About this time last year, I spent some time with an extraordinary woman who lost her daughter in the Twin Towers. Her story closes the essay I wrote for Nonstop Metropolis, the anthology about NYC out in October; it’s a feminist essay about the role and number of women among Caribbean immigrants to New York City providing one bridge across race, religion, language and national origin. On this day, I thought I’d offer Mother Myrtle’s story: “It was mid-September 2015 […]

Categories: Uncategorized

For the new Indian site Scroll.in, I wrote about my affection for chutney music. Here’s the piece: Bollywood and my mother’s bhajans were the background music of my childhood. Growing up in New Jersey in the 1980s, any and all yearning for lost homelands was set to the score of ‘Love Story’, ‘Dostana’, ‘Silsila’. Hindi film music was the approved soundtrack of our nostalgia. Arguably, since I am an Indian roughly a century out of India, born in Guyana, chutney […]

Categories: Uncategorized

While pursuing the history of indentured women, the sources I most craved were their stories in their own words: in letters, diaries, memoirs. I found none in archives private or public. The women did not write down their stories. For the most part, they couldn’t. For the most part, they weren’t literate, in English or any Indian languages. Their testimonies do survive in a few cases, involving mistreatment on plantations or during sea voyages, but those words cannot be seen […]

Categories: Uncategorized

One hundred seventy-five years ago today, on May 5, 1838, the first group of Indians in the Caribbean landed in British Guiana. There were almost 400, assigned to plantations along the colony’s marshy coast. Since indenture was an experiment in slavery’s wake, feared to be a revival of slavery in all but name, we actually know a great deal about these first “bound coolies,” as indentured Indians were called. We know that, during their crossing to a new world, a […]

Categories: Uncategorized