Brother Hinds in the Basin
by Brandon Mc Ivor

The first Haiku I heard was composed by Brother Hinds, a hermetic, but not unfriendly rastafarian who resided in Blue Basin Springs, Diego Martin.

I had met him only once, but I always remember: he had his dreadlocks wrapped around his head like a turban, and there was a sweet, peaty smell about him, like honey from a wild beehive. I was exploring the forest around the waterfall and had come across Brother Hinds sitting on the rotting trunk of a fallen sapodilla tree. He was seated perfectly upright, but his eyes were closed and his face was vacant, as if he were asleep.

My mother, when I had asked her what she was most afraid of one day, had answered  without hesitation or irony: “Rastas.” But Brother Hinds did not seem very scary at all. I backed away from him, not because I was afraid, but because he seemed to be in deep concentration and I did not want to bother him.

As I took the first step backwards, however, he said:

“Come sit here on this log with me.”

So I did. Brother Hinds had not opened his eyes, and it did not seem as if he were  going to say anything else, so I asked him:

“What we doing?"

He answered, “Sitting.”

“You come to see the waterfall?”

“No.”

“You trying to concentrate or something?”

“No.”

“Why you here then?”

“There is no reason,” he said.

*

I did not know what else to say, so I just sat there on the rotting tree trunk, kicking my feet and looking about. There were some squashed and half eaten sapodilla fruits scattered around that were coated with a grainy crust of hardened syrup. There were also some tiny sapodilla plants shooting out of the ground, but they had only sprouted because of the freak rainstorm some weeks earlier. Now they were drooping, all but dead, because of the heat.

Then, Brother Hinds told me to listen, and he recited this poem:

     Dry season drought--
     The spines on the stinging nettle
     Are withering.

He spoke slowly, and his voice was very smooth.

“That is a haiku,” he said.

If he hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have known. I was confused, I’ll admit, as to why he was telling me about the nettles—especially since he had sounded sad that they were wilting. I had been stung many times by the nettles, and the less of them the better, I thought.

But I liked the way he talked, deliberately and pausing mid-sentence, so I told him:

“Tell me another.”

He responded with this:

     Spider web on a dry waterfall--
     Will its eggs hatch
     Before the rains?

I did not know what it was about them, but at that moment, I wanted nothing more than to stay on that rotting sapodilla trunk with Brother Hinds and listen to his haikus.

I asked him, “What is a ‘haiku?”

He responded, “It is a Japanese poem about nature. You know who is Basho?”

“No.”

“Basho was the best at writing haikus. He was an ascetic, just like me.”

“How you mean ‘ascetic?’”

“I mean he didn’t have plenty, but he was happy.”

“Like he was poor?”

Brother Hinds smiled.

“I'll tell you what,” he said, “Why you don’t read this?”

He reached into a knitted knapsack that was lying on the ground and pulled out a wrinkled softcover. It was covered over with brown paper, but it was peeling in places. On the front, written in pencil, were the words, “Narrow Road to The Deep North.”

“That is a book by Basho,” said Brother Hinds, “He went on a journey all over Japan, looking at nature and writing poems. If I was born long ago, I would have do that too, but back in Africa.”

“And I can borrow it?”

“Yes.”

“You don't need it? To help you write haiku?”

“I leaving Blue Basin to see the rest of Trinidad. I travelling light.” 

I took the book from him, and flipped through. The pages were a spotty yellow, and there was a paper ledger glued to the inner side of the back cover. The ledger was filled with names and dates, and the last entry read, “21/4/85—Kenneth Hinds,” which is how I came to call him “Brother Hinds.”

*

I read the book slowly over the rest of the dry season. Some parts were too difficult to understand, with a lot of Japanese place names, but other parts were plainly written, and I liked reading them very much. Occasionally, there would be poems interspersed with the text, and I would dogear and revisit them, thinking about Brother Hinds when I did.
 
There was one character in the book called Sora who always stood out to me. Not much was written about him, but he had been with Basho for almost his entire journey. Sometimes, I would reread the haikus, and I would be filled with admiration for Basho, the master, only to find the addendum: ‘written by Sora.’

This gave me ambition to write my own haikus and to follow Brother Hinds on his journeys, but I never saw him again. Still, I thought about him frequently, even much later in my life, and I would wonder how far along he had gotten in his pilgrimage. During the quiet moments in my life, I recalled the two haikus he had told me, and I was taken back to that place in the Basin, sitting on the rotting sapodilla trunk and swinging my feet with Brother Hinds.