by R K Laxman
When meeting an Australian in his own country for the first time one expected a full-blooded American to emerge from under his skin, the slap-happy, flamboyant kind. But no. One found the Australian reserved and soft-spoken with a great capacity to convey his friendliness in a quiet manner. Generally I found him neither loud nor demonstrative, even when the occasion permitted it. For instance, at the races in Melbourne I got a funny feeling looking at the horses dashing towards the winning post neck and neck and the whole crowd watching the event with a silent thrill. The crescendo of goading and urging and the pandemonium that we are so used to were disappointingly missing.
I do not know if there is another nation so devoted to outdoor life as Australia. Nearly everyone I met had a surf-board, a swimming pool and a yacht or two. They played games, watched games, read about games and discussed games. And they also went hiking, mountain-climbing, skiing, fishing, horse-riding, shooting and so on. As if all this were not exhausting enough, a friend I met here who went about playing all these sports religiously took me to his house. After showing me round his big beautiful house with its garden, swimming pool, garage and outhouse, he suddenly asked, ‘Like it?’ I made appropriate noises.
‘I built it,’ he declared proudly. I did not immediately realize that he had literally built it with his own bare hands brick by brick! Then he showed me the wooden frame with which he made each brick and explained how he put up the ceiling, laid out the garden, dug the swimming pool and fixed the glazed tiles to its floor, connected the water pipe, installed the water purifier and so on. I was astonished at the man’s energy and drive. But there was more surprise in store; he said he did the building job by day and worked in a newspaper office at night!
The people were so busy, engaged in a variety of activties, I hardly noticed anyone talking politics, local or international. Perhaps this was the reason the newspapers here, though bulky, gave short shrift to hard news and seemed eager to get on with ads for consumer goods column after column and page after page. Even the cartoons they carried were thin in political ideas. A well-known political cartoonist has done frontal nude pictures of cabinet ministers. This collection also included Prince Charles wearing nothing but a toothsome royal smile.
Australia was plagued by strikes, I was told; if it was not the postal system which went on strike then it was the transport workers or dock labour. The impression I gathered generally from people was that the unsuccessful trade union leader of Britain had found a haven in Australia for his talents. But I saw no strike drag on painfully. Somehow quick settlements were arrived at and the wheels of industry once again moved, pushing up, of course, wages, taxes and prices, but not yet to a degree, I thought, to give the average citizen reason to worry. Probably, he would turn such a problem into some kind of a novel sport.
I saw evidence of it already. I saw a chap carrying in his car a gadget which looked like a golf stick but with a peculiar head, the size of a saucer. He took it out and operated it and it began emitting a bleeping sound, loud and clear. Seeing the surprised look on my face he said with great excitement, ‘A metal detector. I am looking for gold and I am off to the wilderness tomorrow!’
He was not joking. Quite a few indulged in this sport, risking their lives probing and foraging in the old abandoned gold mines and deserted caves in the mountains. I was informed that some were lost forever, not being able to retrace their way, some were flooded and drowned in the mine shafts. There were more than 10,000 Australians engaged in this adventure. I thought the number would be more, considering the profusion of advertisements in the papers offering metal detectors on hire or for outright sale. It all started with one prospector laying his hand accidentally on what looked like just a fair-sized stone but which actually turned out to be 100 per cent gold! He became, of course, a millionaire overnight! The main attraction about such a gold nugget was that the proceeds from the sale of it were totally tax-free, whatever it fetched.
This boundless physical energy of the Australian spending itself out all times, winter, summer and spring, in the sports field, on the snow, under the sea, over the surf, in the sky and so on and on had made it difficult, I thought, for his finer inner qualities to surface. I would have expected that the blue sky, the green fields, the awesome wilderness and the rugged mountains would have made him a poet first and then the great sportsman that he was. I could air my views to my friend freely without the fear of being misunderstood, because I found the Australians generally indulge in self-criticism and analysis very much like the Indian. My critical views were cheerfully shared and approved when I pointed out that their efforts at painting looked very much like those of the Sunday painters of the late nineteenth-century British school.
