Under the Streetlight in Enmore

Nov 10, 2025 Letters

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Dear Editor,

The streetlight on Friendship Road flickered, as it always did after the rains. A taxi rattled past, carrying a family home from Georgetown, and the tires hummed against the new asphalt, a sound that mingled with the crickets in the garden behind the old sugar estate wall. Children ran barefoot on the newly paved sidewalks, laughing over a cricket ball made of rubber, while their mothers called from doorways, balancing impatience and sari-clad dignity.

Rohan paused at the corner shop, listening to the radio, which was airing an old Mohammed Rafi tune. He had grown up here, but he returned from the city only recently, after ten years of university and a stint in business. The world had changed. Magnificent houses have cropped up where cane fields had once laid, cafes glowed where the market stalls used to stand, and yet, underneath the transformation, the rhythms of the town persisted, like roots insisting on their place beneath concrete.

An older man sat on the bench outside the shop, peeling sugarcane. He glanced at Rohan and offered a nod, as though recognizing someone who had always belonged even when he had left. The man’s hands moved with the economy of habit, splitting the stalks and breaking them into chewable lengths.

“Cane tastes different after it’s burned,” he said, without expecting an answer. Rohan nodded anyway, because he knew it did. It carried the taste of memory, of his grandmother bending over the hearth, of festivals celebrated quietly, without parades or notice, and of mornings when schoolbooks and prayers collided in the same breath.

Across the street, the Afro-Guyanese children played a game of tag. Their shouts punctuated the evening like exclamation marks, asserting their joy, their space, their voice. Rohan watched them for a moment, the way a painter might watch the edges of a canvas.

He recalled his own childhood, how he had learned to speak the language of two worlds: the one that moved fast and demanded achievement, and the one that lingered in scent, in song, in the slow geometry of village life. He had never felt excluded, yet he knew that in certain narratives — newspapers, schoolbooks, tourist brochures — that world was often summarized in the briefest of footnotes: Diwali, curry, a temple in the distance.

A woman came out of the shop, carrying a basket of roti and fried fish. She waved at the children, who scattered for a moment, then returned to their game. Her sari was the colour of mango flesh, brilliant against the twilight, and her presence was ordinary, commanding, unquestioned. She carried with her the authority of everyday life, the kind that is built not in speeches but in repetition, in feeding the town, in ensuring the pulse continues.

Rohan walked on, past the modern clinic with its solar panels, past the small bank that had once been a warehouse, past the cafés where young professionals in brand-named t-shirts and jeans sipped coffee and argued about politics and cricket.

The town had grown into a suburban sprawl, yet the old estate walls remained, a silent witness to the history that had shaped him, his parents, and their parents before them. These walls had been built for control, for measurement, for labour. Today, they still marked territory, but in their shadows, lives had expanded, multiplied, found music and philosophy, and made homes that no one could erase.

The streetlight steadied. A bus came down Friendship Road, slow and rattling, and Rohan caught sight of a banner announcing a cultural festival in the town square. The organizers had included the usual attractions: steelpan bands, dances, and a selection of Indo-Guyanese cuisine.

But Rohan knew the invisible rhythm beneath the surface: the daily devotion of teachers, shopkeepers, artisans, and families whose work, stories, and laughter constituted the heartbeat of Enmore itself. It was not for tourists or photographers, not for acclaim or politics. It simply existed.

He thought of the word “representation,” though he did not need to. It was already happening, quietly, insistently, in every shop, every school, every cricket pitch, every home where people lived their histories without needing to be labeled or justified. The town, in all its contradictions, Afro-Guyanese joy, Indo-Guyanese diligence, the new suburban veneer, was itself a story, one that required no permission to exist.

Rohan paused again at the corner where the sugarcane had been peeled. The older man had gone inside, but the smell lingered. A boy hit the ball toward him, and without thinking, he returned it. In that small exchange, a continuum was maintained: memory, presence, and the everyday authority of life itself. The city, the country, the history of migration, labour, and adaptation – it all persisted, in the quotidian, the unrecorded, the visible only to those who watched.

The streetlight flickered once more, and Rohan smiled. He did not need to speak of belonging, or to ask for a place in the story. The story was already there, written in the streets, the children, the smells, the buildings, the laughter. The mango tree — if it had been here — could have leaned toward the light as it always did. But even without it, Enmore’s light endured.

Respectfully,
Dr. Walter H. Persaud

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• cricket ball, in Enmore, Streetlight, Walter H. Persaud

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