When you look up at the creatures perched on top of the Lion House on the Chaguanas Main Road, you may wonder what they are, exactly. Are they really lions? Or are they monkeys? Or perhaps some half-remembered, hybrid mythological creatures?
The last may come closest to the truth: although they are meant to be lions–symbols of strength–every aspect of the Lion House (its real name is actually The Mansion of Bliss–Anand Bhavan) was conceived through the imagination of its builder, Pundit Capildeo, who was trying to recreate from his own memory the structures and symbols he associated with his own original homeland in Uttar Pradesh in India. He built the house himself, using clay bricks he made in his backyard. The construction process itself is a remarkable feat of will and hard work.
Pundit Capildeo (originally called Kapil) built the house to celebrate his ancestors in India as well as the position his Trinidad family had achieved in Chaguanas society, rising from very humble beginnings. Father Anthony de Verteuil in his book, East Indian Immigrants, describes the inspiration for the Mansion of Bliss as "...a city dwelling in the town of Gorakpur, in the county of the same name, from which Kapil had emigrated and in which his family had lived, for so many generations. Indeed, the architectural style of the building, like his family, went back centuries." He noted that the brutally stark pillars, the plain walls and the flat roof mirrored the early Gupta style of the fifth century AD.
Called Lion House by the public, the Capildeo home became a meeting place for Hindu travellers, and an early community centre for Chaguanas residents who would often relax or debate issues of the day there, according to the site www.thelionhouse.com. Ganja was sold and consumed there, quite peacefully and legally. Panchayats or village councils were held there, to resolve local disputes.
Today, the house stands as a memorial to the thousands of Hindu Indian immigrants who came to T&T over 100 years ago. It is a site of great heritage importance. And it is rotting away.
Pundit Capildeo (born 1873) originally left his home village of Mahadeva Dubey in 1894, and subsequently sailed to Trinidad, arriving here on the ship The Hereford on December 27, 1894, to work in the canefields as an indentured labourer.
"There were 597 persons who left on the Hereford in Calcutta; after three months, they landed in Trinidad, and on the voyage, 40 persons died," said Prof Brinsley Samaroo on a tour of the house last week.
Pundit Capildeo rose to become a businessman, landowner, canefarmer and pundit, who built his Mansion of Bliss in 1924-1926–30 years after first coming to the island.
In 1926, the year he finished building his house, he returned to India for a visit, where he died, leaving behind in Trinidad a close-knit family whose descendants would go on to achieve great things in academics, in the professions, and in literary arts.
Pundit Capildeo was the grandfather ofcelebrated writers VS Naipaul and Shiva Naipual, after their father Seepersad Naipaul married Pundit Capildeo's daughter Droapatie. VS Naipaul was born at the Mansion of Bliss in 1932; he never knew his grandfather, but seems to have inherited his drive and tenacity.
Pundit Capildeo may well be turning over in his grave at the present state of his once proud home. The Mansion of Bliss is haunted by dereliction; its mortar is crumbling, its wooden ceilings are slashed away in ragged parts, as if a bored vampire has been biting into the rotting wood. Pools of water cover part of one floor; some floorboards on an upper storey are precarious, bulging to reveal the floor above. But strangely, the narrow wooden staircase leading up to what was once the family prayer room remains intact. And there is still a great view of the hustle and bustle of Chaguanas from the top floor balcony, as well as a beautiful view of the hills.
Last Thursday, Prof Brinsley Samaroo led a group to tour the Mansion of Bliss, made famous by its evocative portrayal as Hanuman House in VS Naipaul's celebrated satirical 1961 fiction book A House for Mr Biswas, where the house is described as "an alien white fortress."
The tour was part of a three-day conference last week on the works of Seepersad Naipaul and his sons VS Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul, organised by the Friends of Mr Biswas in collaboration with the UWI Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies and The National Archives.
Prof Brinsley Samaroo was an able tour guide last week, explaining that the house reflected traditional Hindu?symbolism in its construction.
Hindu philosophy ascribes four stages to a man's existence: first, infancy and learning; secondly, the householder or family stage; thirdly, the spiritual stage when most people retire; and finally the sannyasin or acetic/recluse stage, when a person is preparing to meet his maker.
So the Lion House's ground floor reflects this order: the first floor was for children and public business, with a shop; the second floor was domestic and private, for family; and the third floor was the prayer or Pooja room. And there is a small, odd floor above this, very tiny, facing the open sky.
Last Thursday's tour was educational but dispiriting–like visiting the site of a house not so much celebrating the past, or even haunted by it, but instead, succumbing to state-sanctioned oblivion and collective cultural amnesia.
It is not that people do not care. The house was, in fact, once restored before: back in 1991 Surendranath Capildeo (VS Naipaul's cousin), who now owns the house, retained the services of Colin Laird Associates to restore it. Suren Capildeo himself paid for the restoration.
By 2001, those restorations were complete. The fact that the House of Bliss stands at all today is because of the dedicated work of architect Colin Laird and restorer Glen Espinet.
But since then, ongoing restoration has not happened, and the house is falling apart again.