But eventually they did liberate themselves from the cultural clutches of Europe. New poets and writers have appeared on the scene in the past quarter of a century and their works have been internationally acclaimed. World-renowned painters like Russ Drysdale and Sidney Nolan discovered mystic qualities in the landscape of the desert, the dried and withered trees, even in the dead animals in the drought-stricken regions and typically Australian abstract art blossomed on the canvases of these painters. Sidney Nolan painted a series on the legendary brigand Ned Kelly, who roamed eastern Australia during the latter part of the nineteenth century, dodging the police and the gallows. But in these paintings Nolan created a mythology around Ned Kelly and his life. Somehow I feel it is not necessary to know the depredations of this renegade to appreciate the greatness of Nolan’s impressionistic paintings.
Strangely, the poets, singers, painters and writers, go away to live in the United Kingdom or America once they attain success. Perhaps outside Australia they get a feeling of living close to the world of happenings,opportunities, money and fame. Therefore, the custodians of culture in Australia tried to create a bit of such a world in the country itself; they not only encouraged local talent but bought Old Masters at fabulous prices. At the time I was in Australia, they acquired a painting of Jackson Pollock paying millions of dollars and also invited Russian ballet, European opera, Indian music and classical dance troupes to perform at their prestigious Sydney Opera House, the architecture of which has caused much controversy. I could well understand the reason the moment I beheld it.
Its outside appearance shrieked for attention as if that was an end in itself. I was shown this building with the flourish of introducing me to some kind of a puzzle which could reveal many artistic delights once you got the hang of it. I did not even know where to begin to unravel it to get at all those treasures. Luckily, the girl who herded the tourists on a conducted tour of the building explained how to appreciate, what to admire, how to gasp in artistic ecstasy, marvel, and so on. Still, in my view, the architecture did not even fit into its surroundings, the weather-beaten buildings, the old bridge, the river and the boats. This disharmony itself was described to me as a vital point of great artistic merit. Luckily its interior was sober and conventional like any opera house. This building, I thought, symbolized the young nation’s urge to shock for the sake of getting instant cultural recognition.
Like elsewhere, the immigrants from Italy, Greece, India, Yugoslavia and Turkey who have settled here for more than a couple of generations frequently return to the land of their origin and bring back a bit of the outside world, good and bad. I saw Italian restaurants. Chinese tea houses, Indian yoga centres . . . And one day resting my limbs in Melbourne sitting on a park bench I suddenly even heard the approaching sound of a harmonium. It was soon followed by the strong smell of incense sticks. Sure enough along came a Hare Krishna group, clapping, dancing and singing away in praise of the Lord as if it was in Chowpatty.
On the last day in Australia, waiting in my hotel lobby for the car to take me to the airport, I was casually turning over in my mind the experiences of my travel. An old man sitting next to me examined the tag on my luggage, smiled and asked, ‘Come from India?’ His dress was pretty rumpled, fingernails chipped, and chin unshaven. �
��Going to,’ I replied.
‘I just returned from there.’ He volunteered the information and a dialogue ensued. He was a millionaire, one of those who kept a sheep farm. But he had retired and was lonely, his wife having died long ago. Now his children and grand children took care of his business and he spent his time travelling. ‘I spent eight months travelling all over India: Sikkim, Bangalore, Taj Mahal, Tiruchirapalli, Madurai, Jaipur, Cuttack, Nagercoil . . .’ He would have gone on but my car had arrived and I left with my opinion of Australia as a continent floating away in remote isolation drastically changed.
MAURITIUS
THE WORLD ATLAS I have with me has many little dots and specks which have really nothing to do with the world or geography. It is an old one, and time, the weather and generations of cockroaches have put them there. So it was with some difficulty that I was able to locate Mauritius in the vastness of the Indian Ocean. It is a tiny speck of an island situated below the Equator on the twentieth parallel some 4,500 km south-west of Bombay.
