“I know for certain now that when I emerge from my apprenticeship I would be able to go into the ring as a champion,” wrote Harold Sonny Ladoo to his editor as he embarked on his second novel, Yesterdays, soon after his successful debut, No Pain Like This Body (1972). Ladoo should have been a literary contender. Born in Trinidad in 1945, he grew up in the rural village of McBean, about twenty miles from the capital, Port of Spain. Few people visited McBean, and if you grew up there and had energy, luck, and a bit of chutzpah, you left as soon as possible. In 1968 the émigrés included Ladoo, who headed to Canada. No Pain Like This Body was published while he was a university student working toward a humanities degree in Toronto.
Serious, intense, and aloof but with a sharp wit, Ladoo was from a generation of writers who, whether they admitted it or not, were inspired by V.S. Naipaul and wrote in the long shadow he cast. Every Trinidadian writer has had to reckon with Naipaul and his most accomplished novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), and in some ways Ladoo’s writing was an argument with Naipaul, his unacknowledged mentor. Even as he humbly professed to be an apprentice novelist, he considered himself a better, more authentic writer than Naipaul and would clash with anyone who dared to challenge that notion.
In 1973, aged twenty-eight, Ladoo was found beaten to death in a ditch less than a mile from his family home. His head had been battered beyond recognition, writes Christopher Laird, the filmmaker and author of Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo (2023): “He could be identified only by the scar [on his neck] and tattoo on his body and his jewellery.” The mysterious circumstances of his death have never been resolved. In the absence of verifiable facts, feature writers, biographers, and filmmakers have pored over his letters, notebooks, and fiction, looking for clues as to why he was killed. Through documentaries such as Richard Fung’s The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo (2024), Ladoo is garnering much more attention now than at any time in his life, whether at home or abroad.
Ladoo’s obituary in the Toronto Star lambasted his birthplace’s culture as “primitive and barbaric.” While that characterization is emphatically defamatory, he did emerge from a society that was debased by poverty, a lack of opportunity, and incipient squalor. Naipaul once described it as “picaroon…with its taste for corruption and violence and its lack of respect for the person.”
It’s an apt description of the world of Yesterdays, which was published in 1974, the year after Ladoo’s death, and reissued in 2024. Set in the 1950s on the fictitious pre-independence Carib Island—a thinly veiled substitute for Trinidad—Yesterdays focuses on a guileless landlord, Choonilal, and his family and neighbors in the semirural Karan Settlement in the Tola district.
After reading the first pages of Yesterdays, though, readers are likely to pause and ask themselves, What exactly is this? Well, this is a peculiar ninety-six-page novel that, though brimming with potential, reads like an early draft. A publisher’s note acknowledges its unfinished state: “We opted not to temper the dated and insensitive vocabulary or tame the objectionable scenes,” as if to anticipate those who might argue that they had a duty to edit Ladoo’s book robustly, which they might have attempted had he lived.
Yesterdays seems intended to be a dark comedy. Dark it certainly is. Comedic? Not so much. Rather it is brutal, with characters exhibiting a cruel Caribbean schadenfreude. Relentlessly crude and rude, it focuses less on the personalities of the individual characters than on their collective attitude toward bodily functions, especially sex and defecation.
Early on, the irate landlord berates his feckless tenant, Tailor: “You does shit de most in dat latrine…. Den you have to clean it.” But so often has the landlord attempted to chastise his tenant (who’s in permanent arrears with his rent) that as far as Tailor is concerned, it has all become just background noise. The back-and-forth volleys of witless, low-grade insults between the two men seem more performative than heartfelt. Tailor has no intention of ever paying his rent, and despite his protests, his landlord is unlikely ever to make a final demand for payment.
Tonally the book has echoes of Naipaul’s early comedic works, such as The Mystic Masseur (1957) and Miguel Street (1959). While those subtly polished novels are written with an amused generosity about characters like the carpenter in Miguel Street who is making a “thing without a name,” Ladoo is purposefully provocative, sly, and unrefined in his stark portraiture. There’s a sense, for instance, that he revels in Tailor’s dark mischief when he brings to Karan Settlement “a band of whores” who were “so drunk that they defecated in the yard.”
My early bemused response to the book’s first pages was similar to that of Kevin Jared Hosein, the much-admired contemporary Trinidadian writer. In his foreword to the new edition, he confesses, “Yesterdays made me feel dirty, but also something I hadn’t truly experienced before with Caribbean literature—I was offended.” He acknowledges later that his thoughts about Ladoo were more generous after a second reading: perhaps the novel is, he concedes, “postmodernist.”
