Hungry Ghosts

The place is Trinidad, "sometime in the 1940s."

Four boys ventured to the river bank to perform a blood oath. Two brothers and two cousins. The brothers were twins, both fifteen; the cousins fourteen and thirteen. They passed around a boning knife, making clean cuts across their palms.

The boys mix and drink their blood, then christen their bond with the name "Corbeau" (the vulture), because the vulture feeds on what has lived before and "stays alive."

Krishna, is the youngest, and he and his cousin, Tarak, live with their families in an old sugarcane estate barracks, which is broken down, leaky, infested with rats, "neighbour to nothing," and some away from Bell Village, which reflects "the dogma of a new world"—the one "being resurrected " from a Trinidad killed by colonization.

These barracks were scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse. In their marrow, the ghosts of the indentured. And the offspring of those ghosts. This particular barracks sat by its lonesome, raw, jagged as a yanked tooth in the paragrass-spangled meadow.

The ghosts are preta—the "hungry ghosts" of Hindu mythology—the ghosts of those whose lives had ended before their dreams had been fulfilled. They are always hungry "for company," with big mouths and huge bellies. Krishna's infant sister, Hema, who died before he was born, is a hungry ghost. The elder, Rookmin, had performed magical ceremonies and had instructed Krishna's mother, Shweta, to observe certain rituals, which she did, but Hema's ghost still haunted her. Tansi, Tarak's mother who died of malaria, is also a ghost. She haunts her sister, Kalawatie, and Rookmin says Kalawati hears her outside at night "in the wind," and sees "her shadow behind the bihar tree." Kawatie must walk backwards into rooms and spread "circles of salt leading up to the door" to keep Tansi's spirit from following her inside.

There are many ghosts in this story, and many people whose dream and hopes are never achieved. Krishna, after the bonding ritual, reminds himself, "Don't let your dreams fool you," and "This is your place in the world," but he faces bullying and discrimination at school, and he sees his father, Hans (Hansraj Saroop), placating a shopkeeper who will not allow a Hindu Indo-Trinidadian boy like Krishna into his shop but allows Bell Village Christian children to enter freely.

Five families live in the barracks, sharing a yard for cooking, drinking and fighting, and existing in five tiny, half-separated rooms, with leaky walls, "cold earthen ground" and no privacy. In spite of the dramas which fill Hungry Ghosts, the slow narrative pace allows the reader to get to know these families and see the hardship of their individual lives, but also the love, respect, and sense of community between them. It also brings the land around them to life:

"Here, the snakes" calls blurred with the primeval hiss of wind through the plants. Picture en plein air, all shades of green soaked with vermilion and red and purple and ochre. Picture what the good people call fever grass, wild caraille, shining bush, tamaries, tecomarias, bois gris... Picture curry leaves springing into helices, mangroves cross-legged in the decanted swamp...

The names may be unfamiliar, but the richness of the land is clear. So, too, are the smells and tastes of the food and the cadences of the Creole language and dialect the people speak.

All this is background to the events that change the lives of Krishna and his parents. These begin when Dalton Changoor, the wealthy and mentally unsound owner of a mansion some way from the barracks, vanishes, leaving his much younger wife Marlee alone on the estate to be terrified by nighttime disturbances, ransom notes, threats, and the horrible deaths of Dalton's beloved dogs.

Dalton Changoor's disappearance is a mystery for most of the book, and gossip circulates widely. The source of his wealth is attributed to criminal activities, or darker forces—"Fiend Money"—and Marlee's background is the subject of lurid and salacious rumors, some of which are true. Marlee always has had to mask her true wants and desires. Only when Dalton is no longer around does she begin to enjoy the freedom to look and behave just as she wishes. She is a complex and vivid character who inspires mixed emotions in the reader.

Hans works on Dalton's estate with two other men. Baig, a part-timer, is a rough, unreliable, "boisterous man with no filter"; and Robinson is a neat, self-sufficient, taciturn, Christian Black man. Marlee, who sees Hans as a hard worker, "fit" and "rugged in all the right places," decides to ask him to stay on the estate at night to protect her. When Hans tells Robinson about this, he questions Hans:

"You mean till the Mister come back?"

