“Run to the back,” Papa said.
I felt his hands grab my shoulder, then I spotted Uncle Ram’s stationmaster’s cap on the floor. It was his treasured possession, one he proudly displayed on the wall. I wriggled free, made a dash for it, and picked it up.
Another great bang sounded and the front roof was gone. Somehow it did not fall on the floor—Papa and I would have been crushed to death. It flew away from the house.
We huddled in the back. With the wind now banging inside the house, we saw and felt its fury—we were inside its fury, we were almost part of it. Papa yelled that Cyclone Alix, six weeks earlier, looked like a trial run. He and Uncle Ram decided we should lock the back and run to the neighbor across the road, the Prem family, who had just built a new house. Papa, being the strongest, would hold Auntie Ranee’s baby; Mama and Auntie Ranee would carry the jewelry and valuables; Uncle Ram would carry legal and bank documents; and I would run ahead of them so they could keep an eye on me.
We massed near the door, waiting. Papa felt a lull and told me to run, and the next thing I knew I had landed like lead under the custard apple tree. I tried to move, but I felt nailed to the ground. The velocity of the wind was such that the rain was moving horizontally. Like a mad magic carpet, a corrugated iron sheet from a neighbor’s roof swirled over my head, nearly decapitating me. I was terrified. Mama looked distraught. Papa shouted at me to wait. Uncle and Auntie were speechless. Then there was a true lull, and we all ran to the Prem family. The whole neighborhood, some thirty people spread across five rooms, had sought refuge there, nervously drinking tea and listening to the wind.
* * *
—
By 11 a.m. it was over. Sunshine and calm settled in, the brutality of nature, its random malevolence surrendering to beauty. So radiant was the sun that day that I think of it whenever I hear Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture. The rays of the morning light conveyed by the violin, the joys of the spring expressed by the flute, and the jubilant fanfare in the trumpets transport me back to that glorious sun.
I walked to the thicket of tangled ferns next to the custard apple tree. There I used to spend a few minutes every afternoon admiring chameleons—the ease with which they swelled their bodies and throats, and turned their eyes in opposite directions. To the young kid that I was, they seemed, with their turquoise, yellow, green, and red colors, to be cousins of the bewitching snakes Uncle Ram had taken me to see at the circus. They now lay lifeless, severed and scattered under the badamier, the tropical almond tree. I felt I had lost some friends.
Strewn around the small bodies were a few postcards. The ink had washed away, the written messages a smudge. I could read the printed captions—Port Said, Haifa, Church of the Nativity—but the photos were unrecognizable. I threw them in the trash heap.
I could hear nails and hammers everywhere; the neighbors had gone back home to salvage what they could. Papa and Uncle helped Mama and Auntie Ranee move the soaked mattresses and bedsheets out into the sun. Papa brought out our books to dry.
“Ram, a miracle. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are intact,” said Papa. He was proud to own these Hindu religious epics brought by our Bhushan ancestor when he arrived from India as a coolie. Then, raising a book to eye level for Uncle Ram to see, he added, “Louis Segond’s French Bible…wet but in reasonable shape.”
Uncle Ram shrugged his shoulders and continued moving furniture into the yard to dry.
I searched for my collection of soccer cards, which I had culled over the years from Uncle Ram’s cigarette packs. It was the envy of my classmates. The wind had dispersed the cards throughout the house, the veranda, and the front yard. They were so soggy that I could barely discern the photos on the two I prized most—Bobby Charlton of Manchester United and Jimmy Greaves, England’s top scorer. Uncle Ram must have seen the sadness on my face. “I’ll get you new ones,” he said.
Not long after, I heard Papa. “Ram, look at Devnarain’s copy of Histoire de France. It survived the fire, but now it has to be discarded. The only memento we have of him.” Papa was close to tears. He was referring to the fire that engulfed their house when they lived in the nearby village of Ferney. Devnarain was the eldest brother, who died at the young age of twenty-eight, the one looked upon by the Bhushans as the supreme example of self-sacrifice for the uplift of family and clan, the one whose salary as a schoolteacher supported his seven siblings in hard times. A brother who was the standard to live by.
