“Come and Let We Talk Gal”

Basdai and Rookmin are friends. Indian women friends who talk about sex.

Basdai is cleaning out the front room when Rookmin hails her from the step, “Ay Bass, where you is?” Rookmin enters and comments on the rumpled state of the sheets, inquiring if their untidiness comes from Basdai and her husband, Choonilal, doing it in the night. “We too old now to do rudeness,” replies Bass as she neatens.¹ “It good to do it sometime, gal,” advises Rookmin, who is the sexually frustrated wife of Sook, “the village queer” (6).

Interaction between the women is companionable, taking place while they sit next to each other on the bed. They recollect scandals and exchange perspectives on the risks faced by young village men. Basdai confides Choonilal’s fears about mortgaging the house to Pandit Puru to pay for their son, Poonwa, to start a Hindu mission in Canada. Before going home to cook, Rookmin fortifies Basdai, encouraging her to give Choonilal “pressure in he ass” until he agrees. Basdai affirms, “One kiss me ass chile I have in dis world. Man I is Poonwa modder, and I done tell Choon, dat Poonwa have to go Canada” (25).

Amid domestic responsibilities, these Indian women’s first conversation together is about the value of regular “rudeness.” Situated in rural Trinidad in 1955, Harold Sonny Ladoo’s Yesterdays, published in 1974, is one of the Caribbean’s earliest literary works in which Indian women friends talk to each other about sex. It remains one of the few where they do so openly and jokingly.

There are not many novels about Indian women’s friendships in the Caribbean, particularly working-class, rural Indian women, and what they talk about in the intimate familiarity of these relationships. Writers typically represent such women as supporting each other through tribulations, violence, relationships, love, and loss.² Banal, “wotless,”³ and comical sex talk among “full grown” (22) or mature Indian women friends is even less documented in Caribbean literature, in the historiography of indenture, or in feminist scholarship on the first postindenture decades of Indo-Caribbean life.

Yet in “Like Sugar in Coffee,” Patricia Mohammed describes her memories of such women: “Their eyes were full of mischief when they talked amongst themselves . . . Their laughter and conversation would grow secretive when we came too close, switching to the Hindi which they knew we could not fully understand.”⁴ Why do such friendships and sex talk within them matter?

Basdai and Rookmin’s conversations show how friendship strengthens women. Rookmin is Basdai’s ally throughout her planned castration of Choonilal’s patriarchal power, whether through wielding of her status as Poonwa’s modder or through her transformation over the decades from a “weak woman” (15), whom Choonilal would beat all over the village, to one prepared to wish her husband dead (98).

Women’s friendships, which politicize and sexualize spaces such as the kitchen and yard, are also a source of what Brinda Mehta refers to as “aji mothering,” which is communal, nonbiological, and authoritative in the way that Basdai and Rookmin together agree on what is best for Poonwa’s future.⁵ Ajis are paternal grandmothers whom Mehta theorizes as symbols of, among other qualities, fortitude, pride, and stability. However, Basdai and Rookmin should perhaps instead be framed in terms of nani mothering, which, in chutney-soca double entendre, simultaneously affirms the matrilineality of older women’s heteronormative and transgressive sexual vocabulary.⁶ Nani politics is what Basdai and Rookmin’s friendship helps them to navigate in Yesterdays.

Finally, such friendships provide spaces away from men for women to mutually reject propriety. For example, intent on shaming Ragbir for “meddling too much in her household affairs” and for pretending to be Choonilal’s friend, Basdai exposes her many extramarital affairs with Ragbir to Choonilal and their neighbors.⁷ This is too public for Rookmin, who chides her, “Not everything you must talk” (99).

However, in the private conversation that follows, prefaced by Rookmin calling Basdai, “Come and let we talk gal,” the women are impudent. Rookmin remembers the time Choonilal became stuck in Basdai, and the villagers had to massage them with soap and water until they could separate (99). Basdai laughs, her body shaking, and then laughs again.

