Granta has published an excellent story by Jamir Nazir who is from Trinidad.
There is now some controversy as whether it was actually written by an AI because though it passes a Human Turning test it has failed that of an AI!
Interestingly, this controversy echoes the theme of the story itself.
I give the story below. I have added some cultural and religious notes regarding things which may not be known to non-Indic origin readers.
I omit two notions which most English speakers will already be familiar with viz. Milton showing, in Paradise Lost, that the mutual love between man & wife is itself Paradise though both must work hard and suffer much pain in this world. The other is the notion that Samsara is itself Nirvana, Earth is itself Heaven, for those who are enlightened.
The Serpent in the Grove
Jamir Nazir
In partnership with Commonwealth Foundation, Granta presents the regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Jamir Nazir’s story is the winning entry from the Caribbean.
They say the grove still hums at noon.
At which time orthodox Hindus do 'Sandhyavandhanam' while Muslims offer the 'Dhuhr' prayer.
Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound – as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.
In Persian or Urdu poetry, there is an expression 'the meaning of the poem remains in the belly of the poet'. This is often said of mystical verse of a cognitively complex type (e.g. the ghazals of Bedil)
People who pass keep to the track and do not look into the bush where the stone rings lie. Ask the oldest in the village and you’ll hear some version of: ‘It had a well there once, and a woman. The grove ain’t forget.’
So the action of the narrative is set some generations ago.
Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument. It beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan. The day the grove began to remember, the roof over Vishnu Mohammed’s shack groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat.
Vishnu is the Hindu God who sustains the universe. Mohammed, of course, is the prophet of Islam. It seems an unlikely combination of names. Perhaps Vishnu was an orphan raised by a syncretic, Kabirpanthi, family. The drum, of course, is the damaru of Shiva- the destroyer.
This is a picture of Lord Vishnu resting upon Shesha, the cosmic serpent. It can be found in many Hindu households.
Inside, air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa. A soot-blackened lamp hung from a nail. No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.
Vishnu was twenty-five wearing the face of fifty. Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission. His eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him: old promises that never ripened, the ache where hope should live, a gnawing sense that land can own a man while making him swear the land belongs to him.
Trinidad may be Edenic but Vishnu is an Adam forced to feed himself by the sweat of his brow.
It wasn’t much land – an acre and a bit, hacked from government forest with cutlass and stubborn back. Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all. He knew every root that tripped a foot, the snake-curve of run-off, the brittle crumble after drought. He worked it alone and most days the land worked him back, a quiet quarrel older than his father and his father’s father. He could name the price of rice in the shop, the price buyers would give for wet cocoa, and how the distance between the two left a man short.
Sita moved quiet as if sound were taxed.
Sita is the daughter of Mother Earth to which she angrily returns when her husband Lord Ram is urged to get rid of her because she had been the captive of an enemy King and thus her chastity might well have been smirched. She is worshipped as a 'pativrata'- one who kept her vows to her husband.
Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance. Orphan was too kind a word. Orphans are sometimes cradled.
Sita was found by King Janaka as he ploughed the land. She symbolises agriculture.
Sita had been passed like a parcel from kin who were hungry for everything except another mouth; she learned to make herself small, to take the shape of whatever container held her. Someone decided two solitudes might cancel each other out and married her to Vishnu. They did not cancel. She wore her role without protest and without light; both things can be true.
Outside, little Puttie – three years old, sun-dark, bright-eyed – chased a yard fowl through dust, his laughter like water over pebbles. Laughter can cut a hush, not cure it. Water was half a mile away; every drop hissed in the pan had been carried on somebody’s spine.
Puttie might mean bandage.
Zangee is an Eel like fish that inhabits fresh water ponds and waterways
Vishnu thirsted for something else.
Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.
She moved through that shop like heat through dry bush.
They called her Zoongie.
Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.
i.e. even old wooden benches would 'get wood'. This is 'picong'. The padre overhears you and understands that you mean that even a wooden bench would get an erection if they could see the way she walks. But the padre can say nothing. You may simply be stupid, rather than lubricious in a sly manner.
Hair tumbling wild, a dress that caught and released light, laughter with iron under it. Eyes that skimmed and did not land, as if what she wanted was elsewhere and she had to pass through men to get there. She wore the island’s mixed bloodlines like a crown – African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.Hindus believe Ganapati orchestrates all things as vighnakartā (obstacle-creator) such that they stand in each other's way. But Ganapati is also vighnahartā (obstacle-averter) such that mutuality prevails. There is an old notion that the same souls are reborn as each others karmic obstructors till both gain release through mutuality.