Our aircraft is bearing us towards it. Through the occasional rent in the clouds I glimpse the ocean spread like a bluish-grey sheet of steel. There are acres and acres of cloud below me having all sorts of funny shapes in an odd abstract way. Curiously they resemble figures in the ancient legends of China, Rome, Greece, India and what-have-you.
I have several hours yet to pass and so I engage myself in this fascinating business of creating cloud-sculptures. I see the rippling muscles of Atlas, or was it Hercules? An enormous coiled cobra with Vishnu, I think, reposes tranquilly in the middle. The whole piece also suggests a profile of some divinity or other but at the moment is rapidly dissolving to take on the form of a Chinese dragon. There are several Spanish galleons, elephants and flocks of woolly sheep . . . The hum of the aircraft changes. The loudspeaker crackles. We fasten our seat belts and land in Mauritius.
I cannot help drawing a comparison, albeit ridiculous and rather far-fetched, between my vague observations at 10,000 metres watching the clouds and what I learn of Mauritius later. This tiny island has an astonishingly similar variety, strange juxtapositions, incongruities, odd mixtures of race and language.
Here Africans and Chinese, Biharis and Dutch, Persians and Tamils, Arabs, French and English all rub shoulders merrily with one another and emerge with a peculiar sense of oneness. A Tamil, for instance, bears a deceptively south Indian face and a name to go with it to boot; Radha Krishna Govindan is indeed from Madras. I speak to him in Tamil. He surprises me by responding in a frightfully mangled English with a heavy French accent. Mr Govindan has no knowledge of Tamil and his tongue has ceased curling to produce Tamil sounds centuries ago!
Like several of his fellow men, his ancestors were brought to the islands as slaves or, later, as indentured labourers to work in sugarcane fields and factories or to cut timber in the jungle and haul it to the boats. Their roots in their original homelands withered and disappeared with the passage of time. All of them happily came to share in the triumphs and defeats of whoever happened to be their masters among the buccaneering trinity of those days—the Dutch, the French and the English who constantly waged battles for the possession of the island for its spices and sugar or just for the strategic position on the maritime route to the East, conveniently placed as it was for piratical purposes.
However, the battle of 1810 ended all that in favour of the English. The French surrendered and handed over the island after extracting a favour from the conquerors that the French influence on the island be left intact. The English kept their word to the last day of their rule, which ended in 1968. And so we still have very musical but unpronounceable names in Mauritius like Trouaux Biches, Beau Bassin, Quarter Bornes, Curepipe, Ross Belle and so on.
The government at the time conducted all its affairs in English, probably carried on unofficial discussions in French and undoubtedly thought in Creole, a dialect which contains a bit of everything: French, Persian, African, Malay, Arabic, Tamil, Hindi, Chinese, English, etc. I was told that the Tamil Ai-aiyyo—a very spontaneous all-purpose expression of unpleasant surprise—is in common usage in Creole! But the people, however, retained their separate religious identities. There were quite a few mosques, churches, temples, and Chinese pagodas. Yet religious clashes and tensions were quite unknown at the time.
The people seemed extremely relaxed and warm towards strangers. In the streets, in the bazaar, in restaurants, it was common to be greeted and smiled at as if you were a long-lost friend. Coming from Bombay, with my fixed grim expression of a city-dweller, I reacted awkwardly at first to such spontaneity and felt ashamed that I wasn’t even able to manage a smile.
The same atmosphere of friendliness prevailed even in Port Louis, the seat of government. The cabinet ministers and others in high positions didn’t act as if they were born to the grace. They seemed just like ordinary people one bumps into in an airport lounge or in a hotel lobby. They were unassuming, accessible, communicative and, above all, went about without a protective shield of hangers-on and security men to repel casual approaches. I was shown a modest-looking flat in a busy street lined with shops and crawling traffic: the residence of the prime minister of Mauritius.
