Silent Winds, Dry Seas

by Vinod Busjeet

  “They love Mauritius because of the higher standard of living and social standing they enjoy here, whereas in India they are a dime a dozen,” Papa used to say. I had heard that Uncle Roshan hosted some of the Vedic Sabha swamis. So I wasn’t surprised to see, in the living room, a portly middle-aged man in a saffron robe reclining in an armchair, with a book in his hands.

  Seated on the floor, Shankar was massaging the swami’s feet. He looked at me with a grimace, embarrassed to be caught.

  All the same sauce, I thought, recalling how Madame Joseph expressed her cynical view of men. A Vedic Sabha swami likes to be pampered just the same as an orthodox, Puranic one.

  “I came by to see if Shankar can go to the beach with me,” I told Uncle Roshan.

  The swami’s face turned sullen.

  I quickly added, “Maybe in an hour or two? I’ll run some errands in the meantime.”

  “Shankar is going to Swamiji’s sermon this afternoon,” Uncle said.

  The swami beamed a benevolent smile. “Shankar is a good son. Filial duty is divine duty,” he said.

  “Why don’t you join us, Vishnu?” Uncle Roshan asked. “Swamiji will speak on ‘Spirituality and Youth.’ ”

  “Papa will be upset; you know he’s Puranic.” And I turned to the swami and said, “He worships all the gods—Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Ram, Sita, Hanuman,” taking mischievous pleasure in slowly enunciating every name. “I’ll come by another time.”

  I lied. Papa was orthodox, but he didn’t care if his family or relatives listened to Vedic Hindus or Catholics or atheists. He even brought me copies of the Watchtower magazine that Jehovah’s Witnesses handed him on the street every now and then. From me, he only expected that I participate in the annual pinda ceremony at home, a Hindu ritual of remembrance and worship of our ancestors. My sole obligation: offering the dumpling of rice and sesame seeds destined for those of our forebears who are “unknown or forgotten.” Religion was one area where Papa wasn’t strict or authoritarian.

  I felt sorry that Shankar couldn’t do fun things like his friends. Not only could he not be at the beach that day. On weekdays, he had to rise early and bicycle with his father to the sugarcane and tomato fields, where he worked from six to eight before going to school and from five to six in the evening after school. Not that Uncle was poor and needed the help; he owned enough land to be able to hire additional laborers and overseers. Shankar was the dutiful son destined to till the soil, while his younger brother and other siblings didn’t even know where the fields were. His weekends, brightened by occasional family gatherings, were spent in the fields or on “devotional duties,” such as attending sermons and massaging holy men.

  “Why don’t you tell Uncle that you have lots of homework and that you need time?” I said to Shankar.

  “I’ve told him. He is okay if I just pass; he doesn’t expect the highest grades. So long as he can tell his friends and neighbors I’ve got my Cambridge School Certificate, that’s fine with him.”

  * * *

  —

  Four years went by. Uncle Roshan hosted more swamis, whose feet were massaged by Shankar, who continued working in the fields every morning and late afternoon. Papa spared me field labor as I strove for the top marks needed to win a coveted laureate scholarship for university studies abroad.

  “To hell with all the sermons on abstinence!” Shankar said to me one day. “I’ve decided to have some fun.” The meager pocket money doled out by his father, he started spending at Rekha’s, a brothel in Mahébourg. He went there every two weeks or so, seizing the opportunity when Uncle Roshan traveled to Curepipe for all-day meetings at Vedic Sabha headquarters. Having a girlfriend was not an option in conservative Mauritius, unless you belonged to the upper reaches of society.

  After he obtained his Certificate, he asked his father to pay him regular wages for his labor.

  “Son, you’re not working for me. You’re investing in your future. As long as you stay in this house and eat my food, you shouldn’t expect any payment,” his father said.

  Shankar spoke to his mother about the matter. She told him she had enough to worry about with her four daughters—having to marry them off being the main worry—and didn’t want an ugly confrontation with Uncle Roshan.

