Paradise found in Tobago
In the days when you see the masks around you, and the emptied-out shops, and the faces of bewildered children hooked on devices and disbelief strikes anew. The guy in the line behind you is standing too close, and anti-vaxxers on your phone are shrieking louder, frightening and lying to one another about “knowing” people, and someone tells you of a pregnant unvaccinated woman dying in a lift on her way to ICU, gasping for oxygen?
How do you deal with so much death flying like a dart at your already stabbed up heart?
What if I told you I went back to a prelapsarian world? A Tobago touchdown, an instant shucking of some of the weight of these past few months. Turn down the glass to a mango chow salty, tangy, citrusy breeze. On our way to Castara, the Leeward coast of Tobago, sunlight blazing through the green on winding roads: There are dizzying shapes and shades of green, from neon to emerald, glittering ruby, white, orange flowers on trees. Somebody in the car cries, look, Mot Mots, or is it a Blue Backed Manakin?
Flapping wings cut through the sky, jewelled impressions of sapphire blue, amethyst purple, citrine yellow. Hummingbirds, the Great Black Hawk, Saffron Finch. And huge bright butterflies, landing languidly, lingering on leaves...
I tell my family, “I took this all for granted when I was a child. It became ordinary, and now it’s wondrous again.”
There is a steep bend in the road. I write to a Tobago friend on my phone. “I feel as overwhelmed as a bad poet,” I write to another. “A surfeit of the senses.”
“Stop looking at your phone, mum”, says my daughter, “look”.
Around the bend, a startling sight: the radiant sun-filtered sea: a palette of meaning mingling shapes of water: turquoise, cyan, emerald. The thunderous rhythm of waves, that was there before you and will remain when you’ve gone. There is a rush of breeze through trees, Snowy Egrets flying at the egg yolk sun.
I am open-mouthed like the girl who arrived from India expecting America and got Eden.
Over the next few days, we discover this. We are breathing deeply. The heart slows down sweetly in spaces devoid of neon lights, fast food, highways and many cars.
Mid-morning: We walk to the beach after meandering along a dry river bed and lush forest, passing trees heavy with figs, portugals, mangoes, breadfruit.
Boys ride their bikes, young men say good morning, a woman dressed in a classic black dress looks like she’s stepped out of Vogue, but she’s headed to church. A child shouts out to us from her balcony to “watch out” for rough waves; a woman offers me a handful of herbs, crushing a sweet-smelling leaf into my hand called “Wonder Of The World”.
She lets me take a photograph.
Yet, this is no la la land. I get a text saying an unvaccinated school friend from Bishops, Tobago, has died. A cruising police vehicle stops, and officers tell people to keep on their masks.
An ambulance pulls up silently outside a small house, and men in hazmat suits appear.
A little girl skips on the beach with her mask on near her school. A disconsolate looking young man sits smoking on an upturned boat looking down on his phone, but a group of fishermen call out to him to help them. A bar owner with a paltry menu and empty chairs and tables turned upside down turns away a much-needed customer without a mask and vaccination card. “You know how we survived COVID when funds dried up?
Discipline. Sharing, looking out for, feeding one another.
If anyone steals, we know who it is. We leave our cars and doors open. We all discipline all the children. We don’t covet our neighbours’ things. People forget clothes and find them days later, folded on trees. There was talk of oil around here once. I’m glad nothing came of it. Quick money ruins people, stops them from living deeply. If we don’t have wants, just needs, and we always have this.” She points at the almond trees on the sand framing the harbour as if it was a wonder of the world.
We meander back to fry the fish gifted to us by a kindly fisherman.
That night, walk through a tranquil village, look in at the parlour with the books there for you to take. Silent except for the night creatures, the strays, and the happy drunk who serenades us.
We look up at the stars scattered across the navy sky and race from waves shattering on the shore, and we know even amidst the hopelessness, that its possible to regain paradise if we learn what it was like before we fell.