There’s a BC Pires in each of us
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
— Late Fragment by Raymond Carver from A New Path to the Waterfall, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.
Basil Carlos ‘BC’ Pires is in each of us. That was a comment by a reader online.
Writing an obituary about BC is impossible because everyone knew him differently, and everyone knew him. I can’t remember when I met BC because it feels like he was always there. I’ve had an unchanging image of him for decades as a permanently youngish cheeky intercontinental writer who threw over a life as a barrister, comfort of a family business, a man you could meet not just at the Pelican Inn in Trinidad but the Groucho club in London, or Harrys New York bar in Paris or a beach in Barbados.
A man who could talk the pants off women (that man loved women like nobody he had this way of lighting up before he even spoke to women, making you feel special and never threatened). A man who could name every obscure brilliant film in cinema history, every good inning in cricket from Trinidad to Australia, had writers he loved, understood difficult journalism, and wrote around complex and highly charged issues as easy as tossing omelettes with one hand.
Watching him grin and crinkle his eyes before his next bon mot, cigarette in hand, you got the feeling he was a man who chose to firetruck a life of privilege and comfort his family could have given him—for a life of writing —I was in awe of him in our Pelican days, this hard smoking, drinking, stocky, bordering on short, ole talking good looking man, who could disconcert anyone—as quick to laugh as he was to quip with a wit that moved so fast it was like watching a cutlass swing wild and free.
I made the mistake of telling him he was a great journalist, and he corrected me firmly, “writer” first. He had a bestseller in him. We don’t have that, but we have years of his bestseller work on his website, which I hope will be turned into a book. Like great thinkers, he saw the mud and horror around us, the lousy race politics, the rotting infrastructure, the crime and gangs, and its normalised collusion with the State but decided to focus on the beauty of our extraordinary citizens.
His columns gave the impression of a man who didn’t give a flying firetruck about the position, money, protocol, power, pomp, or ceremony, who said it as he saw it, an independent thinker with no agenda (perhaps being born into privilege, and eschewing it meant he literally didn’t want anything but to write and live his life with the people he loved). Still, his Trini to D Bone interviews showed he adored the people of this country.
He interviewed everyone from students, technicians, artists and musicians. He loved the extraordinary in the ordinary people because he felt it was authentic and his job to give them a voice. He was fighting on the side of the sound, honest citizen always. He viewed politicians and people in power with suspicion, hilarity and satire, calling out corruption, toadying, removing their masks without toadying to them, knowing that what goes up must come down. They would get old, ousted or found out.
BC may not have believed in God, but he lived as if he did. He saw and felt the fragility of the human being, the beauty and the horror, and the foolishness in proud, shallow, corrupt and pompous people. He believed in the truth, and it set him and us free over and over. He made us rethink ourselves every Friday, took us for a tumble in the mud, shook us out and said, I hope that made you think for yourself; I hope that took you out of your racial/social/economic prejudice and fight for an equal place.
He embodied the quintessence of the fourth estate. Yet BC had eyes that softened at strength, intelligence, grace and beauty, which I saw when I saw him with his wife, Carla. After his diagnosis on September 22, before his first major surgery, which he was sure would be curative, I cooked a decadent meal, which he ate with relish, saying his doctors told him to get in the calories. Despite his hope, I knew, given the path of this virulent cancer, and maybe because I had seen my brother walk it, that he would never be the same after the surgery.
To my surprise, he bonded with my mother with a love of PG Wodehouse’s books. I could never think of two less like-minded people. An old-world Muslim woman and BC laughing in perfect accord over a twee Englishman’s humour. My father asked him to sit and meditate with us, and he did. He did respect and not dogma. He was drawn to people who lived on the edge of countries, coming from elsewhere, making this place a home. He didn’t have a ‘type’ of person. Anyone could be his person if they struck an answering chord in him. He was that open.
