Love after Love, by Ingrid Persaud.
‘What is Love?’ A question that has been baffling famous
figures of history – and mere mortals such as we – for millennia. I think the question should be not what it
is, but why does it change (especially to its opposite) as time passes.
Ingrid Persaud’s debut
novel explores the nature and degrees of loving each other, commencing with
Betty and Sunil Ramdin, Trinidadian descendants of the Indian canecutters
imported five generations ago. They have
one little boy, Solo, whose birthday it is when Sunil takes a tumble down the
back stairs and doesn’t survive the trip:
Betty now has to raise Solo herself – fortunately, she has a good admin
job at a high school and they manage to make the best of their new life, which
becomes even better with the advent of Mr. Chetan, the maths teacher, who asks
to rent a room from her. He is with them
for several years, becomes a much-loved father figure to Solo, and a
better-than-best-friend to Betty, to the point that one night, they share
secrets. Betty reveals that Sunil didn’t
fall down the stairs: he was
pushed. By her. For Sunil was a drinker, and became a
different, monstrous person when he was drunk – as her numerous hospital visits
and injuries showed. She didn’t expect
him to die; she just wanted him to
experience broken bones, cuts and bruises, the same he had inflicted on her,
but the worst happened.
Mr Chetan’s secret is
his homosexuality, worse than a crime in Trinidad - it can get you killed! His own family had banished him from their
lives after he and his schoolfriend Mani were discovered in an embrace; Mani’s family eventually saw sense and accept
and love him as he is, but Chetan’s family have not: he is dead to them. And Trinidadian attitudes to LGBTQ people are
biblical in their condemnation: all
‘Bullers’ are fair game!
Sadly, teenage Solo
overhears some of these revelations and his love for his Mammy turns to
hatred. He leaves for New York to seek
out his father’s family in the hope that he will find a better kind of familial
love than that from which he flees – and finds a very different life from what
he expected.
Ms Persaud has filled
her story with exuberant, wonderfully engaging characters, all the while
demonstrating with almost careless ease the many and various necessary connections we need to have a
life of some meaning: maternal love,
familial love, romantic and sexual love, and the love of friends: have I covered all the bases? FIVE STARS.
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