“A Man called Jaal Maal” by Paris Singh chs-jccss.org/blog/2010/02/07/a-glimpse-of-the-simple-life-in-a-sugar-plantation-part-1/ In some of my recollections during moments of tranquility, I would often conjure up in my mind’s eye an almost panoramic view of the simple life in the sugar cane plantation of Palmyra and Canje where I grew up. Although most of the people were by and large unlettered or under-educated field laborers, they appeared to lead contented lives despite their narrow economic confines. Assuredly they aged very quickly by dint of hard work, and because of insufficient medical care and sometimes improper dieting, but they hardly complained and lived in relative harmony and in the close rhythm with their natural world. The irrigation canals, pastures and low lands flooded during the rainy seasons, and the sugar cane fields left abandoned or fallow for a year, all abounded in fishes, and people had such sheer delight in devising their own ingenious methods of helping themselves to such aquatic bounties. I so often think of the people I have known and observed in such a setting that I thought I would lay to rest some of the ghosts of my early memories by sharing what I knew about three of them, for in so many ways, I believe, they mirrored in microcosm the simple agricultural and pastoral life of Palmyra and Canje as I remember it to be. The first was a man called Jaal Maal, whom the village urchins nicknamed Papaya Paakal. Jaal Maal strikingly etched out in one’s mind the image of the archetypical laborer who dated back since creation. For this reason Michelangelo would certainly have immortalized him in marble side-by-side his statue of David if only this fabled sculptor had met him. Jaal Maal looked fifty and for some unfathomable reason gave one the impression that that was how he looked at any one moment in his entire life. Clad in khaki short sleeves and khaki short pants made yellow as autumn leaves and threadbare through years of labor, he always looked tired and over-worked. When he walked, each time his exhausted limbs measured out some twenty-five yards or thereabout, he would stop, bend over as if to get his head aligned with the horizon, and then pant loudly for breath. His signature tools were a cutlass-knife and a superannuated bucket that was embossed with innumerable dents and miniature craters as if it had been a shield that had survived some of the fiercest fighting in the Wars of the Roses. He wore the bucket over his left shoulder so that its handle made an arc over the front of his shoulder, the rest inverted at the back. He himself fashioned his cutlass-knife by artfully cutting off about seven or eight inches from the tip of the blade so that his newfangled implement was not unlike a Roman infantryman’s sword for close-quarter combat. Possessing no particular skills, Jaal Maal was classified as a general field factotum and lumped into a pool of such laborers to be divided up into various contingents for miscellaneous assignments each day. He usually found his place in the bucket brigade under the supervision of the stern, irritable “driver” called Gareeb, who in his inscrutably preternatural facial qualities bore a remarkable resemblance to a mountain goat. The bucket brigade would bail punts that were used to transport sugar cane from the fields through the complex network of canals to the Rose Hall Estate factory. In the frequent thunder storms, empty punts sent to the fields would be flooded and had to be emptied. Just as often punts fully laden with sugar cane were also flooded. In the latter case, they had to be bailed because first, they were in imminent danger of sinking or second, the sugar cane would become water-logged and consequently unsuitable for processing into sugar. Many were the times when I marveled at Jaal Maal as he bailed the laden punts, and despite his habitual taciturnity and unwaveringly weary countenance, he tackled his work with consummate artistry. Nay, more! I would even venture to say that on a proportionate scale he planned and executed his task with the same meticulous precision and artistic pride as perhaps did Caesar in outwitting and defeating Vercingetorix at the decisive Battle of Alesia. First, Jaal Maal would survey the laden punt to determine the almost imperceptible angle of its listing. His discerning eye having ascertained this, he would go to that listing end where the water would accumulate, cut with his incisively sharp cutlass-knife, efficaciously adapted for such close-quarter strokes, an incredibly perpendicular and symmetrically cylindrical man-hole right down to the base of the punt, and bail out the water with his ancient bucket. Whenever people asked Jaal Maal about his work, he would laconically reply: “Meh bail punt and meh chap and plant”. This might very well be taken as his own summation of the alpha and omega of his earthly existence. His second activity refers to planting sugar cane. After a field has been flooded for almost a year, it is drained and ploughed before being replanted with fresh stalks of cane from a nursery field. Jaal Maal, naturally with other field hands, would take a long stalk, stick a few inches into the ground, and chop off the top. A few weeks later, he would revisit the fields and fertilize the new shoots. In spite of his rugged, unattractive appearance, in spite of the humble tasks in the fields, and in spite of the abuses to which he was routinely subjected at the hands of his often cavalier supervisors and his back-biting peers, Jaal Maal never lost his quiet dignity, never shirked from his labor, but persevered in his dutiful obligations. Other workers too often yielded to the easy temptation of dumping their fertilizers into the canal, skulked for the day, and then reported to the driver at the end of the day so as not to incur any loss of pay. But Jaal Maal, though long distant from his salad days, took pride in the dignity of labor and in his principles of what he construed as right and equitable. Saturday was pay day in Rose Hall and also the biggest market day at the Rose Hall bridge. Shortly after noon, the Canje road leading to the Local Accounts Office became a busy thoroughfare as sugar workers, decked in their finery, their sun-burnt faces gleaming with a smile or rippling with loud laughter, in a joyous festive mood would measure out extra long strides as they legged it to the pay office. Beggars were out in full numbers taking up strategic positions between the pay office and the market, sending out pitiable cries with the extra knowledge that workers would be disposed to be more generous because their pockets were heavier with brown envelopes crammed with crisp, freshly printed dollar notes and newly minted coins. Amid the clamorous throng sooner or later would emerge Jaal Mall with no variation in clothing, with his unhurried deliberate gait in his own characteristic manner, rhythmically pausing to pant. And so making haste slowly and marching to the sound of some mysteriously distant drum audible only to himself, he stood out from the multitude. Though his almost sculptured countenance was no index to his inmost thoughts and feelings, his simple actions made it manifestly clear that he loved his family. While quite a few workers never made it home until late at night, choosing instead to part with many a hard-earned dollar in bacchanalian revelry at Gomes’s “Rum Shop”, Jaal Maal headed straight home somewhere in Canefield Settlement, carrying with much difficulty a pineapple and a large brown-paper bag brimming with buns, cassava pones, konkeys, and jelabies. As he wended his weary way home, village urchins, perhaps perplexed at this odd-looking caricature of humanity, and often quite unfeeling, cruel and stone-hearted idlers would never desist from harassing him by shouting mockingly: “Papaya Paakal!”. With no malice in his heart but with a benevolent disposition, he would simply reply, “Eh!” However much he was publicly badgered, that was his serene response, which failed to assuage the sheer malevolence of the mockers and scoffers. In a world where fame and fortune are measured out in terms of victory in the battle field or in terms of the trophies and treasures carried off in the sporting arena, the truly heroic virtues of forbearance, tolerance, fortitude and kindness are totally eclipsed and seldom see the light of recognition. Paris Singh New York December 31, 2009
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 09:53:03 +0000
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