Still, Yesterdays cocks a snook at readers who may well recoil from its visceral descriptions. It’s worth sticking around, though, and getting accustomed to its unashamedly frank and fecund storytelling:
Choonilal said, “Just now you go see wot go happen in dis island, Rag…. Nobody dont want to work in de cane or plant tomatoes and ting…. All of dem want big work in govament…to be police and postman…. Dis island it go have so much educated people dat dey go have to take dey G.C.E. and ting and wipe dey ass.”
Karan Settlement is home to a small community of villagers descended from indentured laborers. Many communities like it were founded in Trinidad in the latter half of the nineteenth century after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Over several decades the formerly enslaved, who had laid down their tools and abandoned sugar plantations in Trinidad, were replaced by more than 100,000 Muslim and Hindu laborers recruited from India, usually on five-year bonded labor contracts.
The indentured workers, whether in Trinidad, Jamaica, or the myriad other British colonies in the Caribbean, generally planned to save enough to return to India at the end of their contracts. But the majority, poorly paid and unable to afford to go back, remained in Trinidad. By the 1950s, the time of the novel’s events, they and their descendants constituted about a third of the island’s population.
Ladoo was descended from indentured Indians and drew heavily from his childhood and adolescence in McBean for both No Pain Like This Body and Yesterdays; he meant them to eventually form part of a collection of books focused on the legacy of indentureship. With just a few hundred inhabitants, his home village had only two stores, writes Laird, “a dry-goods outlet, selling hardware, pulses and rice, etc., and a bar/rumshop and ‘parlour.’” Carved out of the cane fields, McBean and the surrounding countryside were inhabited almost exclusively by Indo-Trinidadians. Very few of them had managed to become independent farmers; most were still peasant laborers eking out a living on small plots of land and remained dependent on seasonal work on the sugar estates.
No Pain Like This Body is set fifty years earlier than Yesterdays in the same district and portrays an impoverished rice-growing family. It takes its title from the Buddhist scriptures of the Dhammapada:
There is no fire like passion;
there is no losing throw like hatred;
there is no pain like this body;
there is no happiness higher than rest.
The novel opens during the rainy season with a deluge whose thunderstorms and streaks of lightning wriggling “against the black face of the sky” become a metaphor for the constant threats and cataclysms that the family lives with. The writing is alive with enthralling idiosyncrasies, especially Ladoo’s use of onomatopoeic language to describe the elemental forces and tropical nature: the wish wish of rain beating on leaves of mango trees, the craw of huge water birds, and the crachak of crushing cockroaches. The imagery is also inventive and startling, from the “black black, black like rain clouds” of tadpoles “moving like spots of tar in the water” to the spirits “floating in the air like silkcotton flowers.”
The father, Pa, is an extraordinarily violent wife-and-child-beater with “poison in his eyes” and a cunning and cruel misanthrope who begrudges the expense of his children, who must make do with flour sacks for clothing; he curses God, who “coud kiss me ass” for having saddled him with a family. His tender wife, Ma, is drawn with great affection by Ladoo. She’s constantly alert to the dangers of snakes and scorpions in the rice fields, with their treacherous holes deep enough to swallow a child. A Cassandra who fears a future tragedy, “Ma felt grief; her grief was not as shallow as a basket, it was deeper than a river; deep like the sea; like a sea without fishes.” She has a visceral connection to her children and often puts her body in the way of her enraged husband to protect them. She’s as stoic as her parents, Nanny in particular, whose encouragement of her husband, Nanna, to endure their suffering is expressed as barbed fatalism: “A few more years and we goin to dead.”
No Pain Like This Body is an accomplished tale by a young writer who had already developed a mature and unique voice. It tantalizingly suggests that Yesterdays would have become a more effective and polished piece of writing after another draft or two. Though sketchily drawn, the villagers of Yesterdays inhabit the same fraught world as No Pain Like This Body, with brutalized interpersonal relationships, especially within families, and misplaced faith in fraudulent Hindu priests to ease their suffering.
From the outset, readers are introduced to a sleepy and sinister backwater. Tailor sits under a chataigne tree, bored, counting the passing cars, just a few feet away from his landlord. He reaches for a pair of old embroidery scissors and uses them distractedly to pick his teeth. The narrator describes Choonilal’s semiveiled antipathy: “There was a strangeness in his glance as if he were secretly planning to murder his tenant.”
