The gathering at Trinidad's Medulla Gallery to pay tribute to the late, remarkable writer Irma Rambaran. Photo courtesy Bocas Lit Fest. When I saw Salman Rushdie’s name on this year’s Virgin Islands Literary Festival and Book Fair programme, I said a prayer for the festival organisers. Landing a star guest is every festival's dream, of course: a big name raises the event's profile and brings in the non-specialist audiences. But luminaries also suck up oxygen and the attention and energy of organisers and media, and cast their long shadows over other worthy festival invitees. For a fledgling festival on an island of 50,000, a figure like Rushdie, who—thanks to a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, an ex-wife who'd go on to host “Iron Chef”, and his own mediagenic personality—has managed to attain an unusual level of celebrity, was always going to be a bit much. Then comes the news, two days before the festival opening on April 22, that Rushdie had cancelled. Particularly unfortunate news in light of the fact that the VI Lit Fest isn't free, or inexpensive; those who were coming to the festival especially for Rushdie's keynote must be bitterly disappointed. Even sadder, arguably, is the fact that this would hardly be the eminent writer's most famous no-show, as what could top his exit from the 2012 Jaipur Literary Festival, after learning he'd possibly been targeted by killers commissioned by an underworld don? On the evening of the day Rushdie's VI Lit Fest cancellation was announced, about 30 people gathered in the white-walled basement of the Medulla Art Gallery, 500 miles south-east of St. Croix in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to pay tribute to a writer who, in every respect except ethnicity, is Rushdie’s opposite. The event had been quickly pulled together by writers Nicholas Laughlin (who's also program director of the Bocas Lit Fest) and Anu Lakhan, and shoehorned into the pre-festival program for Bocas, whose sixth edition starts on April 23. (And this is probably an opportune time for me announce to disclose my Bocas Litfest bias—I am a friend and fan of both the festival and its organisers). For the people in the room that evening, perhaps the most important way in which the writer in question is the anti-Rushdie, is that the latter is still alive. Irma Rambaran died at the end of February 2016—quietly, as was her way, at the age of late fiftysomething. She was a writer and journalist, according to the promo for the event, ‘whose literary work was little published but much admired by those lucky to be her readers.’ Trindadian writer Irma Rambaran in her younger days. Photo from her Facebook page. I'd met Irma a few times, but wasn't part of the small circle who knew her writing well. Three of the people who would read from her work that evening knew it intimately. Nicholas and Anu and fellow writer and poet Lisa Allen-Agostini had met Irma on the St. Augustine campus University of the West Indies (UWI) twenty-odd years ago. In spite of being several years their senior ‘she had a lot of time for people like us,’ Nicholas said in his opening remarks. ‘I think the reason we didn't grasp how much older she was is that she treated us like ordinary, thinking people.’ Irma was also one of the writers Nicholas published in Prometheus, a tiny literary magazine he started while he was at UWI. Irma handed him a sheaf of papers one day with several brief pieces, sometimes comprising just a paragraph or two, or a few sentences, that may or may not have been fiction. She referred to them as vignettes: in today’s literary parlance they’d be called “short short” or “flash” fiction. He remembers reading them and thinking, ‘Wow—she really knows what she's doing.’ Over the years Irma published a fair amount of her creative writing in Trinidadian magazines and newspapers, including The New Voices, Caribbean Beat, Anansesem, Newsday, and the Trinidad & Tobago Review, though self-promotion was not one of her talents. She worked at various media outlets in Trinidad, including the government television unit. From an essay by academic Kris Rampersad paying tribute to Irma, I learn that in the 1990's she was a scriptwriter on the television series “Book Talk” and “Cross Country“, a locally-produced travel show showcasing Trinidad and Tobago's little-known corners that, according to Rampersad, was once the most popular show on television. Anu Lakhan hinted that Irma may have been schooled in the vignette form by writer and creative writing teacher Wayne Brown, who believed strongly that learning to write these snapshots in words, to tell a story plainly, succinctly and vividly using only material that was immediately available to the senses, was a critical discipline for a budding writer.