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By Root 19229 0

spotted the wet green verges, the dark ridged trunks of trees. It was cool. And then Mr Biswas began seeing the fruit trees. Avocado pear trees grew at the side of the road as casually as any bush; their fruit, only just out of flower, were tiny but already perfectly shaped, with a shine they would soon lose. The land between the road and the gully widened; the gully grew shallower. Beyond it Mr Biswas saw the tall immortelles and their red and yellow flowers. And then the untrodden road blazed with the flowers. Mr Biswas picked one up, put it between his lips, tasted the nectar, blew, and the bird-shaped flower whistled. Even as they stood flowers fell on them. Under the immortelles he saw the cocoa trees, stunted, their branches black and dry, the cocoa pods gleaming with all the colours between yellow and red and crimson and purple, not like things that had grown, but like varnished wax models stuck on to dead branches. Then there were orange trees, heavy with leafand fruit. And always they walked between two hills. The road narrowed; they heard no sound except that of their feet on the loose gravel. Then, far away, they heard the bus starting on its journey back to bustling, barren, concrete and timber Port of Spain. Impossible that it was less than an hour away!

The gully grew shallower and shallower, and then it was only a depression carpeted with a soft vine of a tender green. Mrs Tulsi bent down and disturbed it. A vine hung from her fingers; it had a faint smell of mint.

‘Old man’s beard,’ she said. ‘In Arwacas they grow it in baskets.’

The house was partly hidden by a large, branching, towering saman tree. Swollen parasite vines veined its branches and massive trunk; wild pines sprouted like coarse hair from every crotch; and it was hung with lianas. Below the tree, beside the gully, there was a short walk lined with orange trees, and around the trunk there was a clump of wild tannia, pale green, four feet tall, nothing but stem and giant heart-shaped leaves, cool with quick beads of dew.

An old signpost stood slightly askew in the gully. The letters were bleached and faint: Christopher Columbus Road. It was fitting. The land, though fruitful from a former cultivation, felt new.

‘This used to be the old road,’ Mrs Tulsi said.

And Mr Biswas found it easy to imagine the other race of Indians moving about this road before the world grew dark for them.

Nothing in Shama’s accounts had prepared him for the view of the house from the gully, at the end of the tree-lined drive. It was a two-storeyed house with a long verandah on the lower floor; it stood far from the road on an escarpment on the hill, above a broad flight of concrete steps, white against the surrounding green.

And everything was as Shama had said. On one side of the drive there was a cricket field; the pitch was red and broken: obviously the village team did not use matting. On the other side, beyond the saman tree, the lianas, the wild tannia, there was a swimming pool, empty, cracked, sandy, plants pushing up through the concrete, but it was easy to see it mended and filled with clear water; and beyond that, on an artificial mound, a cherry tree, its thick branches trimmed level at the bottom above a wrought-iron seat. And in the drive the gri-gri palms, with their white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves; though they were perhaps too old: they had grown so tall they could not be seen whole, and could even be missed.

Then at the far end of the cricket ground Mr Biswas saw a mule. It looked old and dispirited. Untethered, it remained still, against a camouflage of cocoa-trees.

‘Ah!’ Mr Biswas said, breaking the silence. ‘Horses.’

‘That’s not a horse,’ Mrs Tulsi said.

They left the drive and stood among the wild tannia under the saman tree. Mrs Tulsi held a liana and offered it to Mr Biswas. While he felt it, she held a thinner liana and pulled it down. ‘As strong as rope,’ she said. ‘The children could skip with this.’

They walked along the weed-ridden drive. The narrow canal at one side was silted