Travel Tips

It must have been around the year 18-- when my grandfather, a young boy without parents wandered onto a ship from Calcutta heading for the new world.

Cramped together with hundreds of other men, women and children they embarked on a perilous journey to land 3 months later on the shores of British Guiana.

It was after the abolition of slavery when the need for labourers arose to fill the void created by the mass exodus of ex-slaves from the sugar plantations.

Great expectations of high wages, good working conditions and a better life must have been the lure for my grandfather and the others to leave India.

At that time Queen Victoria was still the empress of India and the British were tightening their grip in the Indian subcontinent. United States of America had already celebrated more than a hundred years of independence from Britain.

My grandfather along with the other indentured laborers were immediately assigned to the different sugar estates.
Slaving for long hours, cutting or planting canes and cleaning the fields under blazing tropical heat with half-protected bodies or in the rice fields in knee high water and mud, many fell victims to malaria, dysentery and other tropical diseases.
Their lodgings, which they called their logies, were overcrowded and their toilet facilities were outhouses hanging over a trench some distance away.
Even in my school days, I remember those trenches still existed in Skeldon.

The heat and humidity was much more than they could bear, yet they were only given one shilling or twenty-four cents per day.
My grandfather, eventually completed his five-year period as an indentured worker. and along with others started to farm their own lands which later they were allowed to claim.
Rice, dhal and curry were their staple diet and still continue to remain a standard meal in Guyana today along with other foods which the Africans or Chinese or Portuguese introduced.
I still remember being teased in school by other children of other races as "coolie water rice" because we ate so much rice.
The Indians in Guyana were nickname Coolies and at that time it was a derogative name for Guyanese Indians.

I don’t think grandfather or Aja as we called him was a religious man he was more of a loner, a man of few words.
How he met my grandmother is a mystery to me. However, from this marriage my father was born and my grandmother died shortly after.

To make a living he literally took to the road with his goods on his back but he dealt with his customers is a mystery to me. He must have been successful to some extent because he was able to build a house with a little “cake shop” and live quite comfortably from this income.

to be continued........