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Barrackpore has long been ridiculed by some outsiders as the racially prejudiced, Opposition-voting, bison-whipping, cane-cutting, puncheon-drinking, land-loving, wife-chopping, gramoxone-suicide, flood-prone hotspot of “deep South”.
Residents never considered correcting the record because, well, why bother when that opinion is of zero value to them?
Which is why they also dismissed, with a hawk and a spit, the stunningly naïve commentary recently of a UWI professor who considered some Indian names to be some sort of joke.
We couldn’t find a single person who wasn’t proud of their name during a visit on Monday, not Ramtoole, not Toopanie, or Jankie, or Pulbasia, or Meetoo, or Jhingoorie, or the children of Popo Dass and Kismatie—names passed down from the ancestors, or corrupted by the British note-takers upon the arrival of their indentured forefathers on Nelson Island.
What we found instead were people living in a way that has attracted town and city folks who quietly have been buying land and moving to the area (which spans from Debe to Moruga to Princes Town and Penal Rock Road) for some years now.
That’s because when the State closed Caroni Ltd, shut down the sugar industry and pulled up the train tracks, people survived, thrived, some returning to the land, opening small businesses, and making sure their offspring did better than they did.
The centre of it all
The junction that became the gathering spot for the people of Barrackpore was once a piece of lagoon located where the New Colonial and Rochard Roads meet.
No one could cultivate that piece of land, and the soil was so waterlogged and swampy that the area came to be called Black Water.
The lagoon was filled in and built upon in the late 1940s by shop keeper Pollard Ramnarine Gooljar, who wed Agnes Mitchell, at a time when interracial, interreligious marriages were rare.
The couple did good business.
And when Caroni Ltd laid down train tracks from the Ste Madeleine Sugar Factory to St Mary’s, Moruga, it so happened that the line passed alongside the shop.
More luck for the Gooljars came when cane-weighing Scale No 2 was erected nearby, which meant that the crop had to be brought to that spot to be weighed, priced and taken to the factory.
So the junction became the meeting place, and at Mr Gooljar’s shop, one would buy goods and alcohol, maybe Scottish Tennent’s Lager beer, a pint of W&A Gilbey wine, or Dr Kellogg’s Eye Water (should be used night and morning to keep the eyes clear, bright and in healthy condition), some Lydia Pinkham herb medicine for menstrual pain, or Canadian Healing Oil or any of a half-dozen other liniments to ease the pain of the cane man, who would sometimes pitch marble or spin top outside the shop while waiting for the scale to weigh the cane brought by bull cart or, if you could afford it, tractor.
Firewater’ a favourite
As was often the practice, old man Gooljar built a new house of brick, but kept the old one of wood for reasons both practical and deeply personal.
He would have ten children before his death in 1979.
By then, son Veda Prakash Gooljar had inherited the business, changing little of his father’s shop except its name—VP Gooljar (Kumar) Bar and Shop—continuing to buy things from his father’s pre-Independence stocklist, including that Snake Brand prickly heat soap, and Indian root pills cure-all, and adding bicycles and enamel wares (you can still get a posey—chamber pot—here for $130, or a wooden scrubbing board) to the agricultural implements and one of the most extensive collections of cutlasses you will ever find, a blade for every kind of chopping.
VP Gooljar’s business
Many of the items on sale were hand-painted on the front wall of the business using a technique that has all but been erased by the posters produced by print shops.
And while there are quite a few brands of alcohol, the preferred drink remains the firewater downed in one gulp and chased with a drink of cold water poured from a recycled ketchup bottle.
Enduring identity
Which brings us to that junction scene on a Sunday.
One could easily forget the year where a man could forget, watching people selling cascadoo, crab and Miami mall clothes, farmers smelling of sweat and earth, in tall boots and old dress shirts, bartering or selling every imaginable vegetable, some with names you never heard, prices negotiable, old talk competing with Jagjit Singh’s ghazals coming from megaphones mounted on the roofs of “mike cars” headed to a wedding or funeral, tied up in traffic from bad-parking people crowding around vendors’ pick-ups and bicycles, eating doubles and pepper roti or a curried goat intestine.
The rum, the water, the rum shop glass.
In all of this, you will find a character right out of a Sir Vidia Naipaul’s novel—Seeram “Jango” Dhanesar, former cane farmer turned construction worker, but known to all as the village masseur, capable, they say, of curing anybody of back pain with a good crack and rub.
“This is the centre now,” he said, “the taxi hub to everywhere. Right here, you could get a roti, Chinese food, pudding, a corn soup. A tassa group might pass on a Sunday morning, a wedding. You might end up in a bar, beating some table and singing some old-time song. Everything here, except violence.”
The VP Gooljar Bar and Shop is still open, and catering to a fourth generation of village people.
Shopkeeper Veda Prakash Gooljar
Nostalgia and nothing else has kept it open for a long time, said VP Gooljar. He had three daughters. He ensured they got the best education possible, this shopkeeper giving the country a lawyer, an accountant and a human resource professional.
He has also given the people of Barrackpore an enduring identity.
NOTE: Richard can be contacted at [email protected]
Richard Charan’s The HisTTory Project
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