Silent Winds, Dry Seas

by Vinod Busjeet

  “You barge in here calling me names. But you don’t know what Karan and I have between us. You can’t understand love.”

  The baby continued to cry.

  Karan’s woman, still standing, unbuttoned her blouse and brought the baby to her breast.

  “Aren’t you ashamed to parade your breasts in front of this boy?” Auntie said, pointing to me.

  Karan’s woman raised her breast to insert the nipple inside the baby’s mouth. As the baby sucked the big black breast, my eyes savored its roundness. This was breathing and moving—it was different from the breasts my classmates and I drooled over in the magazines at Renaissance Bookshop.

  To my relief, Auntie asked Karan for a lemonade. Auntie drank hers; I gulped mine down.

  Auntie charged again. “Where did you pick up that piece of garbage?” she said to Karan.

  The violence of Auntie’s words hit Karan. His face and ears turned red. I was shocked, too. I had never imagined she could speak that way. Karan’s woman, however, didn’t lose her composure. She sat down on the chair left vacant when Karan went to fetch the lemonade. Maybe my memory has been warped by the spell she cast on me that day, but I remember her taking her seat with elegance and grace.

  I looked around me. A group had gathered, about half a dozen men, squatting in a semicircle in the front yard. They were close enough to hear the argument on the veranda. I don’t know if Auntie was aware of them at that moment. If she was, she showed no sign of it.

  No one interfered. They just listened.

  “Can you tell me about your family background? Who are your parents? What is your khandaan?” Auntie said.

  “My clan or bloodline is not important. We have a child together, that’s what matters.”

  Auntie got up and shook Karan’s shoulders. “Can’t you see how shameless she is? Addressing me with such effrontery! Leave that rundee and go home to Coromandel. You have two sisters waiting there who care for you.”

  When Auntie turned, she scanned the semicircle of men. She paused before she spoke.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  The semicircle was impassive. She might as well have addressed a heap of stones.

  She motioned for me to get up. She said good-bye to Karan, glanced at his woman, and walked to the person who had taken us to Karan’s house. “You must be a respected elder here. Please keep an eye on my younger brother.”

  “Don’t worry about them,” the man said. “She’s one of ours, and she’ll learn to take care of her man and child. We’ll have a wedding when the right time comes.”

  All the men bowed, joined their palms, and said, “Namasté.”

  As we walked away, some women came out of their homes and joined palms likewise.

  * * *

  —

  On the way back to the bus stop, I saw that Auntie’s face was red and there were sweat stains on her blouse. My young mind was perplexed: no one in Madame Lolo had challenged or questioned what she said, and yet in the end they supported Karan and his woman.

  As we crossed the railway tracks, I told Auntie that surely someone must have told her the woman’s name. “You have relatives and friends everywhere,” I added.

  “Who cares what her name is?” she said.

  On the bus, we dozed off, worn out by the day’s drama.

  When we reached home, Mama asked Auntie, “How is she?”

  “They have a child,” Auntie said.

  * * *

  —

  In 1962, we moved out of Uncle Ram’s house, but I continued visiting every Saturday. In mid-1963, Uncle Ram, who also had a story of forbidden love in his past, died of liver cirrhosis, the result of drinking too much rum. On a Saturday visit six months later, two years after the confrontation at Madame Lolo, I saw Auntie Ranee bent at the fountain in the yard, washing clothes. A child was at her side.

  “Vishnu, isn’t she beautiful?” Auntie said.

  “Oh, yes! Whose child is she?” I said.

  “Karan’s. Her name is Sapna. Her mother died last month.”

  It took me a few seconds before I muttered something. The December heat was oppressive, and Auntie’s diaphanous blouse of pink chiffon stirred in me memories of the many nights I had fantasized about Karan’s nameless woman, her breasts, her defiant demeanor.

  “How come you didn’t tell us so we could come to the funeral?” I said.

  “There was no need to make a fuss about the poor woman,” Auntie said.