“Are you sure it can’t be retrieved?” Uncle Ram said as he tried to disentangle the pages. “Let’s check if his name is still visible, or his notes in the margin.” After a minute or two, he shook his head. “You’re right, Shiv. No trace of his exquisite penmanship.”
Uncle Ram took a deep breath, looked at Papa, and wrapped his arms around him.
The hug lasted more than a few moments.
* * *
—
When they had completed the salvage work, Uncle Ram took my hand, nodded to Papa, and said, “He needs to see the world,” and off we went to the bus terminal.
An unlicensed bus had just arrived, with the entrepreneurial driver offering a ride “as far as we can go, since many roads are obstructed by fallen trees.” Uncle Ram and a dozen or so people took the offer and the bus meandered for a mile, until we reached the Beau Vallon tennis court. Some white boys and girls from the sugar estate were straddling the trunk of a flamboyant tree that had landed there. Tree trunks were scattered all around; we could no longer advance. Along the way, practically everything was leveled: the shops, the bakery, the car mechanic’s workshop—all human habitations except those built of concrete or stone. The top floor of the Salle des Fêtes, the cinema where I saw my first film, had crumbled. Uncle Ram said, “We’re lucky. Our back roof and the structure still stand.”
On the way back, Uncle Ram took me to a spot midway between the Catholic church and the Hindu temple, both of which had lost part of their roof. When we got there, his face registered the greatest shock of the day. He pointed to a flattened building. “This is the house I really wanted to buy when I retired. Our ancestral home where your father and I grew up. Our parents owned a coach and horses then.” He showed me where his parents’ bedroom had been, the room he and Papa shared, as well as the kitchen and the barn.
“Why did you move from this house?”
“Your grandpa owed money he couldn’t pay back, and the house, the coach, and the horses all were seized. That’s when the family went back to Ferney, first home of our ancestor from India.”
He stood motionless for a few minutes, looking at the rubble, then we headed back.
* * *
—
The sunshine lasted four hours. Five years later, at the Royal College Curepipe secondary school, I learnt that the eye of the storm, forty miles in diameter, gave us that perfect weather as it hovered over Mauritius. At three in the afternoon, Carol returned. In the morning, the wind had blown southeasterly; the afternoon round brought winds from the northwest, a sequence that inflicted maximum destruction. Once again, we locked the back part of the house and ran to the Prem family. While Carol wreaked havoc all afternoon and night, I thought of Uncle Ram’s devastated ancestral home that he couldn’t buy back with his retirement lump sum. I thought of the two women he had lost in 1945. And, as I was a believer in God in those days, I prayed for his house next door to survive.
VI
The Incident at Madame Lolo
On the morning of Monday February 29, 1960, the radio announced that Cyclone Carol had left Mauritius, and described the aftermath of the 155-to-180-mile-per-hour winds: eighty thousand homeless among a population of six hundred and twenty-five thousand; seventy thousand buildings destroyed; sugarcane and vegetable crops wiped out; thirty-nine dead. For the chief meteorologist of Mauritius, an Englishman reminiscing years later about his career in the far-flung outposts of the B
ritish Empire, Carol was an experience “worth a life time of back-room service and study.” For me, it was a new world. Many of my primary school classmates, sons of fishermen and sugarcane laborers, now lived in tired camping tents set up in soccer fields. The colonial government distributed rations of rice and oil. India donated blankets and cooking utensils. A year went by during which all we saw and heard was masons pouring concrete and carpenters hammering and nailing timber. By mid-1961, sturdy buildings dotted the island; thatched houses had all but disappeared, except for those sheltering cows and goats. Uncle Ram and Auntie Ranee’s wooden house in Mahébourg, which they shared with us, boasted a new roof with Malaysian shingles and a veranda floor with faux marble.
