“I eh know how much years I have. I never go to school to read and write and count. But I know how to work.”
At 105, Ramrajie Ramsawak—the daughter of a “jahaji”, the term used for the shipmates who began arriving in Trinidad and Tobago from India in the 1830s under the system of Indian indentureship—speaks with a strong voice and holds firm, forceful opinions.
A Debe resident, Ramsawak has lived there for many years and continues to work hard, going into her garden daily, planting eddoes and cassava, picking bhagi and selling her produce in the Southern Wholesale Market in Debe.
“My father came from India as a small child,” Ramsawak says. “They put a ticket in his hand, and he came. At that time people were being held and sent here.”
As one of the older children in her family, when Ramsawak’s mother died of typhoid fever, she had to take on responsibilities early on. During those early years, her family lived in Barrackpore, and she started working.
“School? I doh know nothing about school, beti,” she says endearingly. “I know how to cook and cut grass from cattle and go in the garden (farm).”
What does a day in the life of a 105-year-old woman look like? Considering that Ramsawak is no ordinary centenarian, hers is filled with activity.
“When 12 night or 1 (o’clock) come, I go downstairs and sit down in the hammock waiting for the van to pass to take me to market. I don’t want to be sleeping, and nobody bouff me,” she laughs.
After her early rising, she takes her bundles of bhagi, bodi and ochro and sets up shop in her market stall–as the oldest active market vendor there.
Going to the market has been a feature of her life since she was in her twenties, and she used to be known as the “milk lady” in the San Fernando market, where she sold dahee, butter, milk and eventually roti to make money.
Fiercely independent even from then, she says, “I didn’t used to give my husband my money I make. I make plenty more than he because he was lazy. I heap up my money to buy clothes and soap for me and my children.”
Married at 12 years old to Ramsawak Mahase, Ramrajie describes her now late husband as a “sagaboy”, who worked in the cane factory while she worked out in the canefields in South.
At that time, women were often the water carriers in the cane field, but according to Ramsawak, “the money was too little”, so she told her husband to buy a “gilpin” (cutlass) for her to make $1.50 cutting cane instead of 30 cents carrying water.
When she started having children–she had 10 in total, five boys and five girls–she would put the babies in a cardboard box and take them into the fields with her while she cut cane. As the children grew, however, she insisted that instead of working in the fields, the children should go to school and use her money to buy clothes for them to go to school.
Remembering her own childhood, Ramsawak said she never had clothes. “We used to have one dress and wash it and then dry it on the roti tawa.”
Although she is still able to walk and talk confidently, one thing Ramsawak can no longer do is dance. Which she loved. She remembers being young and going to “maticoor” (the night before a Hindu wedding) and feverishly dancing and “jumping up”.
While she enjoyed herself, her husband would be hiding in the canefields watching her disapprovingly, and he would beat her when she returned home. One day after one of those beatings, Ramsawak’s brother intervened and told one of her daughters-in-law living in her house to pack up her things and he came to take her away.
“My husband came looking for me and tell my brother she’s a bad woman who does dance,” Ramsawak remembers.
“My brother told him he found me a rich man, and my husband say he would go hang himself. My brother sent him away.” Six months later, with her children in mind, she returned home.
Her husband died about 50 years ago. Ramsawak recalled that he was not yet 60 as he had not started receiving pension when he died. She never remarried. “I doh want no old man,” she cackles, “and I doh want no man checking on me”. She continues to live alone, managing her own business.
What she does want, however, is a full-time job. Ramsawak said she dislikes being idle, and although she has her garden to tend to, she wants “five days hard work, and I will work the whole day and cook whole night”. Using that money, she plans to have prayers at her house and invite all those who want to come and enjoy her sweet han’.
Cooking has been a constant in her life. “I didn’t marry to have a man; I married to cook and wash for my mother-in-law,” she says, describing the norm in East Indian families at that time, where the daughter-in-law would take over primary domestic responsibilities in the husband’s family home.
When asked what’s the best meal she cooks, she finds it hard to choose but says, “When I cook curry, dhal, rice, sweet roti and kachowrie, the workman does come and lick it up.”
Since marrying her husband, she has been primarily vegetarian, as her husband did not eat meat and, in fact, beat her if he found out she was eating meat at her father’s house.
Ramsawak wants readers to know “this is not a worry story”, and although she never received an education or had a lot of money, she has had a good life (so far).
An avid traveller, she has visited India twice and also spent time in New York, Canada, and England—“to knock about in dem sweet places”.
When she was 102, one of her many granddaughters bought her a plane ticket to the US and she remembers how when she boarded the plane, news passed around the aircraft about her advanced age, and “the plane driver even let me hold the wheel of the plane”.
At 105 years young, Ramsawak has little advice for others but insisted that she has lived life with the principle “whatever will happen, will happen. Pray to God and work hard”.
Still in good health, only marginally slowed down by her “sick foot”, Ramsawak cast her vote in the last general election.
She believes that the key to her long life has been hard work in her garden, donating what she has to others, and praying.
