Blood and Bone by Rajiv Ramkhalawan

In this piece of short historical fiction, Rajiv Ramkhalawan narrates the journey of an unnamed Indian man arriving in Trinidad, where he is forced into becoming an indentured labourer on a sugarcane plantation, subject to vile abuse and violence from 'de white man'. Through the course of the story, we glimpse a portrait of how the approximately 150,000 Indian workers who arrived on the island from 1845-1917 led their everyday lives.

This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Trinidad, 1845 

Not everybody live a life like me. When I say dis, I know what I talkin’ bout. I’ve seen shit hoisted in chipped buckets and flung overboard. The stink devoured by the frothing mouth of the sea below. I’ve seen gelatinous chunks of vomit streaking off teak bulkheads. I’ve seen the swollen eyes of a dead boy looking into mine, his sclera teeming with blood, pooling around the blackness of his searching pupils. His eyes sucking gently at first, then pulling, threatening to swallow the universe. In one blink. 

All this happenin’ while the ship just shoving its way along an ocean of black. No end in sight. Days upon days mired with rain beating down from plumes of fat, graphite clouds. A dizzying network of electric veins whizzing across the sky. Fireworks. The ocean twisting and swirling up and up to match the size of great gopurams, its fists smashing against the hull, waking tired bodies, promising to crack the wooden ship in half. I done make up my mind that I gonna dead each night. But then, just like dat, it’s over. The moon, the size of the ocean itself, drinks up the rain and lightning. Everything is calm again. The big ship keeps gliding across an ebony sheet of silk. Like butter. Silence. Then it starts all over again. 

When we finally reach, I can’t believe it. Everybody say it’s time to disembark, it’s over, but that journey stay with me, boy. It lives inside me, it crack my skull open, spooling fragmented images of thirst and death and sorrow into the recesses of my brain. Each night I on that ship. Each night I shaking like jhandi flags quivering in the wind. Each night I ready to die. 

It feel like just yesterday I bawl out my name at the Gulf of Paria, and de white man press dark ink into faded paper, circling he fingers meticulously along the paper and just like ah piece of magic my name appear. Poof. Of course, I eh recognise it, I eh too good with dem reading and writing ting, yuh see, but I figure he was making log to account for all de coolies coming off de ship. And I am the first one off.  

I ketch a tall, tall white man telling ah next white man how ugly we look. Skin the colour of my shits, Georgie. And I thought my cousin Louise was hideous, but these Indians. My God! Grimy little fucks, aye. Georgie snicker, pinch he nose with his fingers and twist up his watermelon lips in disgust. They are animals, aren’t they? Bloody beasts. Reckon they’d fit in perfectly here. These lot.  

I still remember the uncanny mix of curiosity and fear seeping into my weary bones as Georgie pointed a finger, like a white arrow suspended in the air, motioning for me to move on from the withered dock towards a group of chalk white men waiting to take we to the plantations. They split we up. Commotion. Pulling. Tugging. Some went this way. Some went that way. Never to be seen again. Georgie controlled yuh destination and in some regards, your fate. The trajectory of your entire life decided for you by a stranger. Without any thought or care. The English way. 

The Prussian blue sealine became increasingly distant with each step I took, my wooden sandals tapping into the muddied earth as I hurried toward de strangers. Even the metallic waft of the water became less and less apparent the further inland I went. 

The group of men who brought a few of us to the plantation on Donkey cart transferred us into the custody of another group, each seemingly angrier than the last. They studied us and we studied dem. We were herded like livestock. Moved from one area to another and then back again to the same area as before.  

White man love he power, yuh know. Love gnashing his teeth, pacing up and down. Love balling his fist, cursing at illiterates. Love studying dark skin with burning indignation. Eyes ready to pop out like molasses coloured Crapaud jumping into wild bushes.  

To control is to rule. To rule is dominion. Dominion is kingdom. And no one dreams about kingdoms more than de white man. People like we don’t dream about castles and swords and ascension. Man like me only think about survival. Only think about today. 

I had arrived. This naked green land new to me and this stupid, hopeful boy new to it. De plan was to sift sugar and return to Oudh in a few years, bring back money so that my family could buy up a small piece of land to call we own. This was the promise I make my mudda and fadda. Yuh see, generation upon generation of my people have been landless in Oudh, braving the elements, sleeping under the stars. Dreamers. Paupers. Heretics. All mixed in one.  

I wok dat same day we arrived at the plantation in Perseverance Estate and have been woking in sugarcane ever since. Each day the land gobbles me up and spits me out. No rest, except Sundays. I eh go lie, I learn to enjoy it. I love how the mid-day sun does blaze into each knot in my bare back, coruscated cutlass in hand. It eh have no feeling for me better than the feel of black sludge tickling the soft inside of my hardened toes and the terrestrial smell of freshly chopped cane just as de sun start to come up.  

