A black and white portrait photograph of a girl washing a younger boy in the open air. The girl is stood behind the boy. She holds a round object, possibly a coconut shell, in her right hand and is probably using it to pour water on the boy’s head whilst. Her left hand hovers over the boy, possibly smoothing his hair. She wears a patterned dress, a headscarf covering the upper portion of her head and is barefoot. The boy, streaked with water, is stood in a metal bucket and is naked apart from bangles on its wrists. The side of thatched building, probably a labourer’s hut, is visible in the background. Wooden furniture, more buckets and other objects are lent against its wall. Original caption (within the photograph): ‘The Annual / Trinidad 99’.

The two figures are almost certainly the children of indenturered labourers. The British transported over 140,000 indentured labourers from India to Trinidad between 1845 and 1917. Most lived in poor conditions and performed difficult work on plantations growing sugar or cocoa. These people were often referred to as ‘coolies’, now considered an offensive term. The caption is probably meant to be joke about infrequent washing (i.e. only taking a bath once a year).

A sizeable portion of Trinidad’s population today is descended from South Asian migrants.