Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo

CHAPTER ONE

GROWING UP IN MCBEAN

"He used to have a massive fantasy of his own, you know, a fellow who could create a story now for now, even if something didn't happen to him like that."

- Ramsoondar Parasram

Harold Sonny Ladoo was born on February 4, 1945, to Sonny and Hamidhan Ladoo. They lived in McBean, a small settlement in central Trinidad, in the middle of the sugarcane-farming region. The village straddled the Southern Main Road, which connects the capital, Port of Spain, in the north, with the industrial capital, San Fernando, in the south.

Today McBean is a bustling community of over 4,000. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, it was barely a village. With only a few hundred inhabitants, it supported two stores: a dry-goods outlet, selling hardware, pulses and rice, etc; and a bar/rumshop and 'parlour', selling drinks and snacks.

The inhabitants of McBean and the surrounding countryside were almost completely Indo-Trinidadian, and mainly Hindu1 (with Muslim and Christian minorities). Nearly 144,000 East Indians had been brought to Trinidad after the emancipation of African slaves, to serve as cheap and "bonded" labour on the sugarcane plantations. By 1960, they constituted 36.5% of the country's population. A few had become independent farmers, but most were still hybrid peasant-labourers, with small plots of land, but still dependent on seasonal labour on the sugar estates.

Among these Indo-Trinidadians in McBean was the Ladoo family.

The head of the family, Harold's father Sonny, was short in stature but formidable in nature. Villagers in McBean describe him as very strong2 and very serious, a stern disciplinarian but well-known for his integrity and generosity. He was a farmer, highly respected in the community, growing vegetables and citrus on ten acres that his father and mother had been granted at the end of their second indentureship. The farm stretched behind the Ladoo home, off the Sonny Ladoo Trace3 east of the Southern Main Road. One end of the trace joined the Southern Main Road by Sonny Ladoo Road - the latter designation being one of several indications of the father's standing in the community.

The Ladoo home in McBean

Sonny Ladoo Trace becomes Sonny Ladoo Road as it joins the Southern Main Road (2019)

The area between Sonny Ladoo Trace and the Southern Main Road was planted in sugarcane at one time, but has since become a housing development. In 2003, Trinidad's sugar industry closed down and by 2007 the last sugar factory had shut.

Ladoo residential gardens

With the proceeds from these ten acres, Sonny, Harold's father, rented more land. His crops of vegetables and citrus flourished, and according to Harold's youngest sister, Meena, he was able to acquire further land in nearby Gran Couva. Villagers describe his holdings as one of the largest vegetable plantations in the country, yielding tomatoes, cabbage, pumpkin, aubergines, etc. They describe Sonny Ladoo as "the richest man in the area", and his plantation as "the food basket of the country".

What did this mean? The more I spoke with Harold's neighbours and family in McBean the clearer it became that the real story of Harold and the Ladoo family directly contradicted the "accepted story" mentioned in my Introduction, on Wikipedia, and in every biographical sketch by reviewers and critics. It became evident that Harold had created an alternate personal history for consumption by his Canadian colleagues and the literary establishment.4

Harold was the third child of Sonny and Hamidhan.5 There were two older sisters, Sylvia and Ballo/Llalouci (both now deceased). After Harold came another sister, Geeta, who committed suicide in her mid-teens. Next was a brother, "Toy" or Ramesh, who, following a car accident in the late 1960s, suffered from mental illness and spent much of his later years at St. Ann's Mental Hospital in Port of Spain. He too is deceased. Ramesh was followed by a final sister, Meena or Kusum, the sole survivor among the siblings.

There was an older half-brother as well: Cholo/Balkaran, by Sonny's first marriage. But he lived with an aunt and, according to Meena, was not treated as part of the immediate Ladoo family. Thus Harold was the oldest male child, the number one son. When the time came, he would be expected to take over the role of Sonny, the stern, upright, yet generous patriarch of the clan. Harold first rebelled against these expectations, and then later, to his cost, tried to fulfil them.