Basdai brings up another incident, about twenty years earlier, when Rookmin had sought an affair with a watchman. Rookmin met him for sex in the middle of the road one night, but the “lecherous watchman” forcibly sodomized her, drawing the attention of the villagers (including her husband, Sook), who laughed while she screamed. She was rescued by Basdai, who squeezed the watchman’s testicles, making him bawl out and withdraw.

In the privacy of the kitchen, Basdai and Rookmin now laugh about these sexual misadventures, however painful they were at the time (100). Although Pandit Puru asks them, “Wot de ass all you womens laffin for?” when they come out of the kitchen, they sit near him and reveal none of this mischievousness (101).

Yesterdays publicizes Indian women’s frank sharing in a way largely confined to the matikor, even up to the time of its publication in 1974. Growing up surrounded by the cane fields of rural McBean Village in Couva, Harold Sonny Ladoo would have been familiar with, and his characterization of Basdai and Rookmin conceivably influenced by, Hindu women’s songs, body movements, and vulgar humor about sex in the matikor tradition.⁸

This women-centric night in the preparations for a Hindu wedding is well known as a ribald gathering where women sing about sex and dance in ways and with objects to boisterously represent sex, sometimes with women playing both masculine or feminine sexual roles as well as disrupting heteronormativity with homoeroticism and queer potentialities.⁹

Birthed in the matikor and its music, chutney songs inventively took up this tradition. In the Bhojpuri folk tune “Kataawo Lakari,” for example, “the lyrics refer to a woman asking a ‘lakarhaara’ (wood cutter) to go cut a nice piece of lakari (wood) to help light the ‘aag’ (fire) in her ‘chulha’ (oven).”¹⁰

However, chutney music has also not remained entirely heteronormative. For example, Suzanne Persard describes Princess Anisa in the chutney lashback song “Tek Sunita (Nadia’s Reply)” lyricizing, “Only a woman knows what it takes / To make another woman[’s] legs start to shake.”¹¹ Most often, women’s songs are directed at men, but histories of both the matikor and chutney music position Hindu Indian women’s sexuality as openly expressive and knowledgeable when women, particularly those working class and rural, get together.¹²

Basdai and Rookmin are mature women friends who straighten the bed, cook food, care about the young men in their community, conspire, and console. They are village tanties who, at times, “fuck proppaness” and reject containment of Indian women’s sexuality by monogamy and modesty.¹³ They would likely have been among those in the matikor; singing, dancing, and forging friendships that could survive the complex, simultaneously heteronormative and queer, sexual politics of married life, men’s violence, and women’s desire.

While Ladoo reveals some conversations between Basdai and Rookmin, he leaves others to be imagined. He also fails to notice that Sook could never have been the only village queer, for queerness is not limited to men and bulling but is also located in Indo-Caribbean women’s transgressive jahaji bahin subjectivities and solidarities.¹⁴ These women also appear in Felix Morin’s orientalist portraits, posing in queer and ambiguous relation to each other and to Indian women’s sexuality.¹⁵

Shani Mootoo was the first to fill this literary space, introducing sexual openness in queer Indo-Caribbean women’s friendships with each other.¹⁶ Since then, a body of scholarship and literature has developed that queers Indo-Caribbean womanhood and sexuality.¹⁷ A growing number of works also continue Ladoo’s centering of rural and working-class Indian women’s friendships and his explicit narrativizing of women’s ordinary talk about rudeness.¹⁸

We can draw on and affirm the sisterly bonds that emerge from these kinds of Indian women’s friendships, beginning with the jahaji bahin relations that came ashore with indentured arrivals, as sources for navigating the journey and settlement of postindenture Caribbean feminisms.¹⁹

Such friendship is how Basdai and Rookmin survive. Such friendships were and are how we stay sane, find strength, strategize, and survive. In this way, Indian Caribbean women’s friendships, emerging from the grim histories of sugar plantation life, offer a postindenture feminist genealogy.

