Dear Editor,
The Return of Latchmini is a novel that is as breathtaking as it is unique.
The author, Seeta T. Shah Roath, UG lecturer, takes facts surrounding the living history of Guyana and weaves a story of intrigue, mystery, and adventure surrounding a family split up in Suriname and British Guiana, twice journeying across three oceans, and giving new life aboard the ship, The Avon. Although the journey of the Indian immigrant has been told and retold __ many times before, seeing the actual experiences through the eyes of protagonist Latchmini, her son Mohabir, and the ever patient Naraine, brings a static history to life in the novel. Latchmini returns to her village in India with her two children, pregnant with another child, and faces a different reality from when she had left as a bride with her husband. She had hoped to have her fourth child born in her homeland, but it turns out that was not to happen. The happy reunion with her in-laws was not as imagined, and she soon escaped the family home with her children in the dead of night, boarded a train and headed back to Calcutta and what she had hoped would be a return journey to Suriname.
Journeying out of India for a second time, Latchmini, in her account, watches men jump overboard in fear of the journey, sees dead babies being thrown overboard, comforts women raped in the water-closet on the ship, and barely avoids the same fate. She gives birth to baby Jack delivered by ‘Captain Jack’ in the middle of a violent storm just after passing the island of St. Helena, and before landing in Demerara instead of Sri Ram’s land, Suriname, where she had thought she was heading.
The natural beauty of Guyana is weaved through adventures of the family as never before told realities are dramatised in heightened, breathtaking episodes of some of the evils and triumphs of plantation life and heart breaking scenes of loss and gain. Unlike previous writings on the subject surrounding the departure from India, Shah Roath shows that the real reason for Latchmini’s, and her husband’s original departure was finding work abroad when none was available at home, earning enough money to return and build a comfortable life in her home village in Allahabad, after a bound contract in 1884 Suriname.
The novel brings to focus the Suriname-British Guiana connection of the time while leaving the reader anxiously awaiting the sequel. About the book, the author writes: “Would the tides of misfortune sweep Latchmini into the depths of despair? Or will she ride its crest to triumph?”
Sincerely,
Vishnu Bisram
