ZORIDA'S DREAM

excerpt from TRINIDAD, WEST INDIES, REMBRANCES(Aug 31, 2010)

After several weeks of adjusting to Trinidad and evaluating where to live I decided to move to the southern part of the island, to Bamboo Village, near San Fernando.  I found a real estate agent.   He was Britiah and tried to show me expensive apartments in the white section of the island.  I wanted to live in a Trinidadian environment, not an Americanized version.  He finally found an affordable apartment above a car upholstery shop, overlooking the square of this very small, undeveloped village.

The day we moved in, the owner of the shop came to visit.  He was East Indian Hindu, quite friendly and talkative.  He asked me if I would meet and talk to his wife, Zorida, who was separated from him.  He said he felt that she would be so fascinated with an American neighbor she might come back to him just to visit with me.

The next day she came to visit.  She was small, lovely and very shy.  We seemed to communicate on a personal level very quickly.  It was as if she had recognized me as someone she could trust.  I found out as she proceeded to tell me about her year long, recurring dreams, that her recognition of me was much more startling.  She said I was in her dream.  In this dream she was in a forest full of trees and shrubs.  The limbs of the trees attacked her and the shrubs scraped and bruised her legs.  As she looked up she saw an elderly man in a long white robe with a white turban on his head and a white beard.  He was floating above the trees chanting a prayer in a language she did not understand.  She tried to repeat his prayer in his language and when she did she would rise above the trees.  The trees and shrubs could no longer harm her.  Then she would come out into a clearing and I would be there, take her hand and tell her fortune.  I would say the same thing in every dream. "you have had 3/4 of your troubles and only 1/4 to go".

My immediate thought when she described the elderly man was of Abdu'l-Baha, the son of the prophet founder of the Baha'i Faith. I had a picture of him in one of my Baha'i books and showed it to her.  She said "that's him! that's him!  The man in my dreams!  Who is he?"  I had a rare tape in my possession which was given to me by the Persian who taught me about the Baha'i Faith.  It was  a tape of an old recording of Abdu'l-Baha chanting a prayer when he was visitng America in 1912.  She got even more excited and exclaimed, "that's the prayer!"  She begged me to tell her more and wanted to become a Baha'i that afternoon.

When Zorida told her husband about her decision he became very angry.   He was a Hindu, she had been a Moslem and he wanted her to become a Hindu.  Zorida and I talked many afternoons together.  She told me of the abuse she had suffered from him over the years.  He drank and then beat her.  She had several miscarriages because of this and was hospitalized several time dues to the severity of the beatings.

I believe that meeting Zorida was the "real" reason I wound up in Bamboo Village, Trinidad.