Anna Catherina

Anna Catherina: Reflections from Afar© Part II

The Retailers

If the master artisans and the service providers were the mobile entrepreneurs of Anna Catherina, the shopkeepers were the stay-at-home businessmen who developed the village into a vibrant retail community. Few villages boasted the range of small retailers like Anna Catherina and one could do all their shopping here without ever going to Georgetong. As if they had taken a lesson from modern day business schools, the retailers focused on their own target markets.

Two retailers catered to the high end market in Mr. Raymond and Mr. Yongie. Young children who walked on the long upward sloping bridges that preceded the stores could not contain their excitement and anticipation as they approached the premises. Once in, the excitement continued in the young and old over an assortment of toys like blow blow, cap guns, mouth organs, blue-eyed dollies, brand name shirts and materials like Dan River, Seersucker, Poplin, Tapestry and Mohair. One could not help but feel that they were out-away when surrounded by such exotic items.

At the other end of the scale was the sort of every day store where you could find ordinary and not so high end things at a decent price. Whether it was Cow and Gate or Dancow milk powder, Laalah or Madras curry powder or just plain M&B tablets, Mr. Arjune’s Shop had it all. A skilled retailer, the Arjunes ran a busy outfit to the point where Mr. and Mrs. Arjune and their son were always working. Perhaps the only mid range competition would have come from Mr. Basilly’s shop, next to the Monarch cinema.

Anna Catherina led the charge and developed into a consuming community for the big-boys to later enter the village. Gobin’s Buffalo Jeans leased premises from Mr. Sundar and competed well in pushing john blues and bell-bottoms to buck the local craze of shiny new crimplenes. Across the road, Royal Bank leased the local hot spot of Oscar’s to attend to the banking needs of people along the coast. Yes, the village had it’s fair share of big-shots!

How many villages could boast of a bookstore and a pawnbroker on West Demerara? Anna Catherina held this distinction through the auspices of Reverend Harrichand and Mr. Bhairo. Reverend Harrichand’s Bookstore attended to my emergency purchase of Walker and Miller’s series of New Course in Mathematics in 1969, just as Mr. Bhairo the pawnbroker, provided emergency loans to families across the coast. The good Reverend, always a kind and soft spoken man, provided a vital service and Mr. Bhairo, a low profile gentleman, made his store attractive through warmth and pretty faces.

On a more practical note there was Samad’s Esso gas station. Mr. Samad apparently won some sort of British pool and acquired the gas station from Mr. Munir Khan in the late 60’s. The gas station was a hub of activity and extended across the road where two oil change pits existed. Young boys converged around the oil pits to see and feel the action, watch big men play trup-chall and gantt, and hear the wild stories of the local Dutchman. That local Dutchman, Mr. Saroka, was famed for smoking a cigarette and exhaling it through his ears!

The Jumbies

If the local Dutchman told the stories of the day, his ancestors caused the stories of the night. Yes, stories of Dutchman jumbie abounded and this was not the village for the faint hearted, especially when walking alone on the side-line dam. One had to get past the calabash tree and spirits that resided in Fellow-Yard before dealing with headless jumbies garbed in all white and walking backwards to you from the Dutchman tree. Technically, The Tree was located at CI but Anna Catherinians who used the side-line dam had to bear the brunt of these jumbie attacks. As if the tree was not enough, a lone Dutchman rested in his tomb at the bottom of the CI side-line, only to torment Anna Catherina residents and young boys who wanted to cool aaffff on warm sunny days.

Whenever the jumbies relented and caused no torment at night, the two local spirits filled in for them. Mssrs. Gachoo and Cash were the jumbie surrogates who created havoc in some shape or form for a few in the village. Mr. Gachoo was legendary in his exploits and escapes from the police. One such story was the case where the police brackled him on the ferry. Mr. Gachoo said he needed to kaka and was allowed to use the toilet. Four years later, the police were still waiting for him! Mr. Cash had a reputation as one who could put you away easily. Again rumor ran high about a certain butcher who paid Mr. Cash to wait in the dark by Leonora Park to beat up a regular passer-by. Mr. Cash knew this was wrong and relayed the story to the potential victim. In return he was offered to tek a couple of drinks near Monarch and then go teef two a Shakoor fowl.

The Rum Shops and Monarch

There were a lot of places to take drinks and escape the monotony of everyday village drudgery near Monarch. Here one could be served Banks beer by Fatboy over at Timmys, drink XM and Russian Bear at Harry Bamb, play dominoes or drink Stout at Lall’s, eat pepper pot and drink beer at Shakoor’s or eat, drink and play at Oscar’s. The latter did not last terribly long but introduced the village to the niceties of pool, foosball, soft ice cream cones and punch-box. Across the road and directly under major Bollywood and Hollywood billboards, mobile vendors peddled googrie, boiled egg, bara, mauby, pine drink and black pudding.