  Many of Shankar’s classmates, some from less well-to-do families, went to study overseas and wrote to him about life in the big cities—London, Paris, Bombay. He received postcards with photos of Big Ben, the Arc de Triomphe, the Taj Mahal. The nightclubs in Soho and Pigalle. That reminded us of the orphan from Mahébourg who had impersonated the Maharajah of Baroda and forged his signature on his checks, lavishly living it up in London: dining at the Savoy and showing up in a Rolls-Royce at Soho nightclubs, with a brunette on his left arm, a blonde on his right. He was condemned to only six months in jail by the judge at the Old Bailey. Mahébourg was proud of its poor son sodding it to the rich, of the colonized son of a milkmaid fooling the English. We didn’t feel sorry for the real Maharajah, either. We had relished the accounts in the local newspapers.

  Shankar dreamed of escape: escape from his father, from the swamis, from field work. Sugarcane hell, he called it. Uncle Roshan constantly drilled in his ears stories of their ancestors’ sacrifices and resilience, how they worked their way from indentured coolie to independent planter. But Shankar had made up his mind to go abroad. He was fed up with handling manure and fertilizer. The smell of molasses nauseated him.

  His level and grades, however, were not good enough for him to earn admission to university, let alone a scholarship. But nursing in the United Kingdom was an option. The newspapers carried articles about how the English (most of us didn’t know or care about the distinction between English, Welsh, and Scots) no longer wanted to be nurses. Nursing was dirty manual work best performed by immigrants from the colonies. Shankar’s Cambridge certificate would get him into a nursing course, and, better still, he would draw a salary.

  We had heard of letters of admission from British hospitals torn to shreds and thrown in the dustbin by parents worried that their children would never come back. I told Shankar to use our address, since he usually wasn’t home when the postman came on his daily rounds.

  “I can’t do that. I have to be honest with Pa. I’ll tell him what I intend to do, even if it leads to a fight,” Shankar said.

  The swamis have trained Shankar well, I said to myself. The swamis and his father.

  Later, Shankar gave me a detailed account of what happened.

  “Papa, do you remember what you said at Uncle Ram’s funeral wake?”

  “I said many things that day. What do you want to talk about?”

  “You told us how your father cursed you, and how you forged your own way. I want to do the same. I want to find my way, I want to fend for myself.”

  “Forge your way, fend for yourself. Sophisticated words! What’s your plan?”

  Next morning, Uncle Roshan told Shankar that his plan had kept him awake all night. He had thought deep and hard about his own youth, and the prospect of his elder son leaving for England disturbed him. He needed time to think and asked Shankar to do the same.

  “Think? Present him with a fait accompli,” I told Shankar. “Apply and see what he does. He won’t look good with friends and family if he doesn’t let you go. He’s always carrying on about how Hindus should not trail the other communities in education.”

  After a month, Shankar received a few letters of rejection. Not long after, he received two letters of acceptance, and he settled on Hammersmith Hospital, in London, where two of his classmates had already started their studies. He used his pocket money to pay for his passport, which he proudly showed me. He made travel reservations—part of the fait accompli scheme.

  We decided that I should accompany him when he went to Uncle Roshan with the big news. Uncle was reclining on the same armchair where the
swamis got their massages. His face turned red. “So you’re ready to go now, Shankar,” he said.

  “I have all the papers and the traveler’s checks to cover my initial expenses. I need your help with the airfare,” Shankar said.

  “You’ve made all these arrangements without asking me?”

  “I didn’t want to miss admission deadlines,” Shankar said.

  “How dare you? I asked you to think about it, not act behind my back. You take yourself for a big man now? Too big to stay around here?”

  I was mortified at the turn of events.

  “Uncle, I told him to do it,” I said.

  Uncle ignored me and addressed Shankar. “Your ambition has dwarfed the respect you owe to your parents!”