At first, I was timid, calculating every move I make with the cutlass. Yuh know how much time de white man snatch me up for going too slow. I come face to face with him, his eyes the colour of unriped Julie mangoes. A beautiful green. He forgot I am de one with the cutlass in my hand. He forgot I see things he never see. I am the one who see shit in buckets. I am the beast, not him. I can cut his whole head off in one swipe. Let it roll in the wind. Feed the land red wine for a change. But beasts are stupid creatures. Beasts can be tamed. My two feet leave the ground as he pulls me up, the cutlass dangling against my sweaty thigh. He has no fear. I piss myself, water snaking on my exposed ankles and onto the ground. He grunts, tosses me down and spits on me. Kicks me on my skull and I lose consciousness.  

After a time though, cutting sugarcane became rote, easy. I was a champion. A thing of art to see, to behold, a sweat-slicked torso dancing in the sun, girthy, cane stalks pitching all around, as my cutlass whooshing over and over meh head. Rhythm and precision. A symphony. The land nurtures the beast to get stronger. Muscles pulling, tightening all the time. It feeds me, nourishes me, like milk dropping into the mouth of babies from the nipples of precocious mothers. 

I come one with the soil, yuh know. It know me well and I know it too.  

I am a drifter, a journeyman, who wash up upon dis land of faint promise and tie myself to it forever. But still I left one life of starvation in Oudh for another in Trinidad. There was hardly a day then or now that I did not go to bed a hungry man. But after a while yuh body does get used to it. The brain has a funny way of figuring dese kinda things out. How to do more with less, yuh know. Calibration. A boiling belly settles down, eventually. 

Or sometimes filled in other ways. 

Yuh see, dere was dis girl, Kumari, a nice little Indian with big brown eyes that sparkle bright, bright when she laugh. She had the whitest set of teeth I ever see and I love to watch she giggle when the older women and dem buss joke about how de white men smelling fresh, fresh like the hog dey like to eat. Of course, the women and dem saying all this in Bhojpuri, we may be illiterate but we eh want to dead!  

Her job, together with a congregation of other coolie women, was to strip off all the leaves from fallen cane stalk and load them onto an iron cart. When dey finished, yuh would see heaps and heaps of freshly cut cane jutting out in all mismatched directions on the cart. It was really something to see. If to no one then to just me.  

But thinking ‘bout it, it have to be just me. White man fool we as usual, tell we that we coming to sift sugar in the West Indies. Of course, I sign up for dat, thinking I was fooling de white man to come down here to do easy, easy wok. To rid myself of grueling, non-stop wok (the few times it even have wok) in factories processing cheap leather and textile into dreadful shoes. But white man smart, too smart for we.  

Sifting sugar was just part of it. He put we to wok: digging trenches, planting cane, maintaining cane, harvesting cane, loading cane. Long, long hours in de hot sun. At least the factories were covered. Man eh make for that sun, yuh know. Maybe just dis man. Maybe dat is why I was number one off the ship. I make for dis. Destiny, perhaps. Georgie knew.  

But the rest of dem, they grumble every single day that dey wok, creating songs about de white man and his nasty ways to past the time on the fields. Some argue with de white man for more rice, more dal, more ghee. White man like he allergic to the word 'more', especially if it comes from a coolie.  

Kumari had come on another ship a few years after me. Her father was a strict Hindu man who forbade her to speak to me as I eh originate from the same village in India as dem. She was from Bihar. As much as we similar we different. Eventually though, her father became ill and agreed to the marriage as he did not want to leave his only child exposed to the few ruffians on de plantation. Necessity sometimes obviates choice. But I eh complaining. It was a simple ceremony, no new clothes, jewellery, nothing. I don’t think the law recognised a Hindu ceremony, but say what, marriage is more a state of mind than anything else. 

We live in a barrack on the same estate we cut cane. Hanging cloths and short wooden stands partition the place into separate rooms, but there is no real privacy. Everyone knows each other’s intimate lives. All sounds of sex and argument comb the barrack without any filter. We share song, dance. Latrines, too. Some men turn bitter, having grown frustrated with their insipid lives, beating their wives senseless after the faintest of arguments. Women hushing women in the night, their shrieks rippling into the bones and flesh of every baby girl to come. Boys grow to be their fathers. Angry and sad. 

