Puzzle Island, a small village on a hill in Debe, south Trinidad, was once an actual island within the island of Trinidad. Residents said the hill, the centre of the village, was once surrounded by swamp lands and villagers had to use boats if they wanted to get in and out, or walk through waist-high water.
How Puzzle Island got its name is another intriguing story which an elderly resident told the Sunday Guardian last week.Sitting in the porch of his home at the bottom of the hill, which he said was once water, the villager, requesting anonymity, recounted: "In the early 1900s a Crown grant of these lands was made to Sir Charles Tennant.
"It was only a hill. Everything around was swamp. When they surveyed the land, they used the borders of the swamp to determine the boundaries.
"It came out looking just like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle." Puzzle Island was first settled by indentured labourers brought from India to work with the New Colonial Company, later called Usine St Madeleine Sugar Co Ltd. "The company wanted the labourers close to the estate but the sugar cane season lasted only six months of the year."So they put them on lands where they could grow crops to sustain themselves for the other six months," the resident said.
"The estate owner brought them here and rented them agricultural lands and they grew rice in the lagoons and planted vegetables in the drier parts."
The resident's father, whose name he gave only as S Maharaj, owned a shop in the village back then, he recalled. "This was a hardware, shop and rice mill in one. You used to get everything there, from cutlass to hoe to cattle chain to groceries and medicine. "Villagers took goods on credit for six months and when they worked in the estate for the next six months, they paid us off. "I remember the train used to bring goods from San Fernando up to the railway stop at Suchit Trace."We had no road to bring the goods in Puzzle Island and we had to take it back on a boat."
The resident said his father bought "creole rice" planted by the villagers in the lagoons, milled it and took it to Port-of-Spain to sell. "We used to buy dry black-eyed peas they also planted. All the land in Puzzle Island was cultivated then. There was not a square inch of grass." Villagers were deeply religious and a temple, built on Puzzle Island since first settlers, still stands in the area. Jenny's Bar now stands on the spot where the old shop used to be and well-paved roads link Puzzle Island with Siparia, Barrackpore and every part of the island. Neat concrete houses, some lavish, now stand on land where swamp waters used to be.
"I fill eight feet of land to build my house here," the resident said. A few residents, like Sita and Boyie Sookdeo, still live in "the lagoon" and have no road. Private developers took the track they used and the couple, who cultivate the land, have "nowhere to walk," they said. Tracing the start of the modernisation of Puzzle Island, the resident recounted: "During the colonial era, an oil company came to drill for oil in the area and built the first road. They didn't find oil. Later, the government built new roads."
The roads made life easier for Puzzle Island, but at a price.
"Here is no longer a nice, quiet place. Fifty per cent of the traffic between San Fernando and Siparia passes through here," the resident said.
Then came schools.
In 1952, Bhadase Sagan Maharaj (a 1950s opposition politician) built the Suchit Trace Hindu School, which then prime minister Dr Eric Williams used to call a cow pen, the resident related. "Canadian missionaries built Presbyterian schools here, with the aim of converting the Puzzle Island Hindus to Christianity. "Maharaj decided to counteract that by building Hindu schools using his own money. The schools were just open sheds." (The Suchit Trace school is now like a normal school.) Under the modernisation, Puzzle Island has remained fundamentally the same.
A significant number of the villagers still plant the land for a living. Most of the area's 25 or so farmers wholesale fresh, healthy vegetables to the Debe market almost all year round. Duraindra Beepath, a Puzzle Island farmer, recently won a national agricultural award. Beepath, 34, and his father, Persad, 62, were harvesting ochroes in a sunny field last week that was once a rice lagoon. "I choose to continue the family tradition of planting the land because I grow up in it and I like it," Beepath said decidedly.
