My younger brother and I were bored. We had come from Port of Spain, which is the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. We had been whisked away from our toys, our books, our TV shows, to the village of California, in Central Trinidad, for a family wedding. The name California sounded glamorous at first; in my nine-year-old imagination, I thought I would be seeing mansions and expensive cars.

Instead, we sat at the edge of a dirt driveway which stretched out from Great Uncle Nello’s purple two-bedroom house. It was one of the more upscale houses in California, with white security bars over the window and a grey sheet metal roof instead of thatch. The car and the jeep in the driveway were dusty and scratched and dented.

The sun was high overhead in a cloudless sky. Port of Spain was hot, but the heat was nothing compared to the oven of Central Trinidad. The land surrounding California was flat: ideal for planting sugar cane. There were no hills, no valleys, no rivers to take the edge off the heat.

Men from the village were constructing the wedding tent. They lashed fresh green bamboo poles to the window bars on the outer wall of the house, building into the grass lot next to it. The men cut the bamboo lengths with machetes, sweat pouring down their hairy bare brown chests. They worked silently, and the rhythm of the metal blade against cracking bamboo was their conversation.

I heard the clanging of pots and metal tawas. Earlier, Uncle Nello had shown us his precious tawah. Nello took pride in his cooking skill and his tawah—a circular cast metal pan with no side used to make the buss-up shot. The tawah was gigantic, bigger than me with my arms stretched out. It could not fit on a regular stove, so Nello had set up an outdoor kitchen in the back yard. The giant tawah rested over an open flame cradle in a mud stove. He put flatbread dough on the tawah and turned in around bit by bit to cook it evenly.

He greased the bread regularly with a huge brush dipped in yellow liquid. “You know the secret to the perfect buss-up-shot?” he asked conspiratorially.

We knew the answer from the commercials on television. “All natural Anchor Cowbrand ghee, of course,” we chanted like the model on TV.

“No,” he said scornfully, “my buss-up-shot is famous because I use melted butter. But don’t tell anyone! It is our secret.”

He flipped the giant bread over and greased it again with the brush. The bread was browning and bubbling and blistering. Another dousing of butter and he swished the bread, still flaky and warm into a tablecloth. He clapped the cloth vigorously and “buss it up” until the bread was like strips of a distressed cotton shirt. He took two pieces out and gave them to us to sample.

“You see what I mean? Best buss-up-shot in Trinidad! Now, go in front to play. My son who getting married coming any time now and I have plenty more to make.”

And this was how we found ourselves in the front yard. There was nothing interesting except the prayer flags on the small patch of grass in front. The flags were faded red and orange pennants attached to dry brown bamboo erected from past prayer ceremonies. The pennants hung listlessly in the hot air. We saw pebbles close to the edge of the road. I held a smooth one between my thumb and my forefinger and tried to launch it like a marble, but it skittered unpredictably to the right. My brother, in the meantime, had collected a handful and piled them on the driveway.

“Let’s make Mount Everest!” he shouted.

“Bigger than Mount Everest!” I challenged. We continued the hunt for pebbles and added to the mound.

A boy who seemed to be our age edged toward us. His legs were skinny and dusty and he wore no shoes. He had very big eyes and untidy hair. His shorts were too big for him, and his blue T-shirt had holes in it. He joined us in the mountain-building expedition, but we said nothing to him and he said nothing to us. I thought as the local village person, he should talk first. But maybe he thought because we were the city kids, we should break the ice. We didn’t know how things worked here. So we stayed silent and built.

Great Uncle Nello’s sister Chan was helping him plan the wedding. She had a high-pitched voice and we could hear her clearly from the driveway even though she sat back on the front verandah. She talked non-stop in a mix of English and Hindi and it was all about the wedding.

“How much people coming to this wedding? I don’t have enough plates. Eh, you, yes, Mukesh,” she flagged down an unsuspecting victim who was working in the yard. “Go in the back and cut down banana leaves and then divide them into four pieces. Wash them down. People have to eat off of them. And do it properly—you have a reputation for being dutty at times.”