"To scare off them boys."

"She paying you good?"

"Yeah."

"What your wife say?"

A pause. "I ain't ask her yet."

"I hear a night shift usually spell trouble for a family in the barrack. Stories about women and daughters having to fight for their dignity in a husband's absence. The kinds of things that could happen in the night."

Hans does not ask Shweta, and when he does take the job, his whole relationship with his family changes. At the Dalton house, Marlee invites him into the house, cooks for him, teaches him to use a gun to defend her, gets drunk with him, and inevitably, sleeps with him. Hans begins to enjoy sharing something of the comfortable life she leads. He draws away from Shweta, and she, feeling increasingly rejected, pins her hopes on their agreement that the money Hans is earning will buy a plot of land in Bell. When Hans eventually tells her he has been outbid for it, but he is still going to the Dalton estate day and night, Shweta is furious. Krishna, who has found his father out in a lie, unintentionally makes matters worse:

"In the midst of the cacophony, the boy blurted out, "Pa is lyin. He wasn't at the village this evenin."

Hans is shocked but tries to placate Shweta:

"Marlee is goin to help we find another lot as soon as—"

"Marlee?" Shweta came closer to Hans. "I's your wife and I tellin you—you have no more business at that house. It aint right for you to be there. Not in the night. Is like we aint even exist when you over there. You become a total stranger—"

Nothing good comes of this confrontation, and Krishna is disillusioned with his father, but he has troubles of his own to deal with. His quarrel with bullying boys escalates into violence for which he is arrested; and the police officer in charge turns out to be the father of one of the bullies. Marlee, who has some power, helps to resolve this incident, but a later bullying confrontation is much more serious and has disastrous consequences.

The twins, too, have faced a deadly confrontation. They are "outcasts," because of the murderous actions of their now dead father, and they live in a hut away from everyone else. Hans tells Krishna not to associate with them, but Krishna and Tarak ignore that, and because they are "Corbeau," the four boys meet frequently. At one of these meetings, the twins tell Krishna and Tarak about a terrifying meeting with Dalton Changoor.

Lata, Krishna's young friend in the barracks, also lives through a dangerous incident after attending a celebration of the Hindu festival of Ramlila in a nearby settlement in which a model of the mythical demon Ravana is ritually burned.

Plays and costumes and colours and songs. It was where friends converged, husbands met wives and enemies were forced into eye contact. A transaction of recipes and gardening tips and gossip. Where you learned that nani's curry gave everyone diarrhea. Or that beti's Muslim son secretly ate swine or tantie's daughter was frigid.

Lata dreams of leaving the barracks and bettering her future life, so accepts the invitation of one of the Bell Village boys who is attracted to her and invites her to join him and his friends at the festival. The boys and Lata get drunk, and the boys disappear, leaving Lata alone. The consequences of this precipitate a deadly conflict in which Krishna, Tarak, and the twins all become involved.

Poverty, class-distinctions, and religious differences are all part of Hungry Ghosts, as are traditions and customs, ancient superstitions, plant-lore, sex and pregnancy, but so, too, is the sheer joy of simple activities:

The two boys and the dog set off in the direction of the paddies. The rice plants were still young and looked more like weeds. The water opaque. Each step they took raised a plume of muck to the surface. When they stood still, tiny outlines of fishes swam in spirals. They ran the bag through the water and scooped up a catch of mostly tadpoles and guppies. They spent about half an hour doing this, hoping to get something juicy there.

In interviews, Hosein has said that many of the domestic details of life in Trinidad in the 1940s came from conversations with his grandfather and other elders. These were the ordinary things of life, but it was a time of war. The colonial powers were leaving, and the Americans had begun to take over small villages to set up naval bases. It was a time of change, of independence, and of dreams a better life.

Hungry Ghosts is an absorbing and exciting family drama and the uncertainty of Dalton's disappearance. The possibility that at any moment he might return adds tension to the story. This is traditional story-telling, well done, and the harshness of life is lightened by the warmth of Trinidad and the strong character of its people.

 

A Sydney Writers" Festival interview with Kevin Jared Hosein can be found at https://www.swf.org.au/stories/2023/interview-kevin-jared-hosein-on-hungry-ghosts