Casa Levi has been thoroughly mopped and even though we haven’t passed noon and there’s not a deya yet in sight let alone alight, five-year-old Miss Lily awaits Mother Lakshmi with mounting impatience. Her little brother Baby Ben, unaware of the lights tonight brings, sleeps with all the indifference of innocence—belly full and hammocked out. Over ginger tea laced with lime and honey and a continuous loop of Hindu devotional songs, I’m blessing Mother Lakshmi myself—surely for the coming night of lights but also for the very welcome day of relief from the plantation.
We’re into the season of fin de l’année, (year end) the year’s tail is curling, ready to slip its skin and coil off into the past. There could be a scorpion sting concealed in these waning days, so it’s best to have the lamps up high and sweep all corners. Which is what Divali has syncretised for me, a clarity and illumination necessary to review what the year’s cycle brought; a liminal pool of calm after the daily battles which turned to months, as many wheels turn and the water flows on—sometimes a flood and a raging Rawan ogre, to be dammed and diverted from destruction to irrigate the fallow future coming.
One of the many treasure pleasures T&T has gifted me is Divali, a celebration I’ve come to prefer to Christmas, which coming from the capitalist and rationalist West had long lost its charm in a cloud of consumerism and the attendant stress of the unspoken obligation to shower all and sundry with gifts. Apart from the nocturnal artillery of bussin bamboo, there is a peace to Divali, an archetypal symbolism which flickers in a million—or simply one—lone flame, braving breeze and darkness, a pinprick of hope which illuminates this here Desolation Row.
Maybe Bobby Dylan never reach this far south, but who can doubt he had Trinidad in mind when he wrote his paean to desolation. I love his vignette of the masters of modernism, the stern Anti-Semite Eliot and the fascist epicure of obscurity Pound quarreling, to the amusement of “calypso singers”. A picong war between those two versus Attila and Lion or Spoiler and Sparrow would revive the fortunes of even the most moribund calypso tent, or would make for a delightful culture clash movie. On my right, the man who has measured out his life in coffee spoons, while on my left, I present the spoilt twins who become as one when eyeing the dregs of a rum bottle, or falling hard.
Fall lightly companeros, for you fall on all our dreams; step lightly, for the darkness surrounds us and at any moment the narrow path along the Saddle Road may veer and sheer away, plunging lost steps into byzantine labyrinths, where we search for our missing shadows in a maze of miasmic mirages.
Light and dark, good and evil—are these two twos mutually exclusive, or dependent on one another? At least in one realm of logic, the presence of one implies the absence of the other. Could you recognise light in the absence of darkness? And what about those grey areas in between the two? I got a good view of dawn in the tropics last week when dreams and infant desire drove me from my bed. Red clouds were rising in the east, somewhere Arima side; behind them a pale dawn only discernible against the remainder of the dark curving horizon where night waited for the day to spread across the sky.
No clear distinction here but a symbiosis of day and night. Just by shifting my neck a few degrees I could melt back into night, or look straight ahead into another day coming to come. So I’m not entirely convinced that light always conquers darkness, or that good inevitably triumphs over evil. I guess that depends where you’re sitting and then which way you’re looking. For now I’m more than happy to go with the lights into the darkening year and not have to think too much about Desolation Row.