was let go, largely unharmed physically but emotionally scarred.

I could tell he was nervous from the way he kept looking around during our brief conversation, which took place outside a very safe hotel with several security guards and doormen milling about. It occurred to me that almost all the hotel employees, as well as the cab drivers waiting for customers, were black. Perhaps that did make him less comfortable. As Rebecca Prentice explains in her anthropological study of the kidnappings, some working-class Afro-Trinidadians had little sympathy for the suffering of the kidnapped or their families, citing their ability to pay the ransom and linking this crime epidemic to the underground drug-and-gun trade, which purportedly uses the textile industry as a front. There’s no proof of the latter theory, although off the record many Indo-Trinidadians have placed the blame for the rampant drug-and-gun culture on Syrian-Trinidadians. (The first victim of kidnapping in 2002 was the son of a Syrian business tycoon.)

The kidnapping spree highlighted the economic disparities and racial tensions on the island, and the vulnerability of the brown community despite its political and economic ascendency. Most brown families chose to settle the matter by paying ransoms, since they viewed the largely black police force as unsympathetic and incapable of getting their loved ones back alive. As Kavyta Raghunandan explains in her study of hyphenated identities in Trinidad, the country’s origins as a colonial society established “a stratification . . . based on a class-race-colour hierarchy which some argue has set the foundation for present-day race relations and ethnic competition in Trinidad.”

My own encounters with two Indo-Trinidadians at the prime of their professional lives gave me contrasting readings of the class-race-colour continuum in Trinidad. Samantha, a Trinidadian businesswoman of Indian heritage, confirmed Raghunandan’s proposition, while Jason, a legal aid attorney and law school lecturer, asserted that his country was too complex to be distilled into one racially divided narrative.

THE WHEEL HOUSE PUB in Chaguaramas, a peninsula and the site of a former US naval base, offers a diverse menu for a fairly homogenous clientele. You’ll find your classic English pub food—fish and chips or steak and kidney pies with mashed potatoes and gravy—as well as some Italian pastas, Indian curries and Jamaican patties. On a Saturday afternoon in mid-November, customers were either white, middle-class North American or European tourists who had docked their sailboats in the marina and were taking a break in one of Trinidad’s prime (and safest) spots, or Afro-Trinidadian men who likely worked in the area and had dropped by for a lunchtime beer. The tourists congregated on the patio, soaking in the hot weather; their glasses of white wine and mugs of beer glistened in the sun and warmed up faster than they could drink them. The black men huddled around the serving area indoors, carrying on conversations among themselves and with the only waitress in the joint. This black-and-white, inside-versus-outside division was interrupted when Samantha and I grabbed a seat on the patio. Like the two brown people we are, we compromised by finding a table outside but under a huge canopy that blocked the sun. That’s what I love about hanging out with fellow brown people: no need to explain why we prefer sitting in the shade.

I’d been in Trinidad for just under a week by that point and could tell that I was getting darker by the day, simply from walking down the streets of Port of Spain or travelling around the country for interviews. Skin colour and race, and the associations each brings to socio-economic and cultural status in Trinidad’s contemporary society, were the topics of my conversation with Samantha, before and after lunch. I’d insisted on meeting her because I wanted to see how skin colour, being brown, affects women on the island. Do they experience it differently from men? If so, in what ways? Samantha had a lot to say, mostly from her personal experience but also as a member of the Association of Female Executives of Trinidad and Tobago, which has been working on breaking barriers in the business and corporate worlds for women of all races.

It’s hard to tell where Samantha places herself on the racial divide in Trinidad. Her maternal grandmother had mixed Spanish and black (creole) blood, while her grandfather was descended from indentured Indian workers. Her father’s family is also Indian. Samantha describes herself as an Indo-Trinidadian because, she says with no apology, “I don’t want to be identified as black.” To be seen as black is to be treated as poorer, less financially independent. However, she’s the first to admit that identifying herself as an Indo woman doesn’t amount to much more than curiosity and an abandoned family-tree project. “I wouldn’t wear anything ethnic,” the casually dressed businesswoman says, adding that she never applies the bright red lipstick that some women of Indian heritage believe complements their skin tones.

Samantha’s refusal to follow the Indian-heritage playbook stems from her years of studying and working in the United States. She returned to Trinidad about ten years ago to look after her ailing mother. Despite having a master’s degree in business administration and more than two decades of work experience, Samantha found herself thrust into the traditional role allotted to women: serving others. She lives with her mother and looks after a number of commercial and residential real estate holdings for the family business, but when her brothers visit she’s expected to defer to them, even serving them food. (She tells me that one of her brothers had bankrupted five businesses over the years, but that didn’t stop him from lecturing her on business matters.)