At nights when I lay awake on the cool lipayed, dirt floor, Kumari’s warm head tucked into my ribcage, I hear my father’s relentless coughs ringing in my eardrum. I swear de man lungs must be fly out his chest by now. Yet, I cannot return home. I don’t want to. Man always have regrets. I eh know different. Sometimes I rise panting, only for Kumari to pull me gently into her bosom and nurse me asleep, rocking my head back and forth and caressing my gaunt cheeks. She is a great woman. 

Kumari and I live a good life. Hard, but good. We make a child. I name him King after the white man himself.  

I sometimes stare into King’s brown eyes and wonder whether de white man really think that we coolies are only good for the fields. Wonder why he thinks we possess no other worldly desires, or wants, or even dreams. I realise that is the most important step up from being wild animals. Dreams. But I don’t overthink it. Perhaps, he is right. He is white man after all. God bless he. He doh know what it is to starve. He don’t know what it is to live for just today. He has legacy to think about, lineage to protect. He has everything, and maybe nothing too. Who knows. 

Still, even when I don’t want to think about it, there is a sliver of thought that creeps into the back of my head when the sun is highest, and my blade is whooshing around and around, Kumari in the background filling water from a catchment dug into the dirt: is there more to us than this? Will our seeds yearn for more? Will they ever climb? Like how the beautiful green and yellow cane rises from the murky ground. Standing strong in the blistering sun. 

I tell Kumari that King will become something great in this world. That he eh go need to wok the land like me, that he will read books and understand maps and explore de oceans of this world just like de white man. Kumari laughs, tugs my beard, says that people like we eh cut out for all dat kinda fancy living. I tell she that she wrong, to wait and see, it will happen. One day. 

One day never comes for people like we. King get smallpox. A tiny baby. His skin full of white and pink blisters. Creamy pus all around his eyes and lips. The white man went home and bring it back. A scourge. He recovers and so does King, eventually. But King goes blind. We cry. Each day we cry and wok. No time off. We cry till our eye lids are heavy and swell big, and there is no water left to fall. We beg the Great Master above to help us take care of King. Like how de white man takes care of his children. Like how they flower into ladies and lords, taught fantastical things like grace and nobility.  

A throng of new Indians arrive at the estate. They are as hungry and lost and sad as we are, still are. The white man pushes a new coolie to the ground and spits on him. He is going too slow for de white man’s liking. The coolie is barely a man, really a boy, just out of boyhood. His body is thin, emaciated from the months at sea. There is an uproar as we hear a kick and a dull crack of a rib as the boy falls to the ground, a spray of blood spews from his nostrils as his head smashes onto the dirt. The white man warns everyone to keep out of it. He is pointing and cursing. 

There are times when I think we coolies just born to ketch we ass. That we are just the backs upon which the white man walks, crushes, on his way to prosperity, happiness. Happiness for us always seems like an elusive thing, never truly in reach. Moments, maybe, in between, there might have been happiness. I might have missed them, not having the time to stop and taste happiness, stick my tongue into it and paste its perfumed oil against the rough roof of my mouth. 

I don’t think as I begin to walk to de white man. My feet carry me as if separated from my body. I am calm, in control. Kumari senses what is about to happen and screams my name, begins running from her post a few hundred yards towards me. She is screaming and begging me to stop what I am about to do. Everyone turns to her as she gets closer to me. I ignore her and charge the white man, shoving the cutlass I’m holding into his abdomen. He cannot believe it, his eyes expand with rage, and a shower of blood pitches onto the lifeless coolie below. Kumari continues to scream as she finally makes her way to my side. She shoves her face into my chest and bursts into tears. Why? She screams. Why? Why have I done this? 

She knows why. She knows all the answers. She knows my thoughts. She knows my prayers. She knows my fears. She knows my pain. She knows everything about me. I grab her head and pull her away. She beats at my chest, defeated, upset. Our eyes meet, pain pouring from me to her and her into me. We both know this is the last time we might see each other.  

She shoves my body, and I trot forward. Run. Run, now, she screams. Go. I must flee if there is ever a chance that I might see Kumari and King again. I must act fast as I have seconds before a group of enraged white men will be after me. Cutlass and hammers in hand. Greedy for coolie blood.  

The others make a circle around the bloodied bodies and stare at the scene in disbelief. Everyone has gone muted. Finally, a middle-aged man named Gafoor races towards me, says that I must head towards the South entrance, that the barb wire is sparse there, that I should follow the river further down the bend until I come across a band of defecting coolies who might be able to hide me. 

I kiss Kumari. This is goodbye. She still crying and bawling and cursing me. She saying I ruin her life. Ruin King’s life. She growls, shoves me again. Go, go. Please go. But I know she loves me. I love her too. I tell her to take care of King. Take care until I return. If I can return. 

Cover image: Boarding a Slave Dhow by W L Wyllie RA