MANY WAYS TO
PRESERVE A HOUSE
Judy Raymond
Sunday Guardian
April 16, 2000
Page 22
The
Lion House of Chaguanas was immortalized on paper in VS Naipaul's
A House for Mr. Biswas, and now the building itself has been
given a new lease on life. The house
on Main Street, Chaguanas, the ancestral home of the Capildeo family, has
been restored by Suren Capildeo, Naipaul's cousin.
The
house is also preserved in Adrian Camps-Campin's new painting. Camps-Campins specialises in painting local
historical landmarks, and publishes prints of his works on greetings cards,
which include a short history of the building r site and the people and events
associated with it.
The
Lion House is renamed "Hanuman House" in Naipaul's great novel. "Among the tumbledown timber-and-corrugated
iron buildings in the High Street at Arwacas, Hanuman House looked like an
alien white fortress," he wrote.
The
house was built by Naipaul's maternal grandfather, Pundit Capildeo, who arrived
in Trinidad, aged 21, as an indentured labourer on board the Hereford in
1894. He came from Gorakhpur in Uttar
Pradesh, and his destination was Woodford Lodge estate, Chaguanas.
Within
months of his arrival, it was arranged that he should marry the Trinidad-born
Soogee Gobin, whose family was well established in the area. The Gobins, who owned a shop, paid off
Capildeo's bond and as a wedding gift they gave the young couple the land on
which the Lion House stands. Soogee ran
a store there while her husband carried out his priestly duties, and in 1923 they
began to build the Lion House.
Built
in the north Indian style, the trapezoid-shaped house is unique in local
architecture. It has walls almost a
foot thick, and Pundit Capildeo is said to have made with his own hands all the
bricks used in its construction. The
house contains lot of decorative plasterwork, with figures and patterns
embossed on or etched into the walls, and several rooms feature mirror work.
The
store occupied the ground floor of the four-storey building, and the family
lived above it. The third floor is
taken up by a prayer room, and from the flat roof there is a panoramic view
of the canefields of the Caroni plains and the hills of he Central Range. The lions that gave the house its name stand
at each end of the wall around the first-floor gallery.
Vidia
Naipaul was born here in 1932 to Pundit Capildeo's daughter Droapatie and her
husband Seepersad Naipaul, but he never knew his grandfather. Pundit Capildeo died in 1926 while on his
fourth visit to India.
His
widow, Soogee, became the head of the family.
A strong-minded woman, she had over-ruled her husband's reluctance to
send their children to school, which he regarded as a corrupting Christianising
influence. Thanks to Soogee, even the
girls attended school and learned to speak, read and write English.
Soogee
bought properties in Woodbrook and travelled to Port of Spain every week to
take care of her son, Rudranath, who was to become a university lecturer and
politician, while he attended Queen's Royal College.
It was
for the sake of access to better schools that in 1940 Soogee moved the whole
family to Port of Spain. After that,
the Lion House was rented out or stood vacant, and fell into disrepair. When eventually it was renovated, it was with
no respect for its original style and structure. In 1998, however Suren Capildeo, the son of Soogee and Pundit
Capildeo's son, Simbhoonath, has repainted it white and restored the grandeur
of the Lion House, which stands as a monument to the indentured Indian
labourers.