Even when she briefly dated a white Dutch man a few years ago, Samantha was surprised to find herself automatically looking after him. She and her mother both tended to him in a way that went beyond local hospitality customs. I ask if her relationship with a white man was an issue for her family and friends. The opposite was true, she insists. In the hierarchy of desirable partners, white people—locals or expatriates—are seen as the top prize. No family would turn down a white suitor (or a light-skinned Syrian or Lebanese, who get lumped in with whites). And although douglas—mixed-race children of Indians and blacks—are common in Trinidad, middle-class and affluent Indians are often unhappy when their children want to marry a person of Afro-Trinidadian descent. Hindu families in particular adhere to notions of purity of race that place blacks at the bottom of desirable racial groups. Samantha admits that she would not entertain any proposals from black men. It’s easy to dismiss her position as intolerant (or terribly unromantic), but she put on the record what many Indo-Trinidadians have been socialized to believe but not say out loud—at least not in a country that invests so much of its energy in maintaining that a colour line doesn’t exist.

Samantha’s pick of neighbourhoods to visit or do business in follows along economic and racial lines, and even determines her beauty regimen. She prefers to get her hair done in the affluent western parts of the island (West Moorings and St. Ann’s) because the stylists use high-end salon products and provide better service. It’s the part of the island where white Trinidadians and expats live in gated communities, and its main streets are considered safe enough that you will see families going for strolls at night. In her more mixed (and therefore less privileged and more crime-ridden) borough of Arima, Samantha buys her own hair products in advance and takes them with her to the salon.

I look at her immaculately coiffed dark hair and guess that her last appointment was in West Moorings.

There’s something universally ethnic about the way men and women spend so much of their time and money maintaining their hair’s smoothness and ironing out any curls. Both black and brown people share that experience. But in the Caribbean, smoother hair also means pure Indian heritage, whereas curly hair, or even hints of curliness, suggests black bloodlines. The colour line strikes again.

Jason, a thirty-four-year-old attorney-at-law, lecturer and labour-rights activist, has a view of Trinidad that is starkly different from Samantha’s. Trinidad is so mixed, in his opinion, that he doesn’t see how anyone can say they’re pure anything, much less maintain this purity. It seemed an odd position to take after he and I had spent a long and mostly rainy day exploring the southern tip of the island, a largely rural landscape dominated by Indian businesses, families, temples and the Indian Caribbean Museum, which is dedicated to documenting the experience of this community in Trinidad and elsewhere in the region. (The museum’s docent guided us through its collection in a way that suggested either she believed passionately in its mission or this shrine to all things brown didn’t get many visitors.) This is a part of the island that has remained purely and proudly Indian.

Jason insisted that we stop in the town of Debe, whose biggest tourist attraction is a series of food sheds along a main road. Indo-Trinidadians stop there at any time of day for a bite to eat. When we got there at 11 a.m. or so, the post-breakfast, pre-lunch snack time had already started. Of the dozen or so sheds, one in particular seemed to be drawing the largest crowd. Krishna’s Food Centre sells delicacies that originated in India or were created in Trinidad by the early indentured labourers. It’s not a stretch to imagine workers from the sugar or rice plantations that once existed nearby preparing the same dishes at the end of a long day toiling in the fields. Almost everything is fried, and to my delight, the stand offers such vegetarian options as baiganee (fried eggplant in batter) and katchorie (fried split peas, very falafel-like).

Jason tells me that the sheds do brisk business on Friday and Saturday nights, when Indo-Trinidadian families descend on them from all parts of the island before browsing through local stores that sell Bollywood DVDs and soundtracks, spices or kitchen supplies. You can call it Little India, but that historically contested description illustrates the push-pull dynamics among Indo-Trinidadians. They want to be seen as both Caribbean and Indian in a society that often asks them to choose one or the other—or at least expects them to overplay allegiance to Trinidad at the expense of a connection to Mother India.

In the Catholic household in which Jason grew up, his family thought of India as “some exotic land, a vast country far, far away.” On Sunday afternoons, the family would gather in the living room to watch a Bollywood movie on state television. “I felt no connection to that world,” Jason insists. And neither did his parents. His earliest memory of India as a political or cultural subject was his A-level history class, the History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. It was there that he first read up on the story of indentured labour alongside the history of slavery. His private school and his family home, both in the heart of Port of Spain, exposed Jason to students from black, Indian, Chinese, Syrian and European backgrounds. So much so that he is now reluctant to identify himself as anything but Trinidadian. Period. No hyphen needed. To prove his point, Jason tells me how little he had in common with brown students from the Caribbean when he studied law at the University of the West Indies in Barbados. “I didn’t identify with them at all,” he says, adding that he sought the company of other Trinidadians regardless of race or skin colour.

