My Auntie Daro’s black Christmas cake was heavy, smoky and heavenly. Baked in a traditional mud chamber, she ingeniously cut a deep rectangle in the ground, layered flickering red-hot coals and bricks, and stacked alternate shelves for cooking the countryside confection dominated by the heady base of staggering XM rum-soaked local fruits. Months before my diminutive Aunt patiently picked, cut, candied, dried, preserved and steeped the sumptuous selection including green papaya, “five finger,” golden apple and even mango.
We hungry youngsters ignored the thick, burnt crust and ate it all after admiring her primitive oven. A tough, petite fire spark of a woman with huge, soulful dark eyes and a congenital heart defect that would turn fatal, she worked hard at the land from early dawn to late dusk, toiling with her weather-browned clan to eke out a meagre, honest living planting coffee, fat ground provisions, plump peanuts and a pleasing assortment of pulses, fabulous for their fine flush and flavour.
In fact, my Aunt cultivated a mad, ever-changing garden, tending to whatever she felt might best survive drought, flood and pestilence, or sell that unpredictable year. Reaping time would find her travelling down by bus, heaving her giant jute bags of produce to hawk until hoarse in the sun and rain, for a pittance, all day long, alongside the rusty red iron gables of Stabroek Market in the congested, open area leading to and from the bustling Georgetown Stelling.
For countless years, my father and mother would bundle us – me, coexisting between my two families, the eldest – with my trio of eager brothers and sister into the sturdy, trusty old Morris Oxford car and we would scamper away from the bustle of the city, first by ferry and later speedily across the Harbour Bridge to the crisp, clean air, open sky country and endless bounty of my various Aunts’ farms, beyond the swirling Demerara River.
The chance to run wild, free and unconcerned even for an all-too short spell, in the vast, green backdams of Canal Number One where our uncomplaining Auntie Daro and Uncle Baystick and five handsome, obedient sons lived, proved overwhelming and we would begin to fuss, fidget and fake fight with excitement, hours before.
Begging for more natural juices and goodies that would roll out as soon as the menage arrived, we partook until stuffed to the seams as my beaming Aunt blessed us with hearty chuckles, and generous helpings. Her meals were all quickly done on the handmade fireside smoothed while hot into a satiny shiny finish with a viscous liquid slurry of fine grey ashes and soft clay. Sometimes there might be freshly killed chickens curried in a bubbling iron pot, accompanied by a delicious dhall made from the many exotic beans she grew and experimented with, since at that time the imported orange split pea was banned, added to the extended list of contraband foods.
Hence we eagerly tried savoury steaming sauces of fresh pigeon peas (toor), green mung, earthy urad, gleaming azuki/red cow pea (chori) and the perennial favourite black eyes peas. One memorable year, we even had the “gutney” (Indian swizzle stick) blended, surprisingly sugary seeds of the ripe bora (Chinese long bean) plant and another decadent dish that ended up a mighty mix and mishmash of everything – legumes and vegetables, featuring the young chewy lengths and leaves of the now famous “drumstick” (saijan) or moringa in a sizzling South Indian-styled sambar.
Crusty, crunchy cassava pone, and banana leaf wrapped-parcels of pudgy, pumpkin conkie, replete with gooseberry “raisins” and carambola “cherries,” fragrant with fresh ground flavourings and spices, and chewy chunks of hand-grated coconut would pop up sweating from the boiling pot, and plucked from the contraption under the recycled sheet of galvanized zinc, that once formed part of the tiny house’s roof. On those days there was no scarce wheat flour to be surreptitiously bought, smuggled, on the black market and the experiments with ground rice had gone awfully awry.
My Aunt would deftly pull from the gleaming ashes of burning coconut shells and cocoons of coir, the smoked and lightly seasoned “sweet water” fishes caught by my cousins early that morning in anticipation of our coming via bush telegraph, scraping off the fine coating of ash and steaming skin in a single, swift stroke, and exposing the firm, white flesh or in the case of the favoured hassar, the pale, yellowish-pink rich, oily meat that would mysteriously melt away on the warm tongue.