Down the street from us, on the corner of the road leading to the main bus terminal and the beach, a concrete house replaced the wooden dwelling that Carol had razed. A middle-aged lady and two younger women, probably her daughters, moved in. Over the next few weeks, we noticed that their visitors were all male, well dressed, and traveling by car. I knew some of them were Franco-Mauritians living in the posh areas of Blue Bay, three miles away. I overheard bits of conversation between Uncle Ram and my father about how odd it was for the landlord, who was reputed to be a religious man, to allow something immoral on his property, and in our neighborhood. One day, I was on my way to the bazaar to buy vegetables for Mama and Auntie when the lady asked me if I could mail her letters at the post office. I can still summon her perfume, a blend of lavender and rose. She offered me English biscuits, a luxury in those days. For quite some time, until my mother found out and forbade me, I combined errands for home with errands for the women, and was invited in for tea and confectionery that came in tin boxes decorated with red double-decker buses. There was a regular visitor, someone I took for a decorated veteran. He entertained me with stories of how he fought in North Africa alongside Englishmen, Sikhs, and Gurkhas under Marshal Montgomery’s command against Rommel and the Germans at the decisive Battle of El Alamein. The lady later told me that he was a deranged man who had never left Mauritius and that the military medals on his jacket and cap were fake.
“Don’t always believe what you see or hear,” she said.
In that year of lavender-and-rose perfume and English biscuits, I won a scholarship to attend the elite Royal College Curepipe secondary school, seventeen miles away, and for the first time, classmates were calling me “fat.” One of the kinder kids, who later became the school’s boxing champion, showed me a Charles Atlas advertisement for a program to “build a sculpted body in 15 minutes a day” and advised me to order its twelve lessons by mail. He was surprised to hear that I couldn’t afford it. Pimples erupted all over my face, and across the thin wooden wall separating the kitchen from the dining room I heard Auntie Ranee and my mother discuss a cure.
“Tell Vishnu to rub his soiled underwear on his face every morning.”
“He’s too young to secrete that fluid in his sleep,” my mother said. She was mistaken, and I wondered whether she’d forgotten I had turned eleven.
At home, Mama and Auntie hummed melodies from the Hindi movie Chaudhvin Ka Chand, while the Creole neighbor and his new bride played the romantic instrumental “Stranger on the Shore” loud enough for us to hear it every evening. On my first day at secondary school, the pink-faced English rector, stern in his black academic gown, told us that we were being groomed for “leadership” and that we should consider ourselves in the same league as the boys at Eton and Harrow. The next day, two of the senior boys, both from the big city, came to blows arguing about which was the better song, Cliff Richard’s “The Young Ones” or Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
* * *
—
A few days after her pimple cure conversation, Mama asked me, “Do you still remember how to get to Madame Lolo? Auntie Ranee needs you to take her there.”
When we lived in Rose Belle five years earlier, my father would sometimes take me with him to the adjoining village of Madame Lolo. There he would try to persuade recalcitrant parents to send their kids to primary school, where he taught, instead of putting them to work in the fields. In Auntie Ranee’s presence, my mother made me swear to keep the trip a secret from my father and Uncle Ram. On a Saturday, after Papa and Uncle had left to tend their respective sugarcane fields, we boarded the bus at the main terminal, close to the shore. The sea was tranquil, the leaves on the trees motionless.
The bus was festive, crowded with merry people going to the capital to watch the horse races at the Champ de Mars. As always happened when Auntie Ranee moved among a group or entered a room, the standing passengers made way for her. She had an aristocratic gait, a regal air that commanded respect. A young couple gave us their seats. Some passengers were exchanging hot tips about the horses to bet on; Student Prince seemed to be the favorite that day. I envied them, but I was stuck with Auntie Ranee for the eight-mile journey. I asked her the reason for the trip and learnt that Karan, her adopted younger brother, had run away from home and fled to Madame Lolo, not long after their mother had died.
“Why didn’t you ask the police to find him?” I said.
“The police? He’s run away with a woman.”
The passengers close to us became still. They stared, their ears keen for more details. Auntie shot one of them a nasty glare and they turned their heads away.
