|
YOU TELL YOURSELF, drifting into sleep, you can walk from the Savannah to your pardner's Haleland Park flat, and arrive before the Argentina v South Korea 7.30am kick-off, once you wake up by 6am. At 6.30am, your eyes fly open and you spring out of bed like Heinze running in from the edge of the box to head in that goal against Nigeria. You can still make it, if you cut through the Savannah diagonally; worse comes to worst, you can hop a maxi-taxi at Country Club corner.
You walk briskly but still can't avoid seeing Trinidad. The silver domes of Mr Manning's National Performing Arts Academy - more popularly recognized as Minshall's copulating armadillos - shine in the morning sun coming over the hills of Laventy, like the corn curls wrappers embedded in the Savannah dirt, like warts. You support any national cleanup
attempt but no amount of picking up can replace not throwing down in the first place. Who can measure, far less bridge, the gap between those repulsed by litter and those who see it as an assertion of selfhood?
At what used to be, once, the Queen's Park Turf Club, they've put up a galvanized barricade along the southern edge and your half-forced chuckle turns into a bona fide giggle. Mr Manning, in his NAPA-launch speech, pretended the shiny cladding recalled the steelpan, but this is what it really reveals. Which, you wonder, reflects Trinidad's past, and which, its future? Trinidad's rulers have knocked flat a historical building with a real modern use and replaced it with an open eyesore; but at least they're trying to cover up one end.
You speed up, try to leave your future behind, but you're walking into what journalist Judy Raymond unforgettably called "the Dilapidated Seven". During the first West Indies v South Africa Digicel Test, the usually unerring Fazeer Mohammed referred to them as the Magnificent Seven. Faz has either not seen these buildings lately or might have been referring, just as accurately, to the West Indies batting order. "They" have put up a similar fence around Whitehall, the Prime Minister's office, which was too small for a man of Mr Manning's stature; had he been reelected, he would have grabbed the Red House as he did the President's Grounds and the National Great House, and remade it in his own likeness and honour; a self-made man with a strong negligence suit against the manufacturer.
It's closer to 7am than 6.45 as you sprint across Queen's Park West, your heart racing almost as fast as the cars and you know you have to move to Plan B, catching a taxi as soon as you hit Saddle Rd. Like half the world, you want to see Lionel Messi, the most exciting No. 10 since his coach, Diego Maradonna. You speed through the Boissierre one-way system. Not one car tries to go the wrong way, risking other's very lives for a tiny personal gain. Does this reflect a sea change in national perspective? Or merely that it's not yet 8am, which Trini drivers take to be almost 8.15, which is close to 8.25, which is practically 8.30, when the one-way system ends?
You know there's been a change of more than government in Trinidad. You felt the difference the moment you landed in Trinidad: people in Piarco airport smiling. Between duty-free shopping and baggage reclaim, you saw an African woman in Airport Authority brown smiling Biblically-knowingly at an Indian colleague and your hope rose again for the Dougla nation, the only one that can ever emerge from this mixed bag called the West Indies, no matter what the purists think.
Even between Customs and car rental, people seemed less angry than six weeks ago. Perhaps they feel less victimized; perhaps they may be moving away from the classic, passive-aggressive sour attitude learned by the powerless on the plantation; or maybe they're just relieved. Mr Manning asked for a mandate and got his comeuppance; and all of Trinidad & Tobago, bar the clique at the feeding trough and its adherents/entourage, seemed less pugnacious. If you were in doubt whether the place is a little less savage, driving a car convinced you: no one cut you off and cussed you out all the way to town.
On your feet now, at the Maraval Hi-Lo, it's nearly 7.15 and you know you need the taxi. You keep walking briskly, turning your head to look over your shoulder, constantly, like Ish Galbaransingh and Steve Ferguson, locked up last Wednesday and facing extradition to the US, to answer corruption charges. Nothing in your experience could have suggested that you could walk all the way from Country Club to Haleland Park and not see one legal taxi. There is no profit for them in it. Sufferers and schoolboys who don't have their own cars have to walk to Moka.
But even those with cars suffer.
You walk past car after car, unmoving, for all the distance you cover, faster than them, and your jaw drops low enough for you to consider stealing a wheelbarrow. It may be the worst choice we ever made on these islands: allowing everyone to own cars. More reverse democracy.
The traffic jam begins at the end of Haleland Park. From here to the Savannah, it is car after car after car after car, virtually parked. These people do this every day!
And you start to wonder about Trinis and self-worth and citizenship and the palace that Kamla will soon move into, despite her promise that she wouldn't.
And you wonder how many people will even try to resist it, far less prevent it. And, even as the shout from the house over the river tells you Argentina have scored the first of four, you wonder if you're in a quasi-slave society that is actually a step down from out-and-out slavery, in that only one form of rebellion is permitted, and set to the rigid schedule of once every five years. And, even then, the Negroes won't even burn down the Great House any more.
BC Pires is walking with a limp
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
