Central Trinidad, 1940s. Multiple worlds. The Have-Everythings: the Americans with their clean clothes and waterproof watches, recently arrived to police Nazi U-boats in the Caribbean. The Haves: Dalton and Marlee Changoor, prosperous villa owners. The Have-Nots: the inhabitants of the “steel and diesel and rayon and vinyl and gypsum and triple-glazed glass” of Bell Village. The Have-Nothings: the Hindu-minority denizens of a dilapidated sugarcane estate barrack – a “place of lesser lives” that even God has to “squint to see”. In his second novel, Hungry Ghosts, Kevin Jared Hosein shows with signal power and understanding how these disparate yet entwined existences affect each other.
The mysterious disappearance of Dalton Changoor is the initial plot premiss, but Hungry Ghosts is no whodunnit. Rather, it is a slow, painstaking account of lives unfolding slowly and painfully in the baking sun and lashing rain; of crushing poverty; of male insecurities and violence; of dogs, shit and death. The Have-Nothings are used to insults, “jaundiced eyes”, police brutality. In the barrack, Shweta Saroop grieves her baby daughter, killed by a bug she has ingested from the dirty water; thoughts of the dead infant leave her unable to make love to her husband, Hans. For their son, Krishna, life is a matter of “waking up filthy in a world that equated cleanliness to godliness”. Elsewhere, Niala, young and pregnant, vomits continually.
What options, then, for the Have-Nots and the Have-Nothings? Hosein explored that question in his first novel, The Repenters (2016), a vivid and poignant account of a boy, Jordon, brought up in a Port of Spain orphanage. “The people up there think their shit is over when they flush the toilet”, Jordon is told by a seasoned hustler who takes him under his wing. “But it is we down here who have to live in the sewers.” Violence is handed on from generation to generation. If the “Trinidadian male” is “a barnacle upon the bow of a retired schooner”, compared with his American counterparts, the Trinidadian Hindu male has even less to hope for. Rage festers in the filth.
Hungry Ghosts takes its title from the Hindu concept of the preta, a being into which you are transformed if you have committed certain sins. In a Guardian interview (February 4, 2023), Hosein explained that the preta has an extremely large appetite and an extremely small mouth: the perfect metaphor for hungering after unattainable social mobility. There is more than one preta in Hungry Ghosts, but it is Hans’s envy of the Changoors’ “territory and earthly delights” that upends everything.
Hans realizes too late what the barrack offered all along: neighbourly kindness, instances of which flash out like “bright pink lotuses in night soil”. The barrack’s matriarch, Rookmin, “a mammoth among the mewlings”, is a healer, confidante and rock. The cooking and eating of food that takes place here represents comfort, togetherness and creative female strength. Shweta cooks roti at the clay chulha (stove) using the firewood Hans collects at weekends; on a “good day” she will make pumpkin tarkari (curry). The Hindi words are grounding, the homemade dishes virtually the only pleasurable experiences and fixed points in these desperately impoverished and unstable lives. But they are also reminders of the decision of a Victorian government to allow British colonists in Trinidad to bring over indentured workers from India after slavery had been abolished in most parts of the Empire. In the 1940s, Hosein shows, the Hindu culture that had arrived on the island a century previously was still met with hostility and discrimination. Hans and Shweta are informed that their marriage, conducted with a Hindu rite, is invalid.
“I live my whole life in a small room”, says Rookmin. The author’s canvas is at once vast and tightly focused. The same can be said of the way the novel is put together. Though the story arc is long, the prose derives its power from the individual chapters, which are short. These do not end on cliffhangers; instead they are rounded vignettes that conclude on quietly devastating moments of emotional charge. A sprinkling of inkhorns – “flabellate”, “noctilucae”, “rufescent” – mars the prose. But in the main Kevin Jared Hosein’s writing proceeds with luminous intensity through the lushness and the mire.
Kate McLoughlin is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Harris Manchester College. She is currently writing a literary history of silence
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