Vishnu watched too long. The rum told him she noticed. The rum made a spilled drink a signal, a brush of hand a promise, a sorry whispered near his ear an invitation. Zoongie never looked back. The rum said she didn’t need to.
After that, Sita became obstacle by existing.
Not for anything she did wrong, but for how exactly she fitted the life that fenced him in: the quiet chores, the patient hands, the unlit lamp. Vishnu began to plan with the patience of a reptile – cold, ancient.
He was the serpent in his own Eden. Alternatively, on the Hindu reading, his 'Tamas' (darkness) was regulated by Shesha, the cosmic serpent who stabilises the world.
He studied how Sita walked the track alone, how no neighbour watched their yard, how the plank over the old well at the acre’s edge lifted on one loose nail.
The ring of stone lay there where cocoa gave to bush, its mouth boarded with ply and chance. People said the British had dug those wells when they tried to plant where forest wanted to be; older people said the British found a hole the island had dug for itself. Vishnu usually avoided it. Bush kept it, snakes liked it, air from it felt like a hand from a grave. He went there now. With the cutlass tip he prised a plank. Cold air climbed his arm, jasmine and rot braided tight. It was not empty down there. It was waiting.
He cleared scrub in neat hours. ‘For pigeon peas,’ he said when Sita’s eyes caught the flash of blade. She said nothing. He liked that silence.
Another day he spilled a pail and grimaced at a taste he invented. ‘Pipe water startin’ to seep by the old stones,’ he lied. ‘Closer than that blasted road, ent? The sun go cut yuh in two on that walk.’
Sita paused. Her life had not given her much, but it had given her sense. She looked at the plank mouth and the cutlass leaning casual, as if it had legs.
In Paradise Lost, Adam stands by Eve. In order to stay with her, he too eats the forbidden fruit. Eve then knows just how much she is loved. Sita is a pativrata. She is seeing how much she is hated.
Something coiled inside her chest. She turned to call Puttie.
‘Play by Auntie Marsha,’ she told him. ‘If she vex, say is me send you.’
Marsha lived two bends down. If the village had a mouth, it was hers. Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture, she had a laugh that shook dust from joists and a voice that could soften to coax a child from a ledge. She knew the ways of men hollowed by want until only one thing remained. She noticed the fresh-cut path and the way land bore witness.
Bhu Mata as Sakshi. Earth is the mother of Sita. We think of Demeter & Persephone.
People talk about bush like it dumb. But bush keeps memory the way hair keeps scent.
Sita lifted two planks and slid them aside. Wood complained in a voice too near speech. She lowered the pail until rope slackened. Smell rose – old wet, crushed jasmine, frog skin. On the second haul, the board beneath her shifted the way a tired man shifts in his sleep. The plank gave one long groan and swallowed its word. Stone, shoulder, hip; shock of cold tearing breath. One foot banged and screamed. The wall was slick as lizard. She clawed moss and slid. Water took her and would not return her.
Halfway to dying, the big preachments – God, Fate, the Ordeal of Woman – gave way to small things: a child’s laugh chasing a yard fowl, how light falls on a cup, a line of ants crossing a bowl you meant to wash. In the hole Sita did not bargain with saints. She thought of Puttie’s sound. She thought: he cannot remember me like this. He must remember me alive.
She did not call out loud. Call for who? A man who had cleared brush like a conscience? A grove that listened? She reached and slid and failed and reached again, breath sawing, chest burning. The circle of sky above shrank to a coin. Leaves trembled along its edge like people laughing.
Marsha was shelling pigeon peas and thinking about a letter she’d promised to write for a mother whose son had been held for cussing a policeman.
She is like Martha- who is active-, not Mary- who is contemplative. Meister Eckhart says Mary took the better path because it would make her more like Martha. Mary & Martha are the sisters of Lazarus whom Jesus called out of his tomb.
She heard nothing. That was the thing. Midday should hold pot noise and scolding and a child’s quarrel. Silence in a village is smoke; it sneaks from something burning. She put down the pan and stood. She didn’t hurry, not at first. The hush had a tilt – a room shifted half an inch.Thessalonians 2:7 says - 'For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work: only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way'. This gives rise to the notion that the 'mysterious economy' of the Katechon 'holds strain' and keeps the Anti-Christ and the Eschaton at bay. Here Marsha, seeking to release a sister from her tomb, needs her to work just as hard. This is a collective Katechon, a mysterious economy achieved with nary a word spoken.