Auntie Ranee asked me about school and we talked about the new subjects I was studying.
When we got off at Rose Belle, I was eager to learn more about the woman.
“I’ve never met her. She’s probably a négresse,” she said. When Auntie used that pejorative word, it didn’t necessarily mean a woman of African origin; she meant any woman, Hindu, Muslim, Creole, or white, who liked to parade her beauty and have too much fun.
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“Teach them a lesson.”
“How?” I said.
She didn’t answer, and her steely face didn’t encourage me to press on.
As I led her past the Roman Catholic convent and the railway station and we crossed the rail tracks, I felt very proud to be her guide. I was now a big boy.
After walking about half a mile of dirt road, with fields of watermelon on each side, we arrived at Madame Lolo. It flanked a river and a rudimentary wooden bridge. I had forgotten what it looked like, how different it was from Mahébourg, where I had spent the last few years. I had a village in my mind; what I saw was a hamlet. We came across no cars or buses, only two bullock carts. There was no village store and no bar or tavern. Many of the men were dhoti-clad, the older ones wore turbans, and quite a few were squatting on their doorsteps. In Mahébourg, a largely Creole community, most men, including Hindus and Muslims, wore jackets, trousers, or suits. It was as if we had entered the rural India depicted in the old movies. The triangular red flag of Hanuman, the monkey god, flew in front of every house, proclaiming we were in the Hindu heartland.
No one smiled, and no one pressed palms to greet us with the traditional Indian namasté gesture. The arrival of a tall woman with all the trappings of the city—georgette sari, gold necklace, short sleeves—aroused suspicion. I could hear my shoes and Auntie’s sandals tread the ground.
“Straighten your shoulders,” she told me as she walked to the person who appeared to be the eldest in the village.
Auntie Ranee joined her palms, introduced herself as Karan’s eldest sister, and asked to be taken to his house.
* * *
—
Karan responded immediately when the village elder called him, and asked Auntie and me to come in. His front yard was adorned with trees laden with pomegranates ripening in the sun, in various shades of red. From the outside his house looked modest: corrugated iron roof and sidings, and at most two rooms and a kitchen. We sat on the veranda and Karan offered tea and lemonade. I was dying of thirst, but Auntie spoke for me: “
Not for us, not now.”
Karan looked out of place in Madame Lolo, with his Western clothes and Elvis haircut, which he must have seen in the film Jailhouse Rock or King Creole.
Auntie wasted no time. “Karan, you know that after Mama’s death, I’m head of the family. I’m the eldest, older than our two sisters, and older than you.”
Karan acquiesced with a nod. He kept his eyes on the floor.
“You’re my responsibility now,” she said. Her tone was gentle, motherly. “We all make mistakes, and we learn from them.”
Auntie paused and waited for a reaction. Karan raised his head but put it down immediately.
“I hear you’ve got yourself a rundee. Couldn’t you wait for us to find you a virtuous woman?”
“She’s not a rundee, she’s a good woman.”
“That’s not what I heard. She sold her body for a living.”
“Stop listening to gossip, Ranee-bahen.” Karan addressed Auntie with the respectful suffix due to an elder sister. His voice was meek, at least next to Auntie’s.
“Do you know how many she’s slept with before you?” Auntie said.
The cries of a baby inside the house pierced the air.
“Oh, my God!” Auntie beat her forehead with her hands. “A baby! You’re only nineteen! She’s trapped you!”
Karan sprang from his chair, probably to run to the baby and quiet it, but as he reached the door, Auntie shouted, “Ask your vesya to come out.” Auntie had uttered another Hindi epithet for “whore,” except this time it was cruder.
Karan’s woman was on the veranda with the baby in her arms before Karan had time to pop his head inside the house. She was striking, like Auntie, as beautiful but in a different way. Whereas Auntie was so fair that people referred to her as “the Kashmiri,” Karan’s woman was dark, like my father, with South Indian features.
Silent Winds, Dry Seas Page 6