Additionally, Basdai and Rookmin’s sex talk with each other as friends (limited by Ladoo to heterosexual sex) demands that such a genealogy locate women’s nonnormative sexual praxes within “the very foundation of Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity.”²⁰ Remixing Ramabai Espinet’s theorization of the gendered labor of rural Indian women and Adesh Samaroo’s “Caroni Close Dong,” we can think of this as “a female epistemology of [going for] cane” that is not easily foreclosed.²¹

The necessity of women’s friendships is emphasized by the novel’s end, which feels unfinished and, like sex in Rookmin’s story, unsatisfactory. Ladoo describes her as married to Sook for over thirty years, although she had discovered, just days after their wedding, that Sook is queer. She stays because Sook does not get drunk and beat her and because he is a good shopkeeper. Yet Rookmin’s sexual frustration and psychological distress at being rejected by Sook lead to unfulfillment and eventual madness.²²

Indeed, sexual rejection because of their husbands’ preference for affairs with men deeply hurts both women, causing Basdai to faint in Sook’s shop and triggering Rookmin’s tormented cleaving from the vestiges of marital womanhood.

In the last scene, Rookmin tears off her clothes, points to her pubic hair, and orders the people who ran to her from Choonilal’s house, “All you watch good! Watch de nice fat ting I have. Sook does leave dis fat ting to go and take man. Tell me if dis world have any reason in it?” (110). Basdai is missing from this scene, rendered an absence, relegated to silence, unable to provide emotional reciprocity.

Basdai and Rookmin talk sex because sex affirms womanhood and is a good that women deserve, whether from their husbands or from outside their marriages. It validates rural Indian women as desiring subjects with “a hole to take man” (19) and “nice fat ting,” worthy of intimacy and joy, and having a right to rudeness. This is precisely the way sex is exemplified in a matikor, where women vigorously insist on the pleasures of men’s heterosexual responsibilities to women in marriage, even as they displace the phallus with their mimicry and parody, and the gratification of embodied sexual communion among women.

Although it is Basdai who saves Rookmin during an earlier crisis of public sexual exposure, as Yesterdays closes Ladoo refuses Rookmin a woman friend to help her survive the unbearable unreasonableness of a life without good sex. One imagines that if Basdai were there, she would draw Rookmin from her sexual loneliness and bodily grief to a women’s space, such as a front room or kitchen, to commiserate, counsel, reminisce, and laugh, with the protective care and intimacy of her friend Rookmin’s own words to her: “Come and let we talk gal.”

Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. Among her publications, she is coeditor of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies special issue “Indo-Caribbean Feminisms: Charting Crossings in Geography, Discourse, and Politics” (2012) and the collection Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her interests are in tracing, theorizing, and contributing to postindenture Caribbean feminisms. Her blog, Diary of a Mothering Worker, has been published as a newspaper column since 2012 and includes numerous columns on Indo-Caribbean feminisms and gender relations.

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[1] Harold Sonny Ladoo, Yesterdays (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1974), 25; hereafter cited in the text.

[2] See, for example, Narmala Shewcharan, Tomorrow Is Another Day (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1994); and Kevin Jared Hosein, Hungry Ghosts (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

[3] Ryan Persadie, “Tanty Feminisms: The Aesthetics of Auntyhood, #Coolieween, and the Erotics of Post-indenture,” Journal of Indentureship 2, no. 1 (2022): 72.

[4] Patricia Mohammed, “Like Sugar in Coffee: Third Wave Feminism in the Caribbean,” Social and Economic Studies 52, no. 3 (2003): 7.

[5] Brinda Mehta, Diasporic Dislocations: Indo-Caribbean Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 141. On the “yard,” see 132.

[6] This includes the double-entendre of a playful demand for oral sex as well as a description of sexual violence (“Lick down me nani”). See Shalini Puri, “Race, Rape, and Representation: Indo-Caribbean Women and Cultural Nationalism,” in Rosanne Kanhai, ed., Matikor: The Politics of Identity for Indo-Caribbean Women (St. Augustine: University of the West Indies School of Continuing Studies, 1999), 252, 259.

[7] Basdai’s affairs with Ragbir are occurring during a period when she and Choonilal have stopped having sex because they are fighting over Poonwa’s Hindu mission to Canada. Basdai is clearly not too old to be “doing it,” as she first said to Rookmin, and she is characterized by Ladoo as capable of shamelessly securing sexual pleasure with someone other than her husband.