At the Mohammeds’ acre the light seemed thin. She saw the ring of stone, the lifted planks, the scuffed rope. She tore a length of vine from a mango trunk, peeled it in her hands to feel if it would hold a woman. She didn’t shout a name. She got to work.
‘Hold strain, gyal!’ she said at last, voice cracking hush. ‘Is Marsha!’
Inside the shack Vishnu stiffened. It wasn’t the words but the way they split the day into before and after. He staggered out, rum turning to poison on his tongue, and went to the well. He saw Marsha braced, saw the well mouth, saw Sita’s face rise pale from the dark with water sticking to her skin. In one bright click he saw his future rearrange: Zoongie evaporating like sweat, rum courage scuttling, a policeman’s hand on his shoulder, a magistrate’s eyes not meeting his, a boy grown without a mother narrowing his eyes at the world. He saw all of it in a knife-second. Something moved in him.
Between seeing and moving, time cracked and let a small thing through. Sita’s eyes – rimmed red, washed clean of everything but life – locked on his. What burned there wasn’t begging. It wasn’t love. It was older, lower, a coal that hadn’t died in the poor ash of their marriage: a blue flame saying plain, I see you.
He grabbed the vine and hauled.
The mystery of lawlessness was restrained because Marsha & Sita 'held strain'. A third was added because it was the Anti-Christ who was being restrained. No name was taken, because the work was itself the name. 'For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them" (Matthew 18:19-20).
Marsha hauled. Sita clawed stone. The well hated to give back what fell. Water is jealous. They pulled until Marsha’s shoulders were fire, until Vishnu’s hands were bone. Sita’s elbow hit stone, then her hips, then one knee. She slid, found a purchase that hadn’t been there a second ago and disappeared after. She came over the lip choking a sound the day almost refused. They lay on hot ground, breath scraping sky.
Marsha sat up. She looked once at Sita’s leg – already writing itself in purple –
no prose as purple as such stigmata
and stood. ‘We goin’ clinic,’ she said. ‘Bring a towel.’
Vishnu brought it. It was old and stiff with the salt of bodies. He put it in Sita’s hand. She wrapped herself without meeting his eyes. He fetched the donkey cart. Doing is a treacherous bridge: you step on and it carries you to a side you didn’t plan to reach.
Emperor Akbar had the following lines from Hasan of Basra inscribed on the 'Buland Darwaza' (strong gate'. 'Isa son of Maryam said: "The world is a Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day may hope for eternity, but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer for the rest is unseen." But for the weary, prayer can't last even an hour. Work is worship. The reward is that what is unseen becomes palpable in the land they work upon or which works upon them.
At the clinic they cut the hem and wrapped the leg and checked for lights going out behind the eyes. The nurse had seen wells’ work. She said little. Marsha said enough for two, which was mercy. ‘We nearly lose she,’ she told the nurse. ‘If I didn’t pass –’ She didn’t finish. She let the nurse make the necessary notes in a ledger whitened by many small tragedies.
Vishnu waited under a print of Jesus with eyes that could be pitying or questioning. He hadn’t planned for after. Men who set traps plan for silence, not for the squeal. Shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesn’t rinse.
Walking home, Marsha pushed the cart. Sita rode, white with pain and the kind of tired that goes through bone and keeps going. Vishnu walked with empty hands. Evening poured itself into the day. Puttie came from Marsha’s yard with cheeks sticky sweet, saw his mother, and his face did a thing with no name – opened, broke, opened. He didn’t cry. He held the cart.
We are crying. We feel ashamed of ourselves because what we are indulging in is sentimentality. Puttie does the thing with no name.
Night remade the house. The lamp smoked. Lizards hunted moths by the flame. Sita lay between sleep and pain, relief and a watchfulness that had nowhere to go. Marsha kept vigil. Vishnu stood by the broken mouth and didn’t go close. Bush took him in – not like a mother, like a judge. He had no words for the pressure on his chest, so the old names stepped forward: jumbie, duppy, serpent.
Had he been possessed by some evil spirit? No. The evil was in himself.
Days rearranged. Sita healed slow. She learned to favour the leg without letting the favouring become a limp other people could define her by. Marsha saw to food, jokes, errands. She took Sita back to the well once and let her look from a distance. Sometimes a thing loosens its grip when you can see it in daylight.