Later, we stared entranced as our deadpan Uncle yanked a branch of young neem leaves straight off the tall tree at the front of the yard and stripped the leaves straight into his mouth as dessert or salad depending on his mood, because it was “good for yuh.” Encouraged by this daredevil attitude, we tried a few and the stark bitterness, made us sputter, stagger and spit. As our relatives howled with glee, we four sought out our Aunt’s sympathetic hugs and sumptuous slices as a soothing salve.
Daro was the younger of my father’s two cheerful sisters in a set of five children, who were left motherless when my pretty paternal grandmother, nicknamed the legendary “Tantayra” (after the omnivore weasel, the South American tayra) for her slender, smooth frame, fierce attitude and fearless determination, died early and unexpectedly in a still childbirth at the family’s home in Ruimzeight, West Coast Demerara, in the 1940s. My Aunts emerged opposites in terms of size and temperament, the first, calm, matronly and rotund so called “Baby”, the second, thin, tiny and tenacious, a terrific, talking tinderbox.
My grandfather, the tall turbaned, fair charmer, riveting grey-eyed redhead Surat Ramlochan, first-named for the ancient city in India from whence his parents migrated to British Guiana early in the 20th century, rapidly remarried. In the absence of my extraordinary “Agee” (father’s mother) the centre could not hold and things began to fall apart, so the cattle dwindled and the croplands lay fallow.
At 22 my Big Daddy or Uncle/“Cha Cha” eventually took over the care of his two youngest siblings, my bewildered father, nine and his overwhelmed, weeping baby sister, seven, carrying them to colonial Georgetown to live with him in a small apartment. Aunty Baby had by then married and moved to Canal Number Two, and Daro would finally abscond, fleeing the frightening, foreign town for the familiarity of farmland Canal Number One, the fertile rural settlements that developed along the pair of irrigation channels forking out in a tangled network from the obsidian, wealthy waters of the Boerasirie Conservancy.
But my Aunts, like those from my mother’s side, were always happy to see us and invariably a flurry of foods, fuss, finery and lingering meals full of laughter and love, would follow, out in the simple wooden kitchen its bare floors hand scrubbed to a brilliant shine, with the home sewn bright curtains flapping wildly in the wind, or gathered around an oil-cloth covered table under the open, hand daubed, bottom house.
The first woolly lamb I ever held, my Aunt Daro carefully placed squirming into my skinny arms, she let us cuddle and play with the yellow ducklings, grinned broadly watching us try to catch the fluffy baby chicks and then fail to outrun the angry, pecking mother hen, and cracked up when I balked at crossing the single round wallaba pole across the trench. She simply hoisted me up on her hips and to stress there was no danger, danced back and forth.
I did not know then, why she panted and would without warning become breathless and tired. We scooted off to climb and explore, and left her gasping, to gape at the giant tree in the distance perfectly shaped in a towering triangle, its oval, intense green, glossy leaves and brilliant blush blossoms alit against the orange and lavender banded afternoon sky.
A magical carpet of fallen fuschia flowers atop the velvety grass appeared irresistible and we were all soon lying flat out, innocently rolling around in our jeans, screaming with joy, singing and spreading goodwill at the top of our juvenile voices, and admiring our new-found malaca apple Christmas tree swaying and swishing in the soft wind.
That night we discovered why my alarmed Aunt had hurriedly hauled us out despite our loud protests – when we returned home and suddenly started to scratch and itch. The cunning red welts popped up by the hundreds all over and we rushed, terrified and crying to our amused parents who pinpointed and agreed on the almost invisible dots: “Grass lice!”
The chorus that night was certainly not of cashews nor even the Big or Little Christmas Trees but caustic carbolic soap and cooling chamomile lotion, coating crevices and corners of a cowed caroling coterie.
ID contemplates her life’s scars, thinks she can find a few that can be blamed on an annoying aphid but wonders why she still gets curiously homesick, itchy, and weepy with nostalgia around the Christmas holidays, as her baffled children and startled husband try to understand the ramblings of fecund fields, an earth oven and a wet fireside.