When I last saw BC a month back, he called and asked if I felt like driving to Mount Hope. Not to the hospital, he added, but to the bes’ watermelon there. Half an hour later, he texted that he was too tired to go. So I went to his mother’s home, where he was staying, bearing a watermelon. He was skin and bones but still very much himself, full of hope, with plans of going to London in October. For the first time in his life, hope and not truth kept him alive. That ordinary afternoon with a cooling breeze in dancing sunlight was a gift. We sat in the shade on a beautiful hot hot afternoon. He told us about his boyhood days in Sydenham Avenue, where he and some older boys would crawl in the drain from one side of the road to another, about getting stuck there once and developing claustrophobia after that.
He spoke of his father and how he was afraid he would cry at funerals. Everyone reminded him of his father. They had a tough relationship, but the love was tougher. He spoke of his children, Rosie and Ben, his wife Carla, their tight circle, with a catch in his voice – (the only indication of the terror that must have pierced him in the dark night, on a lonely grey afternoon). He spoke of his new closeness to his brother Joe, who had taken to driving him to hospital, and with his inimitable chuckle, of his conversations with God and Jesus in his columns.
I tried not to look sad sitting on a bench in the shade with him in that golden afternoon light, but marveled at him, how calamitous it must have been for him to chronicle the path of cancer of the oesophagus, to treat his own body like an experiment he was witnessing week after week.
Public figures who are ill and afraid of pity would have long fallen silent after staring down the grim reaper who always wins. But, BC, relentless with himself as if he was bringing down a corrupt politician, skinned himself to the bone week after week, exposing every humiliation, every disappointing scan, the inability to eat, the hacking unending coughs, the painful feeding tube, the disappointing lung infection, the curative surgery and chemo that turned into palliative management that turned into the inability to sip two spoons of apple juice, the inability to swallow his beloved watermelon.
He was a writer to the bone, even when he went from 155 to 125 to 105 to 90 pounds. The other world level of courage to look at himself with a dispassionate eye is almost superhuman. Like a transference of magical thinking, some of me did not believe he would die. I texted him last week after I saw David Rudder at The Tabernacle in London, saying, ‘BC, look your pardner.’ There was no response. But I wasn’t worried. Like Raymond Carver, that great writer, he knew he was beloved, a warrior, and stared the grim reaper down so that he could rest knowing we all in this Trini country have a bit of BC in us. He went down to his bones of 90 pounds a Trini warrior.
Ira Mathur is a T&T Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023. (www. irasroom.org)
“I tried not to look sad sitting on a bench in the shade with him in that golden afternoon light, but marvelled at him, how calamitous it must have been for him to chronicle the path of cancer of the oesophagus, to treat his own body like an experiment he was witnessing week after week.”
ABOUT BC PIRES
BC Pires, 65, was born in Guyana but grew up in Trinidad, where he attended St Mary’s College. He attended a boarding school in the UK, where he did his A-Levels, and came home to study law at UWI, St Augustine, in 1978. After completing his degree in Barbados and a gap year of work, he was called to the bar in the Hugh Wooding Law School in October 1982. He graduated in 1984 and was called to the Bar in October 1984, alongside Wendell Kangaroo, Sonja Beharry and Nalini Sinanan, after which Pires joined Trevor Lee’s chambers, followed by a stint at the Board of Inland Revenue. Thank God he left the legal profession to work as a full-time journalist and, for various periods, worked for all the dailies— The Express, The Guardian and finally, the Newsday, where he filed his last column last Friday before he died. His flagship column, Thank God It’s Friday, has appeared in the Trinidad Guardian or the Trinidad Express since Ash Friday, 1988. From 2002, he was the editor of Cré Olé, the Trinidad & Tobago annual restaurant guide. He leaves behind his wife, Carla Castagne, his children, Rosie and Ben, his mother, three siblings, and his entire country. He was diagnosed with cancer in September 2022. He closed his column on his 65th birthday in June 2023 with these words. BC Pires is 65. Even more against the run of play than last year. Firetruck cancer