A Trinidadian Diaspora Love Story Set to Steel Pan

Carnival Tuesday in Port of Spain is not a spectacle you observe — it is something that moves through you. The bass from the trucks hits your sternum before your ears process it, and the road smells of sweat and sequins and the particular sweet-salt of thousands of bodies in the sun, and everywhere you look there is color, the kind that only exists in the Caribbean, where the light itself seems to come from below as much as above. Priya Ramkhelawan-Sobers had not been on this road in eleven years, and she stood at the edge of the Queen’s Park Savannah with the look of someone recognizing their own face in a photograph they forgot was taken.

She had gone to Toronto at twenty-nine, chasing a research position in materials engineering, intending to stay two years. The two years had become eleven without her quite deciding it. She had a condo in Scarborough, a departmental tenure track, a Canadian winter coat she had not believed she would ever need and now could not live without. She had made a life there that was real and full and organized, and she had also spent eleven Carnivals watching videos on her phone at midnight, after her Canadian colleagues had gone to sleep, turning the volume low so as not to wake the neighbors.

The man who found her at the Savannah was not looking for her specifically. Kwesi Chambers had been a pan player with Phase II Pan Groove since he was fourteen, and on Carnival Tuesday he was not looking for anything except the next rhythm. He was forty, Afro-Trinidadian, a secondary school music teacher the other three hundred and fifty days of the year, and a different kind of human being entirely during the two days of Carnival proper. His grandmother had been one of the first women to play in a pan yard, back when that was considered irregular, and he carried that history in his hands.

They collided — literally — at the doubles stand on the corner of Maraval Road, where the bara were frying in oil that had been hot since four in the morning and the chennet man was setting up beside the coconut water cart. Priya had gone for doubles on instinct, the way that returning Trinidadians always do, trying to collapse eleven years with a bite of channa. Kwesi had gone because he went every Carnival Tuesday, because some anchors are non-negotiable. The doubles woman, a woman named Doris who had worked that corner for twenty-two years, handed them their orders at the same moment and told them both to move because they were blocking the line.

They moved to the same patch of shade under a poui tree, because it was the only shade available, and they ate in the companionable silence of people who understand that doubles require your full attention. Kwesi recognized something in the way she ate — the unselfconsciousness of someone eating their childhood, not a cultural experience. He asked where she was from, and she said Diego Martin, originally, and then Canada, now, and there was something in how she said the last two words that told him the geography was still being negotiated.

Priya had come back for her father’s seventieth birthday, but she had come back three days early because she needed to be on this road. She had not admitted that to herself until a moment of honest reckoning at the Savannah — she had missed it every single day, and the admission was unexpectedly large. Doris, who was listening from the stand, shouted something in Trinidadian Creole that made Kwesi laugh, and Priya, after a moment, laugh too.

He took her to the pan yard that evening, after the road had quieted and the city was in that particular Carnival twilight of beautiful exhaustion. Phase II’s yard smelled of steel and machine oil and the ghost of a thousand rehearsals, and when the players started warming up — just warming up, running scales and phrases — Priya felt the sound in her bones in a way she had not felt anything in a very long time. Kwesi watched her listen. He understood what he was seeing: someone remembering who they were.

Toronto did not disappear. The tenure track did not disappear. She was not the kind of woman who dismantled a life she had built with eleven years of care for a feeling, however true that feeling was. But she applied for a position at UWI St. Augustine. Kwesi told her that he was a musician and understood that some things needed to be played through before you knew where they ended. Her father’s seventieth birthday party was held in the family house in Diego Martin, under a tent in the yard, with chutney and soca and three generations of a Trinidadian family doing what such families do. Kwesi came. He played a birthday song on a tenor pan he had carried on the bus. Priya’s father told him afterward that he had good hands. In that yard, on that island, from that man, it was everything.

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