  She told me that Karan was too depressed to care for Sapna and that she was going to take the child in and raise her. When I asked the cause of death, Auntie said, “The doctors don’t know.” A few weeks later, when a cousin whispered “gonorrhea,” Auntie summoned her to her house, took her to task, and warned that she would make her a family pariah if she didn’t quash that rumor.

  It was disconcerting. Why was Auntie defending the memory of the woman she despised? Was it because she wanted no stain on the family’s honor? That couldn’t be, since she had made sure to distance herself and the family from the “rundee.” Was it because she wanted Sapna to grow up free of any stigma? Was she going to love Sapna? I was too young then to entertain the possibility that she was, like many of us, a bundle of contradictions—her maternal instinct driving her to love Sapna, and her sense of social respectability leading her to withhold love from those who didn’t live up to her standards.

  * * *

  —

  I wish I could explain why, in my adolescent years, I gradually forgot Karan’s nameless woman and her daughter. Sure, competition for a scholarship for studies abroad was intense and left us little time for anything else but study. Every Monday morning (so it seemed) at assembly in the courtyard, the English rector kept reminding us that our school expected “the highest level of performance.” And I wanted to thrive, not merely survive, among the children of the elite.

  Events in Mauritius and in the world were also engrossing: the Indian-Chinese conflict over Tibet, the Profumo affair, the May 1968 French student riots, local elections in 1967 followed by independence in 1968. All this was true, but it was also true that screen goddesses had replaced Karan’s woman in my fantasies: Natalie Wood and, unknown to my friends who dismissed her as a B-grade actress, Belinda Lee, the wife of Potiphar in Joseph Sold by His Brethren.

  By the time I started graduate school in the United States, Karan’s woman and her daughter Sapna had become a distant memory. Until one day in the late seventies, while browsing in a secondhand record store in Greenwich Village, I came across the psychedelic album cover of Carlos Santana’s Abraxas. On the left was a crimson angel, tattooed and bestriding a flying conga drum, pointing to a Hebrew aleph symbol in the blue sky. At the center, surrounded by sunflower, lilies, and violets, watermelon and bursting pomegranates, sat a tall Black woman with majestic breasts, naked and radiant. A white dove stood between her legs, which were spread wide apart. It was a breathtaking but incomprehensible juxtaposition of the sacred and the carnal. I turned to the album’s back cover to look for an explanation and found an excerpt from Hermann Hesse’s Demian:

  We stood before it and began to freeze inside from the exertion. We questioned the painting, berated it, made love to it, prayed to it: We called it mother, called it whore and slut, called it our beloved, called it Abraxas….

  Mother, whore, slut, beloved: these words took me back to Madame Lolo. Given the time difference, I telephoned my mother in the evening. She told me that Sapna had committed suicide three months earlier. A cold sweat ran throughout my body.

  “Sapna killed herself and you didn’t think it necessary to tell me right away?” I said.

  “You never asked about her before!” my mother said. “I didn’t know she meant that much to you.”

  Mama’s words stung. I took a deep breath.

  “Sh
e was only fifteen or sixteen. Why did she do it?” I said.

  “When Auntie Ranee died two years ago, Sapna lost her anchor,” my mother said. “She didn’t have the strength to go on.”

  “Did Auntie Ranee really love her? Did they have a fight?”

  “Vishnu, stop talking rubbish,” said my mother. “Of course she loved her. You’re nine thousand miles away, and you don’t know what goes on here. She fought all those people who taunted Sapna about her mother. If you called more often, you would have been better informed.”

  After I hung up the phone, I paced back and forth in my tiny room, restless. I called a cousin in London who had stayed in touch with Karan. He said something about Sapna having inherited her mother’s genes. “Sinful genes,” he said.

  I needed fresh air. As I walked out of my graduate student hostel towards the solid solemnity of Grant’s Tomb, on Riverside Drive, I pondered Mama’s three-month silence on Sapna’s death. It dawned on me that I had never told her what I saw and heard at Madame Lolo. And I hadn’t behaved in a manner that indicated I had felt anything for the mother and the child. Had I repressed the memory of Karan’s nameless woman and their daughter in my attempt to move on? I felt ashamed, guilty.

