My name is Mr Endar Deosingh and I dehydrate calaloo.
My first name is E-n-d-a-r, not I-n-dar. That’s a specialty: they make one like that and, after, the mould was broken. My wife Chitra was a Deonarine formerly. We from Nelson Road, Freeport.
I reside Freeport all my life. And I don’t think I going anywhere else in the future. Born and grow up with grandparents and so on. I have one boy and one girl. Still under the same roof with me in Freeport. They not married yet, so no grands yet.
I come from the old school: pitching marble; tying trap in the savannah for fellas to fall down. Breaking from school and hiding in the gru-gru patch. That’s me there.
We pioneered the junior sec system in Freeport. A system is just as good as the people who implement it. But, somewhere along the line, the junior sec system became stigmatised. I consider I came from a prestige school: I am prestigious all the way. Who feeling otherwise, too bad for them.
I’m Hindu by faith.
They say that, when you getting bald in front, you have plenty money. And when it going right to the back like mine, you feel you have plenty money.
When it have prayers, that is curry to the max!
Each family will have their little sessions and we go across. Then they come by us. Then we go by the next one. Is too numerous family to mention. And people who live close by, even if they not immediate, they in the fold, too. So that is how the thing operate.
I am not a cookist. I’s a eatist! I’m vegetarian but I like all foods.
California has legalised marijuana and they are selling it in tablet form and they have a problem: they find they’re getting exceptionally long lines at the pharmacies!
The longer you live, the shorter life gets.
My father was a cane farmer. Drink a lot of booze. I used to drink but not scotch: Forres Park (puncheon rum) or nothing, boy: pure super! The acid test was to light it on the counter: if it ain’t light, is, hey, barman, what you mixing here? You start to cuss! But I let go drinking ‘bout 20 years now.
If you don’t live with some of the moments of your past, then you is a nothing. You will still have to retool and relearn. Right now, you are a product of your past. Hundreds of years walking to this moment.
Sad to say, it have a lot of politics in West Indies cricket. The Australian team doing yoga. The West Indian team running down hos.
It ent look so but I’m a primary school teacher. I teach physical education to the kids. Chaguanas Primary School is one of the best in the island, the onliest school that got one, two, three [in the SEA exam] three years aback. The teacher responsible, Ms Leela Kissoon, was one of my classmate in Teacher’s College.
We have been dehydrating calaloo for the last three-and-a-half, four years but we didn’t start dry so. Our original startup was karaile kuchela, mango kuchela, pickled eggplant. We had bodi, pickled chicken and fish but we eliminated all of them except tamarind sauce. The market just not ready for them thing yet. You just can’t keep spending money: my pocket have a bottom. And a hole, too!
My wife Chitra is the brainchild behind it. She do all the fancy work. I am more of the “Go-and-get-this-or-that” person.
We chose calaloo because is indigenous and plentiful year-round. I could FedEx a ten-pack now-for-now. With the real bush, who going to pay for that weight?
The best thing about dehydrating calaloo is it is a new concept. There’s no bad side but it have some down sides, like when you have to source material, prices could fluctuate.
A Trini is somebody like me, who have a deep sense of pride towards his Mother Country. If you are a Trini and you adopting some other foreign cultures, we go sign your papers and ship you out.
I am a West Indian: an East Indian born in the West Indies is a West Indian. We take the best part of our East Indian lineage but I don’t think there is anything in India I would really want. I can’t trade my homeland for nowhere else. Trinidad and Tobago is my Mother Country. And don’t put no hyphen.