Ira Mathur

Sunday offering on Wednesday- Republic Day T&T Guardian Yale University 🌺🇹🇹♥️

To walk here with Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Trinidad-born poet and 2025 Windham–Campbell laureate, was to feel a double incongruity. Gargoyles watched from parapets built to echo Oxford and Cambridge, but that night they looked down on a voice shaped in Port of Spain’s dusk, steeped in Caribbean cadences, honed in Old Norse halls. Capildeo moved through the quadrangles gently but assuredly, as if testing each echo — a twin island voice resounding in one of the world’s grand literary arenas. …
For Anthony Vahni Capildeo, a
poet who had long written doggedly — often against the chill of English and Scottish winters, often in difficult personal circumstances, often quite alone, always swimming upstream — such recognition may have felt less like a coronation than a reprieve: a moment of being visibly loved for their work.

Capildeo’s path to this moment had been anything but direct. Born in Port of Spain in 1973, they studied English at Christ Church, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, before completing a doctorate in Old Norse literature …Capildeo’s poetry, like their spiritual life, is grounded in silence — not as absence, but as attentive fullness. “A formation in prayer (Roman Catholic and formerly Hindu), and in philology,” they told The Yale Review, shaped their habits of “attention, concentration, self-emptying, and openness.”

A Saturday offering 🙏🏾

On June 14, I returned to Bishop’s High School in Tobago to moderate a landmark leadership forum with Dr Keith Rowley, Chief Secretary Farley Augustine, Chief Justice Ivor Archie, and Bishop Claude Berkley—four sons of the island who came back to their alma mater for the school’s centennial.

When I was ten, I landed on an island—with sea breeze, chenet trees, guava trees, and a people who folded my mother Zia, my father Mahendra, an engineer in the Indian army contracted to build the Claude Noel Highway—into their lives as if we had always belonged. My brother Varun, my sister Rashmi, and I became the children of Tobago.
My mother and I were walking up the hill to the fort where we lived next to the museum when a kind lady stopped and gave my mother, wearing a sari and carrying an umbrella, a glass of water. She was the mother of A.N.R. Robinson and became my second grandmother.
Mrs Wheeler, who lived in the museum next to us on the fort, became a second mother, teaching me how to cook macaroni, stewed chicken and plums; her son, now Dr Victor Wheeler, became my brother’s brother. The girls, Alana and Gillian, became our sisters.
I learned to use a cutlass, kill and clean crab, churn ice cream by hand. I played hockey on sunbaked fields. We go-carted down the fort on pieces of cardboard. We picked guavas behind the school, jumped into the sea from the jetty at Pigeon Point on moonlit nights, walked along cocoa estates and along the beach. The cannons became my way of seeing the wider world—which later always seemed unfinished without our sea, our bougainvillaea, our bright skies, and golden sunsets.
I became a Bishop’s girl—its classrooms, its fields, its rituals. Much of who I am began here.
Two years ago, when I wrote my memoir, Love The Dark Days I returned to say thanks to my teachers.

Last week, I returned again—not just as a writer and alumna—but as moderator of the Men in Leadership Forum, held at Mt Marie, Scarborough.

I was thinking of my late father, Mahendra Nath Mathur, who built the Claude Noel Highway in Tobago. An army man, he often said, peace is easy—if men shed their egos and put the people first. Remembering that, I asked Dr Rowley and Mr Augustine what they admired in each other despite their political rivalry. Like true Tobagonians, they rose to the occasion with generosity and grace.

That moment was captured in national press coverage, including these Newsday articles:

https://newsday.co.tt/2025/06/17/rowley-anger-in-society-being-fuelled-by-entitlement/

https://newsday.co.tt/2025/06/15/chief-sec-rowley-reveal-childhood-trauma-suspension-at-bishops-forum/

📹 Watch the full forum here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/DsUOaHq7Ej0?si=nfG99tqoL31bYcr4

Tobago has changed. So have we all. But this place—this school, this island—remains a kind of anchor in the drift of things.