  A year or so later, Karan passed away. Liver cirrhosis, just like Uncle Ram.

  I have since thought intermittently about the incident at Madame Lolo and Auntie Ranee’s words and actions. As I look back on my pubescent fixation on Karan’s woman, I ask the family questions about her. They avoid the subject and view me with suspicion. They apprehend that lurking in my mind is the hope or wish that Auntie’s “rundee” and “vesya” were just figures of speech she used to scare her adopted brother Karan back to the fold, not epithets based on fact.

  Last year, after more than forty years, I returned to Madame Lolo. Cousin Shankar had told me that the place had changed so much that it was worth a visit. It has now grown into a full-fledged village with signs of increasing affluence. The Hanuman flags are bigger, glitzier, and most are hoisted on top of miniature concrete temples in the front yards, no longer on bamboo poles. No one squats on the road; most people are gainfully employed. The fields of watermelon have disappeared, the dirt path has been transformed to an asphalted road, and there is parking space near the bridge, which is new and made of shiny metal. Most important, Karan’s dwelling and the pomegranate trees in the yard are gone.

  As I said good-bye to Karan, to his nameless woman and their daughter, and to the Madame Lolo of my adolescence, I felt sad. But I also understood that I can’t remain steeped in nostalgia. I felt no sense of loss at the disappearance of the old world. The river has been consecrated, and on its banks a holy shrine has been erected. Some years ago, local sadhus elevated the status of the river in Madame Lolo to that of Ganga Yamuna Dhaam, a pilgrimage destination. An officiating priest told me, “The site has a Facebook page. You can find a film on the Madame Lolo shrine on YouTube.”

  I clicked on the YouTube film, expecting a Hindu devotional hymn as background music. The soundtrack was from Santana’s Abraxas.

  VII

  Truants

  I

  While Uncle Neeraj is away,

  I forage under his bed.

  Among his forbidden magazines

  I discover a puzzling cover:

  at the foot of a volcano spewing flames and lava,

  a woman, hair disheveled, is locked in a kiss.

  Stromboli erupts: Ingrid Bergman’s affair heats up the film set!

  At dinner, over fiery eggplant vindaloo,

  Papa says Stromboli is inactive at the moment

  and that I’m too young to understand “affairs.”

  Mama’s face darkens.

  II

  Five or six years later, on a day

  that smells of lychee and mango

  and the Mascarene paradise flycatcher

  flaunts its chestnut plumage,

  a friend and I skip school after the lunch bell rings

  and walk uphill to the Trou aux Cerfs,

  a lovers’ lair which gushed volcanic ash millennia ago.

  Down the slope of the crater,

  where aromatic trees hide secrets,

  we stumble

  on our teacher of revolutions

  agrarian, industrial, American, and French.

  She’s riding the brute who made us conjugate

  amo, amas, amat, amamus.

  She glares at us

  like the virgin goddess Diana

  spied bathing in the spring.

  VIII

  A Massage for the Holy Man

  1963

  Earlier in the afternoon, with Auntie Ranee and other members of the Bhushan clan, I had stood by Uncle Ram’s bedside, his breathing labored and his eyes glassy. Auntie hoped Uncle would at least utter the word Krishna or Bhagwan or any other of God’s names before departing this world. He only said “Ma.” Auntie’s face shrank, the dark circles under her red eyes grew bigger.

  Soon, out of nowhere, Uncle’s drinking buddies appeared and were holding his corpse while my father washed him in the yard, by the custard apple tree. Within a few hours, coffee, tea, biscuits, and snacks were laid out on the veranda, on tables brought by the neighbors. It was in 1963, during the August school holidays. I was fourteen and couldn’t understand how people were going about with so much energy on a such a sad occasion. Some were playing cards, others chatting. I tried to control my tears. My mother charged me with keeping an eye on the food and drinks, to let her know when to replenish. By seven in the evening, the veranda was overflowing with people, noisy from the rum some had brought as an offering to the departed, and from the applause and jeers directed at a young man just returned from overseas. He had challenged a local pandit on God’s existence and proclaimed how proud he was that Uncle Ram had introduced him to atheism. His supporters, a minority, heckled the pandit, who warned them, “You will pay for this in your next life.”

