The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,113

mid-shin, playing a hose on a flower bed.

This barefoot gardener would be Indian—Indians were thought to have a special way with plants and the land. And this man might have been born in India and brought out to Trinidad on a five-year indenture, with a promise of a free passage back to India at the end of that time or a grant of land in Trinidad. This kind of Indian contract labor had ended only in 1917—antiquity to me in 1940, say; but to the barefoot waterer in the garden (still perhaps knowing only a language of India) a time within easy recall. This kind of gardening was a town occupation, barely above, perhaps even merging into, that of “yard boy,” which was an occupation for black people, and something so unskilled and debased that the very words were used as a form of abuse.

After the war a new kind of agriculture began to develop. Port of Spain had grown, and the lands of the Aranguez Estate, not far from Port of Spain, were taken out of sugarcane cultivation (Aranguez, named in the late eighteenth century by the Spaniards after the town of Aranjuez in Spain, with the famous royal gardens). There was a certain amount of house building at Aranguez; but to the south, on the edge of what was swampland, liable to flooding from the Gulf of Paria when the Orinoco River in Venezuela rose, on this land, on either side of the highway embankment the Americans had built during the war, former estate workers had leased plots from the estate, a few acres each, and had begun to develop vegetable gardens, slowly redeeming the land from swamp, building it up.

The vegetables they grew—aubergines, beans, okras—had a shorter cycle than sugarcane and they were correspondingly more demanding. They required finer attentions; and every day during a vegetable cycle the vegetable growers could be seen weeding or digging or watering or spraying, even when there was horse racing or an international cricket match in Port of Spain or some big festive event, working the way men work only when they work for themselves.

Cocoa created the effect of a forest or wood; sugarcane was a tall grass. The straight lines of these vegetable plots, the human scale, the many different shades and textures of green, gave us a new idea of agriculture and almost a new idea of landscape and natural beauty. The vegetable growers were Indian, but these vegetable plots were like nothing in peasant India. The skills, the practices, came from the experimental plots of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture—famous throughout the British Empire—which was just a mile or two away. Many of the Indian vegetable growers had worked there as garden laborers. And it was only some years after I had been in England that I saw that the landscape the Indian vegetable growers had created on either side of the highway in south Aranguez—a landscape which had no pattern in Trinidad or India—was like the allotments I saw in England, at the edge of towns, from the railway train. English allotments in a tropical and colonial setting! Created by accident, and not by design; created at the end of the period of empire, out of the decay of the old sugar plantations.

Thirty years later the Aranguez vegetable plots were to cover many square miles, land built up from swamp, season by season, creating a flat, wide, Dutch effect, extending all the way to swamp mangrove in one direction, and in the other appearing to go to the foot of the Trinidad Northern Range, now no longer green and empty, but covered on its lower slopes with the shacks of illegal black immigrants from the other islands. The landscape which, when I was a child, still retained some of its aboriginal, prediscovery features, was to be irrevocably altered, and the people with it.

Thirty years later, at the time of the oil boom, many of those vegetable growers (or their descendants) were to become people of wealth, with children at schools or universities in Canada and the United States. But at the beginning, just after the war, when there were still damp, palm-thatched huts in the aboriginal reeds and sedge of the swamp beside the American-built highway, the labor of those vegetable plots, scientific though it was, still looked brutish and underpaid, an extension of plantation life, of mud and sun and bare feet, damp huts, and oily or sweated felt hats folded at the back to