Balwant’s experience of childhood has its songs of innocence and its darker struggles of experience. Before a fatal accident to his parents, he enjoys their loving warmth and a Twain-like world of pitching marbles, sucking stolen sugar cane, and riding a raft with the other sugar estate boys.
Sent to the house of his cruel aunt and inadequate uncle, Balwant learns about human frailties, but in the company of his sensitive cousin Savitri he experiences a deeper friendship that enables the pair to grow in integrity and maturity. Set in two villages in Trinidad, one in the flat sugar-growing area, the other on a cocoa estate in the hills, the novel powerfully evokes these two landscapes as the backdrop to this sensitive account of courage, sacrifice, friendship and the healing power of forgiveness. In connecting the coming of electricity and the return of the annual festival of Diwali, Vishnu Gosine, without any overt preaching, makes evident the continuing relevance of Hindu teachings on duty and forgiveness in the contemporary world.
This novel, by an author who is himself a secondary school teacher, is aimed at readers in the 11-14 age group.
Vishnu Gosine was born in Trinidad in 1946. In addition to The Coming of Lights he has published short stories in a number of journals and anthologies.