Years earlier, Choonilal had taken pity on Tailor when the penniless vagabond arrived in the settlement like a stray dog and offered him accommodation. He’d even helped establish Tailor as a tailor, buying him a new sewing machine. Choonilal was transfixed by the machine’s purring and took vicarious, fatherlike pleasure in Tailor’s ability to fashion dresses and suits. But after years of indolence and disappointment, Tailor’s ambition has atrophied along with his piety; he has surrendered to a life of sponsored laziness and become nothing more than an aging yard boy. He is even given to disrespectfully “standing on his landlord’s steps and urinating in broad daylight” whenever he feels the need.
Half a dozen venal and vindictive villagers circle around Choonilal, who is portrayed as a relatively sympathetic, earnest, and sentimental elder. (He’s fifty-five and bald.) Initially he’d considered Tailor an upstanding and religious fellow who was down on his luck. But the tenant’s habits, in particular his public excretions, are all the more egregious because the adult yard boy shares Choonilal’s yard with the Aryan gods.
Choonilal has erected a Jandee pole with a red flag in his yard, giving it pride of place not just in remembrance of the ancestral homeland but to signal to others, in this world and the next, that he is a devout Hindu. The Jandee pole is a reminder, says the narrator, that “a higher form of being after death was what life was all about.” The Aryan gods’ aura is felt around such poles, and men like Choonilal understand that they’re under surveillance by those gods. The sacred flagpole is desecrated when Tailor carelessly brings the inebriated prostitutes to the yard.
Ladoo never lets up in describing the villagers’ fixation on shit and sex. My irritation with the unremitting repetition, pushing the boundaries of satire, actually yielded to a kind of admiration for his daring by the end of the book. More impressive is Ladoo’s skill in recreating the speech of the villagers. Yesterdays comes alive in the virtuosity of the dialogue. The narrator’s standard English grounds the story and goes some way toward providing an entrée to the verbal jousting between Creole and Trinidadian English, which offers a rich and immersive dive into the kind of uncensored rum-shop talk of bigoted, loose-tongued men. Although the pacing, rhythm, and linguistic inventiveness of Trinidadian speech in Yesterdays is similar to that adopted by Naipaul, especially in A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul’s dialogue is carefully mediated, close enough to standard English for readers unfamiliar with Creole to understand. Ladoo’s language may seem more accurate to the cognoscenti, but it runs the risk of excluding readers not in on what might appear to be a private joke.
This adds to the suspicion that Yesterdays is really an elaborate schoolboy prank designed, as Kevin Jared Hosein recognizes, to offend, with Ladoo the sort of wag who lets rip a fart as the headmaster opines during assembly. Nonetheless, with patience and on a second reading of the novel (at fewer than one hundred pages, it’s worth the effort), it becomes clearer that in Ladoo’s portrayal of the unedifying lies uncomfortable truth. This raises a question: For whom is such a book, which critiques and scorns the society of Karan Settlement, being written? It’s difficult to discern.
Choonilal’s yard is clearly a site of competition between the sacred and the profane. The Karan Settlement peasants’ obsession with defecation and ablutions is a product of their conformity to Hinduism, which emphasizes the importance of cleanliness. This not only extends to the notion that it is more hygienic to build an outhouse than to introduce an internal water closet or commode; it also suggests that to defecate inside a house is to dishonor the gods.
If relieving themselves indoors is ungodly, taking to the outdoors comes with risks. After visiting the outhouse one night, Choonilal’s wife, Basdai, is raped by a passing taxi driver. She and her husband raise the alarm with their neighbors to chase the culprit, but “instead of helping Choonilal find the lecherous man, [the villagers] began laughing.” The narrator simply reports that subsequently Basdai “became so embarrassed that she developed a fever and stayed in Tolaville Hospital for two weeks…to combat the village scandal.”
The villagers’ unsympathetic response is recorded casually without any hint of surprise; such men lurk in their midst. Choonilal’s many scandalous and unattractive neighbors include Ragbir, a known rapist who, rather than being censured for his crimes, is spoken of admiringly as having the longest penis in the settlement, and Sook, the local shopkeeper, an unabashed predator referred to as “the queer” who is mostly animated by the prospect of seducing men, no matter their sexual preference.