Port Louis brought to my mind Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. The little port town seemed as if it was built at the suggestion of these writers to suit their novels and short stories. Merchant ships, trawlers, dinghies stood anchored in the harbour with cobwebs of ropes and festoons of flags hanging from their masts. Grimy sailors and dockhands in seamen’s caps lounged on oil drums and packing cases or leaned against bleak warehouse walls, smoking pipes.
Facing the harbour a few hundred metres away I spotted a statue, of the founder of Mauritius, Mahe de la Bombdonnais, in wig, breeches and frock-coat. Far away behind him, hidden by graceful queen palms and gulmohur trees, stood one of the most beautiful colonial buildings on the island. This was the Government House.
Sugarcane fields like a carpet of green covered the island on all sides as far as the eye could travel up to the foot of the distant blue mountains that formed a ring around the island—a volcanic happening of geological ages. These mountains do not have the traditional monotonous pyramidal shapes. Their outlines are freakish and whimsical with unexpected sweeps and perpendicular drops and pin-pointed peaks precariously doing a balancing act with boulders as big as a skyscraper!
There is no railway in Mauritius. Well-maintained trunk and arterial roads connect various villages and towns, cutting through the ubiquitous sugarcane fields. Although the whole country is only 64 km by 50 km in size, driving round the island for sight-seeing made me feel curiously as if I was in a place as sprawling as India. But the excellent weather and breathtaking landscapes all around made up for the many hours spent just sitting inside a car. It is very common for people here to drive up and down an average 70 km to a cocktail party or dinner with friends.
The trees in Mauritius were unlike the gigantic specimens I saw in the Andaman Islands. Disappointingly enough, they were short and gnarled even in the interior of jungles, looking like abnormally overgrown bonsai. Furthermore, the jungles had no wildlife, not even poisonous snakes or insects. The bat was the only mammal before man arrived on the island with the monkey and the deer centuries ago. Unfortunately even the birds were dwindling in number and variety. The dodo, a bird which could not fly and which certainly had no claims to beauty and elegance, a native of this island is extinct now. And so are the giant tortoises of the Aldabra variety, of which a few specimens have been brought and kept in an enclosure in the botanical gardens at Pomplemousses.
What intrigued me wherever I went even in the well-tended botanical gardens, were a colossal number of trees uprooted and lying on the ground in all directions, drying in the sun to become faggots. I saw a whole valley full of trees, thousands of them, bleached to the colour of bone, twisted and scattered about like giant toothpicks spilled out of their containers.
However, despite amazing natural beauty, the isl
and had also had its share of natural disasters. The people of Mauritius could never forget the night the King cyclone struck them. On 6 February, 1975, a 320-km-broad howling wind moved in at some 255 km per hour. The eye of the cyclone alone, I was told, was 48 km wide and it churned the country for two days, relentlessly flattening everything that stood, smashing windows and doors, tearing up roof tops, uprooting trees and bringing them down on buildings.
The island of course recovered from the devastation. But the valley of dead trees gave me a fair idea of the enormous violence the cyclone had wreaked on these people, who were actually quite used to facing these storms as they are an annual event in Mauritius. But the big ones come only once in fifteen years. Like most tragedies however, by the time the next one is due the memory of the previous disaster fades or merely comes a myth. So, again, trees are planted in congested areas, tall buildings come up, plateglass picture windows are fixed and roof tops are put up with an eye on elegance. But, sure enough, at the end of the fifteen-year period, the King cyclone appears promptly on the horizon to surprise the people of Mauritius.
A coral reef runs all around the island parallel to the shoreline, keeping the hysterical waves away at a safe distance from the beaches. The calm turquoise-blue lagoons of Mauritius have thus become world-famous. They are still and calm like lotus ponds and are a delight to those who like water sports such as scuba-diving, swimming, surf-riding, speedboat racing, and yachting. In some places the sea is so shallow there is even horse-riding.
My wife and I not being aquatic, watched with amusement the avidity of the tourists from all parts of the world extracting every bit of fun that the magnificent beach could yield.