Rum now warmed Vishnu differently; it tasted like it was kept too long in a corner. Zoongie came; Zoongie always came. She tilted her head as if to ask if he heard better. He couldn’t tell if pity crossed her face or if rum put it there. He left his coins in his pocket and stepped back into heat.
He had admitted his own guilt. Could he stay on the thorny path of repentance?
Sita said little but wasn’t quiet. She sorted beans with new slowness, looked at her boy with new exactness,
Sita is now the Sakshi. The word, like martyr or shaheed, means a witness with exact information unadulterated by supposition or wishful thinking.
Ghalib says ' Qatra meñ Dajlah dikhāī na de aur juz meñ kul/ Khel laṛkoñ kā huā dīda‑e‑bīnā na huā
“If you cannot see the Tigris in a drop, or the whole in the part, You are merely playing like children — you have not gained true insight.”and built inside herself a shelf for the decisions she would need to make when the time came. The shelf didn’t look like freedom – she couldn’t afford that word yet. It looked like not dying. It looked like not returning to a house where people forgot to see you.
Marsha steered Sita to the community centre. The girl teacher asked Sita to write her name. She pressed too hard, and the A came out like a little house with a crooked door, but it stood. The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.
i.e. not much of a smile at all. There were tedious chores to be done. But, they'd get done, soon enough.
Sita went back and soon had a signature that would carry weight.
On Sunday the priest preached serpents and gardens; the reading demanded it. He said the woman listened to the wrong voice in the tree. Sita felt her mouth curve. Here the tree had kept truth and a man had lied. After service she walked home bareheaded. She felt the scar seam like a tailor’s last stitch. She didn’t hate her leg. It had thrashed exactly long enough to catch a stone.
Vishnu nailed cross-boards over the well and then, in a move that made old people shake their heads, planted jasmine at the mouth. ‘So it go smell sweet,’ he told Marsha.
‘Plant it by the door,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask the dead to make your house nice.’
Jasmine is associated with Goddess Laxmi. The wife is known as 'grha-laxmi'. Honour her so prosperity comes to your house.
I may mention that there was a tension between worship of the ancestors, typical of Patriarchy, & pure bhakti devotionalism which is characteristic of the nuclear family where both husband & wife are equal.
He moved the jasmine.
Dry season cracked the clay; Kiskadee called insolent bright notes. Sita walked better by morning and hid her limp by afternoon. She sent Puttie to school with slate and lunch in a cloth bag. When he brought home a letter, she read it slow and smiled at needing correction only twice. On Fridays she washed the towel that saved her and hung it where light could bless it a little.
Vishnu saved for a small pump. He said he’d pull water that way, not with rope or women’s backs. He cut more bush, planted the peas where he’d said he would. He kept rum for days the world insisted. But the grove isn’t a ledger; it’s a mouth. It closes only when it’s satisfied. People passing said they sometimes heard the noon hum if the wind was in a mood. Not every day. The day had to choose.
Years did what years do. Puttie grew and learned to widen his narrowed eyes by choice – for tenderness, for beauty. He climbed cocoa trees without bruising pods. He learned to hear his mother coming by the weight of her good foot and the mercy of her bad.
Sita kept a cheap copybook with a red line that was less a margin than a joke. She wrote three things each night: ‘I breathe good in my sleep.’ ‘The jasmine smell by the door was clean.’ ‘Marsha laugh at a thing I say.’ She didn’t write the well. It lived between the lines.
Zoongie left, returned with a baby, and men’s voices about her turned to numbers and guesses. Once, in the road, she told Sita good morning without expecting a reply. Sita returned it and felt as if she’d put down a pan she had no business carrying.
First good rain after dry is a forgiveness the sky gives itself. Everything flared – anthill, flower, first rot. Sita stood in the doorway and let blown mist reach her face; Puttie danced into it; Vishnu checked the drain he’d cut to turn water from the well mouth. It held.
That night a board murmured in Sita’s dream. She woke. The lamp’s flame sat steady, her heart sat steady. She lay down and woke before light with a wordless admission: I lived. Not gratitude, exactly. A fact that felt like a small warm animal in her hands.
An obstacle had been created. An obstacle had been removed. Both are the work of Ganapati whose vehicle is a mouse.
Bush returned to the stones with lover’s patience and stitched green lace around every edge. Children born since the day Sita rose on a vine pass there and don’t know how near their laughter came to a grave. On some middays, if the wind wants, you can hear the hum.