The multifunctional Bollywood and Hollywood billboards served as the backdrop of the capital of Anna Catherina, Monarch Square. Perched high above ground on twelve by eight board frames, the movie billboards were the domain of Monarch employees, Mssrs. Feroze and Maaga. Mr. Feroze and Mr. Maaga added drama, action and suspense to the mounting of the posters that could only be matched by the movies themselves. A typical poster mounting operation started with the arrival of the duo with posters tucked under their left arms and cans of paste in their right hands. Both parties mounted the billboard stand and worked from the far ends pasting rectangular sheets of poster, frame by frame to meet a dramatic final scene in the middle. As they worked their way patiently from frame to frame, the crowd of onlookers built up in tandem, to witness the drama, could sometimes hear Maaga say, “Fee yu waan go knack two baara now?”, to which the onlookers would yell “ ayu two gat abbi a wait hey and ayu a go eat now?” Fee and Maags would smile at their importance, abort the baara lunch and lay the last piece of the poster to an exciting crescendo of oohs and aahs!

Surrounded by the beer gardens and mobile vendors, inundated by loud chatter and Dakar Dhale from the punch-box, Monarch Square served as the meeting place for evening and weekend action in and out of the cinema. Whilst Shammi Kapoor was drapping licks on Pran inside, Monarch’s Patriarch Mr. Wah-you-call-am was giving instructions out in the parking lot to employees to clean up dah wah-you-call-am and put am in dah wah-you- call-am. If Mr. Wah-you-call-am was not out, you could join passive locals to witness a gladiator looking Roland Hunte beat up a helpless and drunk Jerry Bisnauth, beyond the Monarch gates.

Outside of the Monarch gates, young men dressed in their shiny crimplenes, stood waiting with their cheese cloth and fancy clipped bicycles, to tek in the 8:30 P.M. Saturday feature of another Sangam or Dosti. The well to do locals and good looking girls, all powdered up and full of puff, uncomfortably put up with the hooliganism of the ordinary and semi drunk who could disturb them from their comfortable and well priced balcony and circle seats. Here at Monarch Square, the rich and the poor, the big shot and the knack-a-bouts, the pretty and the ordinary, the light skinned and the black skinned, the jeweled and the bare, all met in common for their dose of the village equalizer, movie entertainment. Whenever the uncle-nephew combination of Paul and Krishna and the loudspeakers did not bring in the crowds, then the occasional appearances of Indian singing stalwarts Rafi, Lata, Asha, Manna Dey or Mukesh always infused new life into Monarch Square.

Sunday Morning Prayers

If the movie or singing entertainment did not cause villagers to forget their worries, or the Saturday night beer and rum drinking did not make them forget their troubles, then a return to the general vicinity on Sunday morning was an attempt of redemption from their weekly sins and sorrows. Nestled along the Monarch corridor, were the Christian Churches where well dressed villagers came together on Sunday mornings to listen to the Lord’s Prayer. First came the Presbyterian, then the Seven Day Adventists, followed by the Anglican church which was situated in a compound with a resident Pastor, housed in a two storey concrete building. The Pastor and his family were the architects of a milk distribution program in the late 1960’s that helped needy families regardless of their religious orientation.

The diversity of the village accommodated the different paths to heavenly salvation and there was mutual respect among the people and the institutions. Further down the road from the Christian Churches was the Islamic Masjid and Madarsa that catered to the village’s Muslim community. In later years, a clap hand or Pentecostal Church topped off the word of the Bible by taking over a small kindergarten towards the end of Anna Catherina, near the Leonora Park. Amazingly, the village did not have a Hindu place of worship until the 1960’s, but it came when the south east housing scheme was developed for new migrants into the village.

Not far away from Monarch, the Anna Catherina Middle Walk dam led towards the train line and connected with the south east housing scheme that hosted the Hindu temple. Flanked by the clean black water middle walk, full of purine leaves, water lily and water nuts on one side, and Mr. Fazloo’s rice factory on the other, the red brick dam created the famous Gap as it met the public road. The Gap hosted the evening assembly of young men liming away their study days during the week but remained rather quiet on auspicious Sundays.

A walk down the dam on a Sunday would inevitably lead towards the Hindu temple where a guest Pandit, recently returned from a trip to North America, could be overheard delivering a speech on the essence of Dharma and Karma. One could overhear from the Middle Walk Dam, the powerful message from the well travelled Pandit: “Western people call our religion insular and call theirs universal. Universal means that they can make a Hindu into a Christian because they are open minded. My dear bhaiyos and bhaihenos, I was in New Yaak, and Montreeyaal, and yu shuld see how dem bhaiyas knacking their jaals and singing their Hare Rama and Hare Krishna! And dem nah ardinary bhaiyas like yu and me, dem a white white bhaiyas! You must never give up your religion in the belief that someone else’s is better than yours.” Not far away from the temple another sermon could be heard on the dialectics of Swami Dayanand and Shri Tulsidas. This was the south east housing scheme, home of Anna Catherina’s newest migrants; home of Churchill, Hitler and Gandhi; home of the Shop, or School of Athens!

The author, Ravindra of www.cornelia-ida.com limits commercial reproduction and/or publication of this article unless a donation is made to a charity of his choice. Ravindra is a native of West Demerara and writes from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He can be reached by email here. TOP