They wear their worth

There were no seats that afforded them to sit side by side, so, instead, they sat one behind the other and proceeded, presumably, to continue their conversation from before. One girl was fair, what we call red, and the other dark.

They were both quite young looking. I wouldn’t have put them past 19 if I was being generous. The girl with the dark complexion wore a pair of huge gold earrings in the shape of the letter K in her ears. She had a smaller one in her left nostril. Another huge K —also in gold — lay against the bony infrastructure of her chest. On the middle finger of her left hand she wore, I assumed, what had to be her entire name, fashioned in cursive gold.

The other girl was one better. She wore her entire name in her ears (confirmed when the other girl later called her by this name). It began at the lobe and worked its way up the pink curve of her ear. I thought it was one earring. But when the passenger next to her friend had left and she switched seats I realised that it was actually the individual letters of her name that hung, ponderously, from separate holes. Her fingers were less glorious, bearing only three thin gold rings with the simplest of designs. They could easily have cost less than $100 each.

They were speaking, I had deciphered, about the red girl’s daughter, and how difficult it was proving to source the amount of gold necessary for the jeweller, whose store they had come out from in Tunapuna, to make her a pair of gold earrings.

She had already decided against having the girl’s entire name done and had settled for just the M. The other girl helpfully called out the names of friends who had gold that she could buy but apparently she had explored those avenues already and they all had need for the gold themselves.

In fact, some of them wanted to buy her gold for pieces they wanted to create themselves. The jeweller was giving her a good price, less than $400 for labour if she supplied all her own gold. She didn’t know what to do but would come up with the gold somehow. They left the maxi in Trincity.

Last week in London I sat on a bus opposite a woman and her daughter. She too was young, in her early 20s.

She had the soft, slightly harassed look of young motherhood but was smiling beatifically at everyone. She had a long brown weave in her hair.

The child on her lap was perhaps four or five. Her hair was braided with the extensions that I’ve seen so many young, black girls sporting, even babies in prams whose scalps surely must be too tender for the hairstyle. This girl’s braids were long and straight and held in a ponytail high on the top of her head.

Around this little girl’s neck were two thick gold chains; the link on one was almost as wide as my little finger. They came down to below her ribs and from the end of one dangled a curious little doll-like figure.

Throughout the bus ride the young mother fingered the chains around the girl’s neck. Her daughter played with the pendant whose arms and legs had been fitted with some sort of hinge that allowed them to move.

The girl made golden doll run, then wave, all the while smiling up at the mother who smiled back at her, and everyone else on the bus with what I assumed to be pride and admiration.

Watching the mother and child on the bus, I remembered the two girls back in Trinidad.

One mother anxious and uncertain of the means of attaining her goal, the other self-satisfied over having already realised hers. Two different countries, two different parts of the world, yet similar values, both motivated by the desire to give their children external trappings of worth, to announce ostentatiously to the world that they were of value, because they were the possessors of valuable things.

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