Trinidadian politicians and the manufacturers of the multicultural glue that holds the country together would consider Jason a poster boy and his experience exemplary. This is a country that celebrates every major cultural or religious festival. The list of national holidays includes Indian Arrival Day, Emancipation Day, Diwali, Eid al-Fitr, Christmas and, of course, Carnival. But what politicians say and how they govern can be two completely different realities. Jason acknowledges that when it comes to politics, the country is built to be divided along colour lines, with brown and black people fighting each other for survival. “The parties can assure themselves of victory by polarizing groups of people and pitting them against each other,” he says. “How people live on a day-to-day basis is not reflective of how they vote. The two major political parties use the doctrine of divide and conquer, subconsciously forcing people to vote along racial lines.”

Later in the day, I recount the story of the kidnap victim I met in Port of Spain and ask Jason about the national stereotypes of the resourceful, wealthy Indo-Trinidadians and the poor and crime-prone Afro-Trinidadians. His sigh betrays frustration with and disbelief at how generations of Trinidadians have created and perpetuated such stereotypes. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” he vents. In the legal aid clinic where he sometimes works, assisting clients with issues from domestic assault to petty convictions, Jason sees equal numbers of people who “appear to be” Indian or African. Both groups can get into trouble or be victims of it. It’s the economics and not the racial identity that matters. Trinidadians with better incomes insulate themselves against most legal issues and crime by living in gated communities and avoiding contact with criminal elements.

However, even Jason concedes that “there’s a perceived advantage” to being lighter-skinned, both in and out of court. “If the average person was to look at someone with a lighter complexion, she or he may assume that the light-skinned person comes from a certain economic bracket.” Generally speaking, this perception works in favour of Indian people. On a personal level, Jason says that he notices skin colour only when he travels outside the country. In Trinidad, he’s become sort of colour-blind: “I don’t differentiate; I don’t discriminate.” He applies that philosophy at work and at home, regardless of racial or religious lines. Jason’s wife is Hindu, but their two-year-old son, Callum, is being raised a Catholic. As Jason says, Callum will have Hindu cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents, and he may well identify with Hinduism later in life. If that happens, his son will seek a stronger connection with his Indian heritage, since that is part and parcel of the faith.

When I repeat Jason’s assertion that people in this country don’t see colour, Darrell Baksh all but laughs it off. Race and skin colour underscore virtually all social and political interactions in Trinidad, he insists. “Indians judge their own people. Fairer is better,” he says. Whenever Darrell flies to Toronto for the holidays, members of his immediate family will invariably note that his skin has gotten darker from the Trinidadian sun. The fact that he looks healthy or has gained weight after being almost anemically thin in Canada doesn’t factor into the discussion. Some even wonder aloud why he’s spending so many years researching a musical genre with a past in old traditions and a future than hinges on a culture more black than brown.

ON MY FINAL NIGHT in Trinidad, I joined Jason and his family at a gathering hosted by Ashad, the only Muslim Indo-Trinidadian I got to meet during my visit. Ashad and Jason attended the same high school in Port of Spain and have remained close friends ever since. My initial plan was to see if members of the minority Muslim community held views that differed from those of the dominant Hindus. But as soon as Ashad invited me into his home, the reporter in me gave way to the brown middle-aged man who has been away from his family for decades and just wants to enjoy some family time. I put my notebook down.

The entire evening could have taken place in our family home in Cairo in the 1970s or early 1980s. This extended family—again, the son, his wife and their only daughter live with the grandparents in the same house—felt and looked very familiar. But it was a family that held on to traditional values and eschewed the more liberal aspects of creolization—the men were served first, for example, and the women ate only once the men had had their fill. And yet, as I joined the women around the dining table once the men had decamped for the living room, I heard stories of their involvement in the annual Carnival and I noted that all were financially independent—or at least working for a living. (Ashad’s wife ran a beauty salon in the home’s converted garage.) The guests that night were Catholic, Hindu, Muslim and Presbyterian, representing the main faiths in the country. I did notice that no one from the black community joined us, even though everyone present mentioned having a close friend or co-worker from the other side of the colour divide. Perhaps, I thought, Jason is right after all. Despite the dominant influence of a colour line, Trinidad can’t be reduced to a single assertion or observation.

But as I left I noticed that the house was in a gated community of mainly brown families, with further protection provided by a guard dog, a Rottweiler. (A docile one, but still a Rottweiler.) The isolation and overprotection undercut my briefly held conversion to Jason’s vision of Trinidad. They were a physical manifestation of the way the colour line works: separating blacks from browns, and vice versa.