[8] See Kanhai, Matikor. On Ladoo’s life in Couva, see Christopher Laird, Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2023).

[9] Lauren Pragg, “The Queer Potential: (Indo-)Caribbean Feminisms and Heteronormativity,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, no. 6 (2012): 1–14. As Ingrid Persaud’s character Betty describes to her friends at a matikor, “Check that old lady. She wine till she nearly had sex with that other old lady.” Ingrid Persaud, Love after Love (New York: Random House, 2020), 156.

[10] Cutlass Magazine, https://www.instagram.com/p/C23CaO9uyPy/?igsh=MXFrMGxhMGluMGYwaw%3D%3D. My thanks to Vinay Harrichan, of Cutlass Magazine, for providing this example.

[11] Suzanne C. Persard, “Queering Chutney: Disrupting Heteronormative Paradigms of Indo-Caribbean Epistemology,” Journal of West Indian Literature 26, no.1 (2018): 33.

[12] See Aisha Mohammed, “Love and Anxiety: Gender Negotiations in Chutney-Soca Lyrics in Trinidad,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, no. 1 (April 2007): 1–42.

[13] To quote Aruna in Ryan Persadie’s theorization of “tanty feminisms”: “This proppaness Indo-Caribbean women are supposed to be, being a tanty really fucks with that.” Persadie, “Tanty Feminisms,” 69.

[14] See Aaliyah Khan, “Voyages across Indenture: From Ship Sister to Mannish Woman,” GLQ 22, no. 2 (2016): 249–80.

[15] See Gaiutra Bahadur, “Postcards from Empire,” Dissent 62, no. 2 (2015): 49–58.

[16] See Shani Mootoo, Out on Main Street (Canada: Press Gang, 1993).

[17] For example, see Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan, Erotic Cartographies: Decolonisation and the Queer Caribbean Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022).

[18] See Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan and Preity Rajanie Kumar, “Queer Tactility: Same-Sex Intimacies between Women in Chutney and Soca Music,” Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies 4, no. 2 (2020): 87–105; and Preity Kumar, “We Deh”: Women-Loving Women, Rurality, and Creole Linguistic Potentials,” Inter Alia 18 (2023): 84–100.

[19] See Peggy Mohan, Jahajin (Haryana: HarperCollins India, 2007); and Brinda Mehta, “Jahaji-Bahin Feminism: A De-colonial Indo-Caribbean Consciousness,” South Asian Diaspora 12, no. 2 (2020): 179–94. See also Gabrielle Hosein, “Post-indentureship Caribbean Feminist Thought, Transoceanic Feminisms, and the Convergence of Asymmetries,” Scholar and Feminist Online 16, no. 1 (2020), https://sfonline.barnard.edu/post-indentureship-caribbean-feminist-thought-transoceanic-feminisms-and-the-convergence-of-asymmetries/.

[20] Mehta, Diasporic Dislocations, 23. See also Ramabai Espinet, “The Absent Voice: Unearthing the Female Epistemology of Cane” (presented at the University of Toronto, July 1989).

[21] This is a chutney remix of Espinet’s conceptualization of a “female epistemology of cane” (Espinet, “The Absent Voice”) with Adesh Samaroo’s “Caroni Close Dong.” Samaroo sings: “She getting pain because early in the morning she can’t go for cane.” The double entendre is “for cane” / fucking, and it implies that cane fields were sites of sexual pleasure as well as livelihood. It is the woman who is pained by the closure of the sugar factory in Caroni, Trinidad (which is symbolic of the sugar industry) and the loss of a chance to cut cane for income as well as go “for cane” for pleasure. However, the song is phallocentric, and Samaroo sings about sexual pleasure only in terms of fellatio: “When I in de canefield, I does break [a double entendre for ejaculate] and she does suck,” giving little to heterosexual women’s pleasure or the possibilities of nonheteronormative, women’s queering of going “for cane” / fucking in the history of sugar production. Adesh Samaroo, “Caroni Close Down [sic],” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2shVsZsj9mk (accessed 11 October 2024).

[22] See Letizia Gramaglia, “Representations of Madness in Indo-Caribbean Literature,” (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2008).