Kevin Jared Hosein biography

Interview

An author's note by Kevin Jared Hosein about his first novel, Hungry Ghosts, set in the Caribbean in the 1940s

My favourite Caribbean stories aren't written on the page. They were those told by relatives and friends and strangers. Animated reflections such as these have always been part of Trinidad and Tobago's multicultural panorama—its anecdotal tapestry. Ghost stories and dark domestic parables and calcified wisdoms rooted in the bedrock of an island nation. I was always surrounded by storytellers—and my novel, Hungry Ghosts, is a deep breath held long in this tradition.

Set in the dusky rural past of the 1940s, it follows two households—the Saroops, living in a dilapidated, leaky-roofed barrack; and the Changoors, in the grand whisper-filled manor surrounded by lush acreage. When Mr. Changoor suddenly vanishes, Mrs. Changoor hires Mr. Saroop to guard the house. And here we see her adoration for him—and his for her lifestyle. Both families are subjects of hereditary pain, and both clash in a searingly slow but ruinous manner. Much focus is given to the land itself—the splendour of the Caribbean soundscape and ecology at a time when Trinidad was so old, yet so much on the cusp of reincarnation—on the cusp of post-colonial. This was when the American navy was still stationed at the peninsula. When ...