In 1952, Harold began attending the Exchange Canadian Mission Indian School (CMI) in the town of Couva, two miles south of McBean - the only primary school in the area at the time. He was seven, two years past the recommended age for enrolment. (While five was the official age for starting school, children in outlying areas often began later, because of the difficulty of walking the miles to and from school at age five.)

Contrary to what Harold would later tell his Canadian friends, and describe in his novel Yesterdays, people who attended the school at the same time (his sister-in-law Phyllis Siewdass, and a neighbour, Hugh Ramdeen) insist that CMI was a pleasant and good school. There were no Canadian teachers, and no punishment rooms or untoward disciplinary measures. Nevertheless, Harold's father, a devout Hindu, was not happy sending his children to a Presbyterian school, where entrance to the Canadian Mission secondary schools was conditional on conversion to Christianity, and the teachers at both levels had to be Christian.6 We can assume that Harold was aware of his father's objections, and his criticism of the Canadian missionaries whose work was entirely focused on the Indian community. This antagonism no doubt fuelled Harold's later portrayal of such a school in his novel, Yesterdays.

Sonny even offered to donate land for the establishment of a Hindu school in McBean. Eventually, land and funds were provided by other donors and in March 1955, the McBean Hindu School opened. Harold was transferred immediately, having just turned ten. Here is his teacher, Ramsoondar Parasram, whom I interviewed in 2003:

McBean Hindu School (2003)

RP: As a student, Harold was the third child I believe in the family if I am not wrong. So when this school McBean here opened, he came into I think the Second Standard.7 He was a sort of middle student. By the term middle, I mean average student. But he used to have a massive fantasy of his own, you know, a fellow who could create a story now for now, even if something didn't happen to him like that, possibly that must have led to his later ability to write.

For instance, if two little boys had a little fight outside, which was a common thing in those days, then he would bring the information, he wouldn't bring it like the ordinary fellow, you know, he highly dramatised the issue and make it look bigger than it was big, so that immediately you have to take action because, you see, the report that you get is kind of critical. But generally, other than that, he wasn't a mischievous fellow. To say he'd go and make fight with nobody, no, not that I know of. When he left Trinidad I don't know, 'cause I left in '65, so after that, what he did I wouldn't know, but up to the time I knew him in school, he was a nice fellow, friendly, good friend with everybody, except that the family had to live under the very strict rules of the father. He was an extraordinary disciplinarian, you see, and I personally believe, and I used to tell him also, that he was a little tightfisted on the children. I don't think the father did give them much freedom.

CL: So as far as you know Harold was Sonny's natural son. He wasn't adopted?

RP: No, no, no. There's no two ways, that's his son. Now I can't say we'd do a DNA test, .but looking at mother and father, there's no two ways about it.

CL: But there were no rumours or anything going around that he was adopted or anything?

RP: I never knew of that, never did.

I pressed Ramsoondar Parasram on this last point, because of something Peter Such had mentioned in an interview:

He told me the story of being raised in an orphanage. I said, "Well, so was I," because I was raised in an orphanage too. And so there was this kind of instant recognition of what we'd been through.8

It seems that teacher Parasram had Harold's number, when he described him as "a fellow who could create a story now for now, even if something didn't happen to him like that."

Ranjit Ragoonanan, a school friend of Harold's, remembers him this way:9

RR: We attended primary school together. He was most of the times a loner, but at certain times we got together. As a matter of fact, we planted those palm trees that you see in front of that school there, because we were the first batch of students that came into the school. But Harold was on kind of distant terms with his father, who was a very strict disciplinarian, 'cause he concentrated mainly on his produce and whatever.

CL: But he was a first-rate farmer, eh?

RR: He was the best in the village.

CL: What was Harold like, a regular sort of fellow?

RR: No, no,...