“This is Irwin’s Bay, this is where the Indians arrived” said Mandoo, pointing me to the shore. He was referring to the arrival of indentured laborers from India. It was on May 1, 1857, the ship Maidstone carrying 375 Indian indentured workers arrived in Grenada from Calcutta. Mandoo is Grenada’s best tour guide. He was touring me and Sam around Grenada offering an absolutely fascinating download of the country’s history. The Indo-Grenadian, and broadly the Indo-Caribbean history was a part of his brilliant narrations.

In fact the reference to Indo-Caribbean or African-Caribbean is incorrect. In the Caribbean, everyone is Caribbean first. That much the races have got blended over time to become predominantly the Caribbean culture. Thanks to the  exhilarating beauty of the racial mix between Indians and Africans in the Caribbean, the neighboring Trinidad & Tobago has produced numerous beauty queens! The very pretty Valene Maharaj to  Ysabel Amara Bisnath, who is also a bright lawyer; the list of their miss worlds and miss universes is rather long.

Grenada is an island country in the Caribbean. The hills in the main island has many nutmeg plantations. It felt home for me as we toured the hills, I kept thinking of Amma’s nutmeg plants back home in Kerala. Driving up Grenada’s hills felt like a trip to Munnar in Kerala. Spice isle, the island’s other name is thanks to nutmeg and mace crops.

On landing, as I approached the immigration officer at Grenada’s airport, he asked: ‘what brought you here’. I said, ‘I am visiting your former Prime Minister Sir Nicholas Brathwaite’s family’. He looked at me, smiled and asked: are you Nic’s friend? I said, yes I am. He said, ‘I went to school with Nic’. Having visited over 40 countries, never an immigration officer welcomed me into a country with a personal touch. I realized Nicholas Earle Brathwaite is a big name in the Island, and in the Caribbean.

Mandoo and Sam took me to a Caribbean Indian restaurant for Roti. The Caribbean Roti is a curry stew folded in a paratha. The stew had chicken and potatoes. But it could be fish or conch. Just like everything else in the Caribbean, including their pretty beauty queens, even the Indian food is so blended into what is more or less a Caribbean food.

After the food stop, Mandoo’s tour-guide explanations entered a topic that I have been  anxiously to waiting to hear about: the United States invasion of Grenada. I have been reading about the history of Grenada around the time Sir Nicholas Brathwaite became the president. Sir Brathwaite was an educationist who was Regional Director of the Commonwealth Youth Program when he took over the office of Chairman of Grenada’s Interim government, and eventually elected as the Prime Minister from March 1990 to February 1995. He stabilized the country after a bloody coup d’état when Maurice Bishop was killed by his own party’s hard liners.

Later that day Eddie Frederick, a fascinating orator, radio talk show host, and a deep human being who i met in Grenada, talked about Maurice Bishop sitting at the bar of the Spice Island beach resort. Maurice Bishop evokes mixed feelings among Grenadians, I realize. At some level his life, ideals, Caribbean nationalism, and his contributions are a reverential folklore for Grenadians. At another level, his name evokes a long silence.

The Umbrellas, a beach side bar on Grand Anse has a cool vibe. Just as the beach itself, a 2 mile long, golden sands and calm blue waters. The choice on all days was between a long swim in the morning, not to go past 50 meters as I was warned, and some amazing Rum punch in the evening. On the plane back to JFK, I texted Sam sitting on the other side of the plane to block calendars to go back, to Trinidad. That’s when the carnival happens next February.