A spot of indigestion, anyone? Illustration Copyright © 2023 by Akaila Armstrong.
DAVID PLACED two small scoops of cou-cou on Tasha’s plate with two slices of sweet potato, some salt-fish gravy and cucumber salad. Then he dished out his portion and started to eat.
“This is proper, Mum.” David half-closed his eyes. Gracewin smiled and patted him on the hand. The cou-cou was mellow and swimming in the buttery-yellow salt-fish gravy. The fork sank through it like a hot knife through butter. The steamed fish looked like something that could be served at a Bajan buffet in a restaurant, with its lashings of white onion and the red cherry tomatoes that grew in her garden. There was no way she was wasting money buying things like herbs and tomatoes when you could grow them yourself. Provided that the monkeys, that were trying to take back the land, let you get any of the produce. Poor David. She felt so sorry for him sometimes, she thought as she searched his face. He looked happy but how happy could he really be, shacking up with a woman who probably didn’t even know how to boil water properly?
“Eat as much as you want, David. There’s lots more in the kitchen. You probably don’t get cou-cou too often.”
Gracewin took a quick look in Tasha’s direction, taking in her ridiculously long weave, long nails painted bright pink and smooth, well made-up dark face. Some of these young women in Barbados were just as strange as the ones she used to see in London. There was even one with blue streaks in her hair on the shuttle this afternoon. She cast another discreet look Tasha’s way. She just could not understand what a forty-year-old man like David saw in this thirty-one-year-old black Barbie doll, apart from the obvious. Tasha did not want to get married, David had told her. And neither did he. “But what will you do when you have children?” Gracewin had asked the question, honestly bewildered. Tasha did not want to have children, it appeared. At least not for a few years. And neither did David. They were too busy right now.
So many changes had taken place in Barbados since she and Anthony left here for England. Impressive wall structures had replaced many chattel houses, there were highways full of Japanese, Korean and European vehicles, village shops had been replaced by supermarket chains and malls. On the surface Barbados was almost unrecognizable, but it went deeper than that. Barbados didn’t even belong to Bajans, who no longer had a national bank and didn’t own most of the large businesses. It was true that people still exchanged niceties like “Good morning,” “Good afternoon” and “How are you?” but for the most part the new breed of Bajans was boorish and brutish. They seemed to prefer messaging on a mobile phone to carrying on an actual conversation. People easily cursed or acted aggressive over minor inconveniences. And the slow-paced island life was a thing of the past. Everyone was always in a hurry, always busy, although it was arguable that, compared with somewhere like Britain, they achieved a great deal more in terms of efficiency and service.
David was busy. He was an independent IT consultant and worked all hours of the day and night. Tasha, like many Bajan women nowadays, was always busy, but Gracewin was at a loss as to what they were busy doing. They never cooked and had all the modern conveniences in a house to help them wash and clean. They purchased almost every meal from the supermarket or a drive-thru. She saw them at lunchtime waiting in a long line for cooked food, even on Sundays if she went to pick up something after church. Few of them were wearing church clothes, so they could not use the excuse that they had spent the morning at church and did not have time to cook. They surely didn’t spend their time baking cakes because they bought those in the supermarket. Plain cake, chocolate cake, sweet bread, great cake. She had even read that fights sometimes broke out at Christmas over supermarket cakes but, thankfully, she had never witnessed one. You didn’t even have to bake a ham for Christmas either because nowadays you could buy those already baked from the supermarket. Disgraceful. Gracewin’s mother, who had made sure that each of her seven daughters knew how to cook every possible dish, would turn in her grave if she knew what a lazy lot Bajan women were nowadays. Gracewin had made sure that her daughters Grace and Linda were cooking at an early age.
“Tasha cooked cou-cou last week,” David announced. “Cou-cou and tuna. It tasted really good too.”
Gracewin swallowed her mouthful of cou-cou and salt-fish. She gave Tasha an assessing look and felt a pang of shame for having misjudged the young woman.
“I didn’t know you could cook cou-cou.” She smiled at Tasha. “I thought you young people weren’t into that sort of thing.”
“Well, it’s easy,” Tasha said. “I cook microwave cou-cou so it’s quick.”
Gracewin struggled to collect her thoughts. Even Anthony and Ralph were gobsmacked and had stopped eating to stare at Tasha. The silence stretched awkwardly until finally Ralph gathered his wits enough to speak with some degree of eloquence.
“Microwave cou-cou. Wow.”
“I could give you the recipe, Mrs. Brathwaite,” Tasha continued blithely. “You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between microwave cou-cou and regular cou-cou. And you don’t have to do all that turning and stirring.”
Gracewin felt a moment of pity for Tasha and the rest of the disposable generation. Fast food, fast lives and living in a world with smart phones and stupid people. How would these women ever get a man to marry them if they sold themselves so short by living with a man without a ring on their finger and cooking everything in a microwave? Tasha would probably put pumpkin and sweet potatoes in a blender to make conkies instead of using a grater and doing it properly the old-fashioned way. Then she would wrap the conkies in foil instead of banana leaves because she was too busy and tired.