  He resumed his Maréchal Rommel bearing, and we understood it was time to leave the room.

  “Why don’t you ask my father to help you?” I ventured.

  At home, I realized that my suggestion was a risky bet. “What gives you the right to conspire with Shankar against his father?” Papa said. “You know I don’t like Uncle Roshan to meddle in my business. Now you want me to give him a reason to do so?”

  The last time Uncle Roshan had dropped by, unannounced, my mother was rubbing an ointment on Papa’s muscular calves and feet. Next to her was the heavy bucket of hot water she always brought. I thought my father could perform that daily footbath-and-ointment ritual himself, and had told him so a few times. Uncle Roshan couldn’t control himself. “My sister has been your wife three hundred percent all these years,” he said. “Though she’s half your size, she’s taken care of you with the devotion of three women. Show her some gratitude by taking her to the cinema once in a while.”

  With that incident in mind, I told Papa, “He wouldn’t meddle so much if you treated Mama right.”

  He looked vexed, then had a faint smile. He called Mama.

  “Look at how your brother is treating his son. He talks big about education, and he doesn’t want to spend money to send Shankar abroad. I bet he boils his banknotes and drinks the broth.” He welcomed this opportunity to trash his brother-in-law.

  He agreed to pay Shankar’s airfare, but Mama counseled Shankar to enlist the support of his paternal uncles, too. “It’s not just the money. Your father needs to be persuaded that going to England is the best thing. He’s probably afraid you’ll return with an Englishwoman, like your cousin in Port Louis.”

  Shankar’s paternal uncles were excited when they heard of his admission to nursing school, but they didn’t want to get involved. “You can’t talk with a man who thinks he knows everything,” said one. “Roshan will turn the conversation into a religious argument,” said the other.

  When Shankar went to inform his father that he had secured the money for his airfare, Uncle Roshan was in his orchard at the back of his house, lounging on a rattan armchair with a cup of tea. To me, he looked strangely serene, as if the birdsong, the pink bougainvillea flowers, and the murmur of the wind had soothed and pacified him.

  “Shankar, you’ve been the best son I could have hoped for. All the swamis said that about you. Now you want to leave. Who’ll take care of me when you’re gone?”

  “Mama is here. The other children.”

  “What can they do? You’ve done everything right. Your brother and sisters know nothing about sugarcane, nothing about growing tomatoes.”

  Uncle Roshan inhaled the tea’s aroma.

  “They can learn, Pa. As I did,” said Shankar.

  “With all that land, you can earn a good living right here.”

  “I want to travel.”

  “For more than a hundred years the family has proudly tilled this land, and now you’re going to clean the Englishman’s dirty bottom! How can you touch the intimate parts of those bastards who raped and looted India? You should have more pride than that!”

  “Your best friend’s son is in Manchester doing nursing. There’s nothing wrong in that.”

  “I’m getting old, Shankar. Rheumatism in my bones.”

  “I’ll visit often,” said Shankar.

  Uncle rose from the armchair, grasped Shankar’s hands, and pressed them between the palms of his hands.

  “How many who leave come back? In Mahébourg, in Mon Désert, I don’t know anyone who’s come back.”

  Uncle Roshan turned to me. “Vishnu, do you know anyone?”

  I didn’t know anyone who’d returned, and I didn’t answer. On the bus, at the barbershop and the bazaar, one couldn’t avoid hearing about the young who fled unemployment by emigrating. Or who looked for the good life overseas.

  I saw that Shankar’s eyes were moist.

  “I love you, Pa. I’ll stay.”

  Uncle Roshan paused for a second, drew his arms around his son, and held him tight.

  I was disappointed with Shankar for not having the guts to stand up to his father, and angry at Uncle Roshan and the swamis for elevating obedience as the supreme virtue. I was even upset with my mother: she had been meek and had not made an effort to convince her brother to let Shankar go. Over the next few years, however, maybe because I read too many Chekhovian tales in secondary school, I shifted the blame. Or, rather, I widened the net: the tyranny of family and the lack of gumption of the clan were responsible for what happened. I resolved to stand up to my father if he were to oppose my going abroad.

