Food; Trinidad on the Hudson Caption:

THERE'S NO SIGN TO TELL YOU WHEN YOU'VE arrived in Tunapuna, the curry powder manufacturing capital of Trinidad, but if you've got a nose, you'll know. I grew up in New Jersey, and so am naturally wary of all emissions of an industrial nature. But the first time I visited Tunapuna, I found myself thinking that I might consider moving to a factory town some day, as long as it smelled like this. Clouds of roasted cumin and turmeric, garlic, coriander and those acidy-hot Caribbean peppers called Scotch bonnets -- simply by breathing, one was exposed to hazardous levels of piquant longing. To die in Tunapuna, I imagine, would be to die wondering what was for lunch.

Wherever Trinidadians immigrate, the curry follows. Turban brand curry powder is shipped from Tunapuna to the rest of the island, and exported overseas. This oily golden powder then becomes the base for the spicy curry stews that fill Trinidad's most famous and delicious dish, the bread-wrapped sandwich called roti. Without access to their curry, Trinidadian cooks abroad would be as lost as Sicilians without fresh garlic. Tunapuna's most distinguished export is more than a blend of spices; it is Trinidad itself, sealed in a neat three-ounce cellophane packet.

Here in my West Indian neighborhood in the Flatbush section ofBrooklyn, the Korean groceries stock not only Turban, but also its competitors, Chief (more pepper, heavier cumin flavor) and Indi (Guyanese-made, and much hotter). In response to ever-increasing West Indian immigration, the markets also import dasheen bush (the green vegetable used to make callaloo, the soupy puree that is an Eastern Caribbean specialty), live, feisty Trinidad blue crabs and a hypochondriac's paradise of patent elixirs -- Gripe Water, Andrews Liver Salts, Dettol, Ferrol and Sanatogen. However, at 95 cents a package, Turban remains the cheapest and most reliable remedy for emigre homesickness.

Whenever I am walking down the block on a wintry afternoon and a pungent cloud of Turban and onions drifts from the kitchen of one of the take-out roti shops that dot Flatbush, it always discombobulates me. What business does this tropical aroma have insinuating itself into my nose on a chilly city street? With Trinidad's essence swirling through the brain, I savor the taste of memory before diving into the subway.

The aroma of curry in the air of a Flatbush afternoon is a cultural memory twice removed from its source. Even back in Trinidad, curry is a flavor of a world left behind. Tunapuna's spice factory is owned and run by Trinidadians whose ancestors came to the island from India in the mid-19th century, when Trinidad belonged to the British Empire. After the British abolished slavery in its colonies, sugar-plantation owners in Trinidad began to import indentured Indian laborers. The contracts included a return passage to India, but most of the 150,000 Indian workers settled in Trinidad.

On visiting Trinidad in the 1940's, Patrick Leigh Fermor, a travel writer, was struck by the island's similarity to rural India: "Wide tracts of Trinidad are now, for all visual purposes, Bengal." Fermor probably did not stay for lunch; if he had, he would have discovered just how much Trinidad's Indian culture had evolved in less than a century. Emigre realities transformed and creolized the traditional flavors of India. Faced with gaps in the supply of familiar vegetables, herbs and peppers, the East Indian cooks in Trinidad learned to improvise on old recipes and substitute locally grown foods.