Tag Archives: Vaneisa Baksh

I’ve come to believe that what I had thought to be a vicious bout of both acid reflux and one of my lifelong afflictions, bronchitis, was really some form of Covid. By the time it occurred to me that it might be, it was too late for a conclusive test; …

Grief was palpable in her Facebook post; a jolting reminder of the savage, indelicate and arbitrary nature of life. Akili Charles had been gunned down in the night, mere days after his legal challenge to the criminal justice system had been supported by the Privy Council. Those accused of murder …

When I was 16, I got a job as the receptionist at a small printery on Sellier Street in St Augustine. It was not my first job—I’d left school the year before and had worked briefly at two or three places since.  One of the Seafood Enterprises outlets occupies that …

Inside Madeo’s mini mart, the place in Aranjuez where I buy dahi, a tray with eight breadfruits the size of grapefruits sat on the counter. I had never seen such small ones being offered for sale, but since Madeo was always keen to market unusual fare, I was intrigued.  They …

Bird peppers turned up everywhere. You didn’t have to plant them; they took root wherever they were dropped off by their bird friends.  Small and innocuous looking, they were hot—none of the warning signs like scotch bonnets, whose succulent exteriors were a fire alarm. My younger brother, at four, was …

I have had a lifelong love for curries. When I was a child, my favourite meal was rice, dhal and curried chicken. It was actually the rice and the curried chicken, but we were made to have the dhal on it.  It felt like an interloper, interrupting the concentrated taste …

My first encounter with coffee left such a bitter taste that I silently swore I would never have it again. I must have been about eight or nine, and it was one of those rare occasions when we were left at home unsupervised.  It wasn’t that I had any particular …

For decades, the approach and departure of festive occasions—Carnival, Independence Day, Divali, Christmas, Old Year’s Night—have elicited desperate missives.  Complaints about unbearable levels of noise from unrelenting sound systems and fireworks have poured out to the impervious Environmental Management Authority (EMA). Nothing’s changed. On its website, the EMA describes four …

True story: ‘In 1919—over 80 years after Emancipation—a Trinidadian petitioned the King for compensation for 31 freed persons previously owned by his grandfather, which he claimed had never been paid.’ It’s one of the astonishing tales recounted by Professor Emerita Bridget Brereton in her newly released book, History Matters: Selected …

After a time, poor service wears you down—lowers your expectations to the point where you feel special when you actually succeed in completing a transaction, or most of the processes get by smoothly.  This is my lucky day, you murmur happily, just because it took only one hour to pay …

I see you write about me again, she said, laughing. Mystified, as she was not present in my mind as I wrote my last column, I asked what she meant. She was referring to the people who bottled everything inside and the unexpected eruptions that come from what might seem slight …

It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the barrage of brutality. How many times in recent days have I felt my stomach churn because of the news bombarding us?  Rage is roaring through our space, so unfettered that we can’t help but feel that, here and now, all fall down. …