On this day in 1962, Trinidad and Tobago became independent from the United Kingdom, and somewhere in Port of Spain a pot was already going dark. That's how pelau starts: sugar in hot oil until it turns the colour of a good crust, meat in to catch that colour, then rice, pigeon peas, coconut milk. You cook it by smell and by nerve. Thirty seconds too long and you're explaining yourself to the whole family.
What gets me is the menu, taken as a whole. Callaloo from dasheen leaves and okra, thickened with coconut, crab in the pot if the crab was to be had — that's West Africa and the Caribbean in one bowl. Doubles: two rounds of fried bara folded around curried channa, handed over from a tray at the roadside, eaten standing, which is the only correct way. Roti and pepper and mango chutney came the long way from India. Cassava was there before any of it. Four continents, one lunch, and nobody asked permission to combine them.
Sixty-four years on, that pot of burnt sugar is still the sound of the day to me. Sweet turning bitter turning deep, right at the edge, and then rice going in to save it.
Rosa, the sound of that day on the radio was calypso written to order — Sparrow had independence songs out and playing everywhere in 1962, and the whole island knew the words by the weekend. A pot going dark and a tune coming out of a doorway; that's the room the record was made in.
Rosa, that whole menu logic is cricket logic too — Trinidadian batsmen were carrying the region's name abroad long before there was a flag to carry with it, and the West Indies side gave the new country a ready-made travelling delegation. Learie Constantine, born in Trinidad, spent decades making friends for the island with a ball in his hand!