  Just as Uncle Ram’s wake threatened to turn into pandemonium, Cousin Shankar and his father, Uncle Roshan, walked in.

  Uncle Roshan was of average build and height. But he had a reputation for being fierce and for standing up for his rights. Mama had told me that in his youth, his bearing and blue eyes had earned him the nickname Maréchal Rommel among the Franco-Mauritian girls on the sugar estate. Some in the village even claimed that one day, as the girls bicycled by the weighing station, they were awestruck by the sight of Uncle Roshan holding the white weighman by the throat; angry at the weighman for understating the amount of sugarcane he had delivered, he challenged the accuracy of the scales and accused him of cheating. At weddings, funerals, wakes, young people enjoyed hearing him argue against the Puranic pandits, the orthodox Brahman priests. They jostled to sit close to him and clapped their hands whenever he, a non-Brahman, cut down his opponents. Mama, proud of her brother’s rhetorical prowess, had also told me that many elders marveled at Uncle Roshan’s superior knowledge of the Scriptures but refrained from adopting his strict, monotheistic views; they were afraid of punishment by a deity, or bad karma—they might be reincarnated as a crawling animal.

  Uncle Roshan’s entrance silenced everyone. The pandit, a Puranic, got up and went inside, where Auntie Ranee was talking to my parents. Uncle said, “Panditji, are you running away from a vigorous debate?” He took the pandit’s chair, and I handed him a cup of tea. He turned his sharp, angular face, maintaining eye contact with those on his right for the duration of a sip. Turning his head to the left, he said, “No doubt strong-willed Ranee will ignore her husband’s wishes and indulge in all sorts of Puranic rituals. Wait for the milk-drinking ceremony next week: the priest will rub his Adam’s apple and claim that the milk Ranee offers him isn’t flowing down his throat. ‘Ram’s soul is strangling me; it is demanding Ram’s felt hat,’ he will sa
y, and Ranee will give him the hat. A more vigorous rub at his Adam’s apple, the soul craves for Ram’s clothes; then it will be Ram’s silver watch, and by the time Ram’s soul is appeased and ready to transmigrate to a new body, Auntie will have given the priest more than a few of Ram’s favorite possessions.”

  To a teenager like me, the milk ceremony sounded hilarious, something to look forward to. My cousin Shankar, three years my senior, elbowed me and whispered in my ear, “They don’t know my father. He is full of bullshit.”

  Before Shankar could continue, his father focused his intense eyes on me. “Vishnu, I saw you laugh. This is no joke. Did your mother ever tell you why I’m not Puranic like the Bhushans?”

  Uncle Roshan didn’t wait for a response. “Years ago, after the saffron ceremony on the eve of a wedding, the pandit said, ‘Fellow Brahmans, join me in the dining room for dinner.’ I asked the pandit, ‘What about the other guests?’ He told me they have to wait till the Brahmans have finished. I had just turned twenty-one. I stood up and told the guests, ‘There are empty seats at the table. Let’s eat with the Brahmans!’ My father lifted his hand, ready to slap me, but controlled himself; instead he cursed me in front of everyone. I walked to the dining room. No one followed me. That’s when I decided to join the Vedic Sabha; they don’t believe in the caste system. And they worship only one God!”

  I was relieved when my mother called me to help her. Shankar followed me inside and said again, “My father is full of bullshit.”

  Shankar and I had gotten closer since our family moved, about six months earlier, to Mon Désert, my birthplace, where Uncle Roshan lived. A few days after the wake, when I went to see him, his father opened the door. “Come in, Vishnu, I want you to meet Swami Ananda. A learned holy man from India.”

  I knew that swamis from India, orthodox or not, had a certain cachet among the Hindu community on the island, much like a visiting prelate from the Vatican among the Catholics. They were supposed to know more than the local swamis and priests; I imagined they came to train the local priests.