  Later, much later, events unfolded that made me realize how little I knew about the mysterious bonds that tie father and son.

  * * *

  —

  In December 1990, more than two decades after he capitulated to his father’s wishes, Shankar visited me in Boston. In the intervening years, I had completed secondary school in Mauritius and college and graduate school in the United States, and was on the fast track in my international finance career. Unlike his classmates and friends, Shankar did not marry. Through his letters and phone calls, I learnt that he planted new varieties of sugarcane that dramatically increased the yield on his father’s land. But he was not reaping the benefits. His father maintained a tight grip on finances. Shankar also informed me that two sisters had gone overseas to study and that his younger brother had eloped with a Muslim girl; Uncle Roshan felt that this act of rebellion sullied his reputation, especially within the Hindu community.

  Shankar’s trip to America was his first abroad. Unlike most visitors from the tropics who prefer to visit in the spring or summer, he chose winter because he wanted to see, touch, and walk in the snow. He’d seen it on Christmas cards sent to him by his friends abroad, on glossy calendars, and in films like Doctor Zhivago. And he wished to visit a nursing school. Harvard, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Faneuil Hall, and other monuments associated with the American War of Independence were further down on his list.

  On a snowy day, a friend of mine who taught at the nursing school of Mass General gave him a tour and arranged for him to have lunch with some of his students. In the evening, I took him to a pub in Harvard Square to warm up with Irish coffee. He was surprised at the ID checks that the students went through: no one back home had ever heard of drinking age limits. Once we got over discussing the fifteen- or twenty-year age gap between us and most of the pub’s patrons, I asked him what he thought of the nursing school.

  “Being Pa’s nurse, my life’s not very different from those of the nurses here, except for all that technology.”

  Loud cheers erupted in a corner booth. Shankar stretched his neck to look. Wistful, he added, “And I never experienced that.”

  I was afraid he might form an overly rosy picture of student life. “Not all students can afford this, Shankar. This is a privileged few. Many are boiling pasta or eating pizza in their apartment,” I said.

  I knew from Mama that Uncle Roshan was bedridden and Shankar’s mom was too weak to care for him. Shankar told me that neither his sisters and their hus
bands nor his brother and his woman had any interest in sharing the caregiver tasks, and that he bathed and shaved his father.

  “I remember as a child I used to watch him shave. He would whip shaving soap into a white lather that shone, and work it into his stubble in circles with a brush. His technique in handling that old-fashioned double-edged razor fascinated me: the blade just glided across his face. It was a show,” he said. With a sigh he added, “I can’t give him such a close and smooth shave.”

  When Shankar was not emptying and cleaning chamber pots or bathing his father, he was supervising the laborers in Uncle Roshan’s fields. He confided that he would have liked to spend more time on this trip and visit London, Paris, and Amsterdam, but he couldn’t get a nurse’s aide for such a long period and his sisters were unwilling to help out for a week or two.

  “I hope Uncle leaves you the major part of his estate,” I said.

  “My friends tell me the same thing,” he said.

  “There’s no need to be sheepish about it,” I told him.

  “My sisters want to put Pa in a nursing home,” he said. “I can’t do that to the old man.”

  “He hasn’t been fair to you in the past. I would hope he shows some gratitude now.”

  “You’ve been in the West for too long, Vishnu. If I don’t take care of him, who will?” Shankar said.

  He rose and surveyed the room. There was something troubling about the abrupt way he did it. On the surface, he was soaking in the pub ambience, the background music, the boisterousness, the smoky atmosphere. But when I looked at him, he avoided eye contact. I pulled his hand.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” I said.

  He hesitated for a few seconds, then sighed. “Pa doesn’t trust anybody. He takes his checkbook and his bank statements with him to the bathroom,” Shankar said.