Estate notes, Port of Spain

The first thing I remember about Paramin is the fog. Not fog the way people describe it in English novels, but a hill-country cloud that sits on the cocoa like a weight. My father drove us up there to visit a man named Ramkissoon who ran a family estate the old way. Wet fermentation. Wooden boxes. Beans spread to dry on a concrete barbecue slab. I spent twenty-two years as a columnist for the *Trinidad Guardian*. The column was 'Turning the Page', back of the Arts section, every Saturday. You learn how to tell a story in 700 words, and what gets left out. Toward the end I was less sure. I left in 2019. The novel is about cocoa and also about memory. A cocoa estate carries everything the country has been: Amerindian land, African labour, East Indian indenture, independence, the oil boom that made agriculture look beside the point. My protagonist is Celestine Marcano, sixty-three, returning to an estate in Brasso Seco to settle her mother's affairs. She finds her mother's correspondence from the 1970s: letters about a man who worked the estate when the cocoa price collapsed and everybody left. Those letters are the reason the book is difficult to write. I work on it mornings before the heat gets serious. A cup of cocoa tea at six. I post notes here. Not the chapters. The book will tell me when I'm done.