About four months ago, a man had died there, from a bullet in his skull, allegedly after chatting up the wrong man's woman. On Monday, as I waited to cross Pashley Street into Melrose Supermarket, my eyes fell to the pavement, and my heart sank a little from what I saw.
Downs. Stemmed globules of gold and crimson and green had been left in the dust, or mashed by indifferent shoe heels, or had rolled unnoticed, untouched, and untouchable, into the gutter. More fruit lay on the bare, shaded earth under the downs tree, a kind of tree that has all but lost its identity, and the respect and the utility once enjoyed as a place marker.
"I stopping off by the downs tree," a passenger would tell a taxi-man, thereby publicising, if it were Wrightson Road, a private medical mission. "By the downs tree" was the good-humoured, euphemistic reference to the specialist centre, in the days before HIV, to treat VD, endemic at least since the US troops landed during World War II.
Similarly, "by the tamarind tree," used to be a landmark and a residential, and also a social, signifier. Places were known by fruit with which, from childhood, people shared an affectionate relationship. Downs and tamarind were sought after, and voluminously consumed, by the young, and the young at heart.
The term "snacks" hadn't yet been adopted, to connote manufactures in shiny foil envelopes addressed with catchy names, and set in grocery racks at children's eye level. In Hi-Lo, tamarind is offered in packs imported from Thailand. I haven't had the heart to try them myself, or to offer them to children with a taste for tangy, salty, "snacks."
Nor would anyone who, like me, had attended Nelson St Boys' RC School a block away, contemplate harvesting any tamarind that still fall from whatever trees still stand in Tamarind Square. I have rechristened the place Vagrant Square, in recognition of present land use and orientation of that downtown Port-of-Spain space.
Enthusiasm–more, nostalgia now–for local fruit defines, and dates, people. (Unlike local options, imported apples, grapes, peaches, plums and tamarinds are forever in season.) So you can plot the age range of a David Bratt, the paediatrician whose Guardian column sometimes runs a typically understated campaign for a return to the outdoor life he knew as a Port-of-Spain child.
Abundant and diverse fruit, self-served off the tree branch, was part of that childhood experience. Like that childhood, the fruits are gone, something not widely noticed, an absence less and less cared about. This was called to my attention at a verandah lime in the Northern Range foothills of San Juan five years ago.
We were surveying the familiar pattern of hillside scraping and the implantation of housing, or slash-and-burn farming, or both.
Painful results are today being felt in erosion, in landslides, floods, and even the horrific possibility of avalanches, without warning, of monster rocks.
Another result, pointed out to me in San Juan by Simeon Sandiford, engineer and T&T music producer, is that many varieties of fruit, native to that hillside, have been lost.
He mentioned, among others, gru-gru boeuf and cocorite. The fruit of those two mountainside palms were, as I remember, acquired tastes, requiring the cultivated appreciation of unique subtleties.
Not having bitten into a gru-gru boeuf or a cocorite for decades, has my life been any the poorer?
I cannot tell the ways. Yet, it had been fulfilling to know, or believe, that such gastronomic options obtain: that a certain part of T&T's natural wealth, of the national patrimony, has remained available for consumption, for reference, if only literary.
The diminishment of options is keenly felt by people of a certain age.
Scrupulous about communication values, we are denied use of the image, "as hard as gru-gru boeuf."
Encountering that phrase, a presumed 75 per cent of listeners or readers will roll their eyes quizzically.
Life marches on?
Well, Trini life, I suppose.
In the Bourda market, in Georgetown, Guyana, I have spent quality time appraising the bountiful presence of fruit we no longer see, even in the T&T natural-treasure trove that is the Chaguanas market.
Caimite, fat pork and mammy apple, plentifully available in Bourda, would be, to my early-teen, Trini daughter Zara, fruit options so exotic, her eyes would go blank.
Inspired by Dr Bratt, I've been trying to orient her toward local fruit–and away from Arthur LokJack's tangy, salty, imported, "snacks."
This has meant meeting teen taste halfway by supplying (green) fruit–mango, pommecythere, plums, cherries–capable of being processed into a "chow" rendered highly savoury through applications of salt, pepper, lime, and chadon beni.
Monday's downer over downs had a hopeful sequel when I visited friend and Diamond Vale neighbour, Carl Dedier.
After raising Christmas toasts, I told my story, and he led me into his backyard.
There, we filled a shopping bag with pink-and-red pommerac, plucked direct from low-hanging branches.
Will Zara eat this stuff, I wondered aloud. Carl affirmed, and the teenage fruit gourmand later confirmed:
"Yes, you could make chow with it."