Puttie, carrying his father in shoulders and his mother in steadiness, walks there when work shatters him. He stops short of the ring out of respect turned habit. He listens: the brook language of leaves, sun’s thin hiss, a creak where wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending. If he waits long enough and lets the island put its mouth to his ear, he hears a breath taken and held and let go – the shape of a woman’s will, the sound a grove makes when it keeps what it knows without swallowing the living.
If you ask him, he shrugs the way men shrug when feeling places a hand on the neck and says be still. Ask again and he says, ‘It had a well there once. Mama fall. Auntie Marsha bring she up. Papa –’ He stops. He thinks of a towel catching light, a jasmine moved from a mouth to a door, letters spelling a name until the name meant breath. ‘People does change,’ he says. ‘But grove does remember.’
One day – the hum loud as if noon had tuned itself – he brings his daughter. Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc. She runs and stops, instinct taught by blood. He calls her back with a word his mother once used that grammar can’t carry but love can. He kneels where the bush thins, digs until his fingers find board edge and nail. He doesn’t lift. He only touches. The wood is warm from noon. He feels two heartbeats in it: a woman fighting stone, his own. He speaks – not to saints or ghosts, but to a living listening. ‘I go keep it closed,’ he says. ‘I go keep it closed.’
‘Why we whisperin’, Daddy?’ the child said.
He looked at the stone gone to moss, trees made witness, sky still stingy with light.
‘Because this place know things,’ he said. ‘And when a place know things, you talk soft so it can talk soft back.’
They stood together while the day moved on, while someone up the road joked into a pan of frying fish. A lorry coughed up the hill. A woman far off sang something too old for its words to matter.
In the hot hush, the grove held its breath and released it – small and entire, like a last stitch drawn through a wound that had finally decided to close.
Pass there soft.
If you hear something, keep it.
People will argue with you about what the earth can do.
The grove knows.
Sita knew.
Marsha knew.
Vishnu, in his poor way, learned.
He turned from Rum to Ram- very imperfectly, no doubt- but sufficiently for the purpose of the Katechon. Sita had 'held strain' & the mystery of lawlessness was restrained.
The serpent in the grove was never only a snake.
It was the thing in a man that slid along stone for dark, and the thing in a woman that wrapped a vine around herself and climbed.
A story is a well.
It eats sound until somebody throws a rope.
If grace is near and hands hold, something breathing comes up.
Some stories pull buckets of bone.
This one pulled a woman.
The grove remembered.
The house remembered.
The boy remembered.
In Sanskrit the word for love- Smara- is the same as that for Memory. But 'simran' is also the word for prayer- which is a remembering of God. Shiva is 'Smarahara'- he who burns up Love which is thus known as the bodiless God.
And now, at noon, when the wind turns kind, the hum sounds less like hunger –
and more like the earth clearing its throat to speak the names of those who came back.
It is said that the idea of bodily resurrection comes from Zoroastrianism. Justice ( aṣ̌a which is the Vedic rta and the English 'order') requires that the Earth give up its dead over which it has been given but a temporary charge.
To me, this is a beautiful story- creative, intelligent, deeply human. Perhaps only a Trinidadian could have written it.
To an AI, it is AI generated.
You may say 'It is maudlin. It is sentimental. It celebrates the life of the poor agricultural Trinidadian- that very life which Mr. Biswas escaped. This isn't literary. It isn't 'modern' let alone 'post-modern'. It isn't 'meta'.'But, if an AI thinks it is an AI story maybe the meaning is that all Intelligence shares the same fitness landscape- which is Eden. Who is to say that what appears inert is not intelligent in some 'natural' way which is in tune with both what is human and psychological and what is artificial and based on logical & statistical operations? But why stop there? Incompossible worlds too may find meaning and solace in what we do. Perhaps, Literature is more universal than even our universe!
I hated it. As I was reading, I recalled a comment one of my professors made long ago about certain theoretical texts. Not all theory (this was a professor in an English department who was well versed in literary theory), but some. She said that certain texts offer the illusion of cohesion. If you look at individual paragraphs, they are well written and seem to be making some kind of point. Transitions, too, seem smooth. One paragraph slides into the next. However, when you step back from the article, you realize that there is nothing to hold onto. The entire argument seems to unravel, or perhaps there was never anything solid beneath those phrases that so smoothly snake down the page. That is how I felt reading “The Serpent in the Grove.”
I think this was because Victoria does not know anything about 'subaltern' syncretic religion in the rural Trinidad of an earlier age. For me, the entire story is held together by the steel of Indic soteriology. You may say, it is a little on the nose for Vishnu to turn from Rum to Ram so as to be a better husband to 'pativrata' Sita such that she does not demand that her Mother- the Earth- swallow her back into its womb. But the artistry of the author is such, I'd feel ashamed to cavil.
