Uneasy in the islands

The title story, which opens the collection, is a good ambassador for the book as a whole. Like several other stories, it is divided into wittily titled sections (e.g. “3rd Kill a nun”); has a strong first-person narrator; is sharply aware of the importance of money and work; and reveals a complicated mix of cultures, races, and religions. The story opens in 1939 when Deepa, age 14, is sent to a leper colony on the small island of Chacachacare off the coast of Trinidad. She is sent there by her Christian mother because her Hindu father has just died on the island and because Deepa, too, has the first signs of leprosy on her arm. The nuns, Deepa’s mother tells her, will take care of her.

Deepa’s first friend on the island is a boy named Lazaro, so called not because he has been resurrected but because he refuses to die. “One could not tell if Lazaro was African or Indian - there was talk that there might be French in him, too.” Lazaro is two years older than Deepa and much smaller. She confides in him that she is thinking they will bury her father instead of cremating him, “Even though he Indian.” “You thinking wrong,” Lazaro tells her. “Here we all Indian, no matter how much African we have in us.” Later Deepa describes the doctor who is going to operate on her arm: “Only his eyes showed and I couldn’t tell if he was French and tanned, or African but light, or Indian even.”