The neighbors are even more amused when Choonilal is having sex with Basdai in a shed—built for that purpose after the village priest, Pandit Puru, advised that it was the best way to conceive—and has “the surprise of his life: his organ had got trapped inside her.” Suggestions for how the pair might uncouple and the eventual sight of Choonilal’s engorged penis provide pure entertainment for the villagers. The scene underscores the fact that there is no privacy in Karan Settlement. The residents ignore personal boundaries and are all up in one another’s business. This is particularly the case when it comes to sex, which, for the villagers, appears to be allied not to love but to humiliation. Yet many of their misogynistic and homophobic exchanges are too self-indulgent and immature to be read as Ladoo’s critique or satire of such behavior.
Sook is hated by Basdai for so determinedly trying to entice her husband that Choonilal eventually gave in and “went into the full-time practice of sodomy” with him, at least for a while. The affair was a long time ago but has not been forgotten. In the midst of one of their recurring arguments, Sook mocks Basdai’s sexual cravings, and she answers in turn: “Yeh I want man Sook!… God make me wid a hole to take man. But you is a man and you takin man. You shouda shame. Why you dont go and kill youself?” Sook dismisses her with the retort, “Man sweeter dan woman!”
All the sex and shit becomes tiresome to read, but the book is saved by another narrative theme: the connection between self-worth and homeownership, which is explored with more success. Here there are strong parallels between Choonilal and Biswas. A House for Mr. Biswas is animated by Biswas’s dread that he will “have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth.” Choonilal is equally exercised by his desire for a house of his own. Unlike Biswas, he does not have to wait until the book’s end; he has already realized his ambition as it begins: “It took him thirty years to save the money to build” the house, which “stood on ten-foot concrete pillars.” Modern and spacious, it boasts a lovely veranda and a living room cabinet stacked with expensive chinaware that only comes out for honored guests.
Choonilal has realized his dream, but what about his son’s future? Poonwa is a smart and intellectual twenty-five-year-old in a dead-end job whose school certificates in Trinidad are only good for “wipe dey ass.” Poonwa and his empathic mother fear that he is in danger of going the way of too many of his frustrated and despondent peers whose only future is “drinkin rum and playin de ass.”
Poonwa could take the same path embraced by his creator—leave the island, migrate to Canada, and reinvent himself. Why not, for example, start a Hindu mission abroad, modeled on the church missions brought to Trinidad by Canadian missionaries and educators? The price of admission to their admired schools, of course, is conversion from Hinduism to Christianity. Poonwa could invert the process. But there’s a catch: the venture will need to be subsidized by remortgaging his father’s house.
The issue for Choonilal is whether he can hold on to the house and retain the respect of his wife and son. At first he’s steadfast in his resistance to the attritional campaign they wage. The scales are eventually tipped in Poonwa’s favor after he survives what appears to have been an attempt at suicide (although he’d actually just fallen into a trance and had a vision of Lord Krishna, which reinforced his dream of becoming a great missionary). When the eccentric, chauffeur-driven, cowboy boot–wearing Pandit Puru, who will conveniently arrange the mortgage from his own funds, is brought in for his wisdom and counsel, Choonilal bends toward making an accommodation with the inevitable.
Poonwa speaks for all of the islanders, descendants of the indentured and enslaved who yearn for revenge for their cultural subjugation:
My Mission, so help me God, is to make white people good Hindus. I am going to make them feel that their culture is inferior…. Within a few decades I will teach them to mimic Indian ways. Then I will let them go to exist without history. I will make East Indians buy up all their lands and claim all their beaches. Then I will drain all their national wealth and bring it to Tola.
His vision articulates the island-wide desire for reparations and redemption, but having raised the fascinating notion of a Hindu mission in Canada—of, as it were, colonization in reverse—Ladoo doesn’t do enough to follow through on that story line; there’s no room in the brief novel to see how that might play out. It’s a bit of a stretch anyway, as Poonwa’s dreams of exporting Hinduism come with a complicating caveat: he doesn’t speak Hindi or even have much belief in the religion. Laird’s biography suggests that Ladoo planned to address that conundrum in a sequel, but in Yesterdays he painted himself into a corner with little room for maneuver.
The publisher describes Yesterdays as a “rediscovered classic.” It falls short of that, but it’s bold, experimental, truthfully ugly, and unforgettable. When Ladoo first submitted the manuscript, with the working title Mission, to his publisher, it was turned down. Wounded by the rejection, he wrote to his editor in August 1972, reflecting on his writing practice, his depressive outlook, and the harsh reality of his experience as an inheritor of the generational trauma of indentureship: “At times I worry very seriously whether my life is not perhaps more tragic than the artistic life of my own characters.” Sadly, that proved to be the case when he returned to Trinidad just a year later and was brutally killed.
English (US) · 