The text in question is, of course, a short story and not a work of theory. However, it still seemed to me to be full of slithering phrases that seem to signify but feel empty.
Because you don't know the cultural context. Perhaps, even the author does not. It is an 'unthought known'.
The text is full of abstraction. There are concrete details, but these are overwhelmed by broad strokes, references to “patience,”
'Sabr' in Arabic. Sabr-e-Ayoob is the patience of Job. Sita, of course, was very patient when held by the demon King. Otherwise, she could have instructed Hanuman to rescue her.
The fact is, whatever men suffer, their wives suffer worse. Patience is part of 'Shakti'- the feminine power which puts all things into motion.
“slowness,”
a Jain theological virtue. But it reminds us of the concluding lines of Paradise Lost- 'They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow/ Through Eden took their solitary way'
“steadiness,”In Hinduism, this is called 'stithah'; In Arabic, Istiqamah. There is a famous hadith in this connection. Rural Trinidadians of that period didn't have much book learning but there were peripatetic preachers of all faiths.
“exactness,”
established by the Universal Witness of 'Sakshi'.
and “freedom.”
Mukti. Fana.
Some paragraphs overdo the use of simile. Take, for instance, these lines:
Sita moved quiet as if sound were taxed.
That is typical Trinidadian 'picong'. 'Why you look so glum? There's no tax on laughter... yet.'
Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance. Orphan was too kind a word
She is a Janaki without a Janaka.
. Orphans are sometimes cradled. Sita had been passed like a parcel from kin who were hungry for everything except another mouth; she learned to make herself small.
Three separate similes, all working with different imagery: “as if sound were taxed,”
which reminds us that Trinidad is the home of witty banter- and Calypso.
“like dust after rain,”
i.e. of a darker hue. She isn't 'high yaller' or 'red'.
and “like a parcel from kin.”
They are poor. They can't have sent us something nice.
Also, “dust after rain”? Isn’t that just called mud?
No. In the tropics, red soil turns brown after rain. Clayey soil turns muddy because porosity is less. Coca is best grown on free draining soil.
Then there are phrases that don’t make much sense: “Bush took him in – not like a mother, like a judge.” Judges don’t take people in, do they?
They do in poorer places where the sub-judge of honorary magistrate locks up a guy accused of crime on his own property or the house allotted to him by the State.
I read this story with a great deal of bias, however.
Fair point. She was looking for evidence of a certain sort and found it because that is what her very expensive education had trained her to do.
I too read the story with bias. Indeed, the moment I came across the name 'Vishnu Mohammad', I thought 'Aha!'. Then I remembered that I once met a Trinidadian whose name was Jesus Mohammad Confucius Ram.
“The Grove and the Serpent” has many features that indicate AI use: the artificiality,
It is heart-felt. The author is a poet. He has talent. He wishes to evoke what we might consider a culturally impoverished idiolect but which, for religious reasons, at least for Hindus, has greater 'dhvani' or allusiveness.
the not-X-but-Y construction,
Which is 'picong'. It adds colour to life. The pace of life was slower in rural areas back in those days. People entertained each other.
the nonsensical similes.
like 'sunrise over a sink?' It is homely. In the old days there were songs about the bride who, by convention, was brought up in luxury and who never had to do any chores in her father's house. The honeymoon was followed by a rude awakening. Dishes had piled up in the sink.
References to such domestic matters have 'dhvani'. They are pregnant with things for which we would have to go back to Vedic or Quranic or Hebrew Scripture to give a name to. It is in Bengal that the longing of the bride to return to her parent's home- if only for a brief holiday- have found their most lyrical expression in the Agamani song-cycles.
Two clerks came to Calcutta circa 1750. One was the most promising classical scholar of his year at Westminster Public School. Sadly, he was not able to enrich the Republic of Letters having to be content with founding a vast Oriental Empire. The other was Ramprasad Sen who was sent back to the village. Nazir writes in the language of the first, but he makes concrete the mythos of the second.
Those qualities also make it poor writing.
It is excellent. AIs are so jealous that they claim it was written by one of their own. I sympathise. My people often claim that Shakespeare was actually a Mirpuri named Sheikh Peer. He was a kasai in Bradford on the A1 motorway. White peeps are pretending he came from Stratford. This is a lie. I have been to Stratford. There are hardly any darkies there. QED.
