Silence of the Chagos

by Shenaz Patel

He had forgotten. Or pretended to. Only a distant echo. The hazy feeling of closed eyes that couldn’t just be opened.

  He must have been about twenty when the topic came up again. He thought he could remember a family gathering, most likely a birthday, where all the aunts were gathered together. He’d overheard something that drew him to the lively conversation in the living room, bits and pieces that kept circling around the words “return” and “compensation.”

  That night, he had been impatient to get back home. Once he was alone with his mother, he had danced around the subject, trying to find the best way to broach it. She hadn’t been expecting it. She had gone into the bathroom, had come out ready to go to sleep. She had to work early the next morning, her boss was catering a huge dinner.

  “Why do they call me Nordver? Is it Norbert?”

  In the sideboard with oversize feet, amid the green teacups and mismatched saucers taken from several tea services, between the cross-country championship trophy and the Coca-Cola glasses she had saved up so many bottle caps to get, an old clock was ticking slowly.

  “M’ma, is it Norbert?”

  She tried to get around the armchair he was sitting in to get to her room, and bumped into the low table where a plastic conch held aloft by a glassy-eyed cherub was displayed. The silence was palpable in the heavy heat.

  “Well? Is it Norbert?”

  She turned toward him slowly. In the half darkness, he could barely see her eyes.

  “It’s Nordvaer.”

  “Nordvaer?”

  “It’s a boat.”

  How absurd of his aunts to call him a boat, another one of their notions. Like the little girl next door who had clipped her eyebrows to look like her mother, they’d decided her nickname was Sosouris because it meant Bat and that was what everyone called her from then on. So Nordvaer was some sort of joke about a boat he didn’t remember.

  “The Nordvaer is a boat,” she repeated in a disjointed voice that barely seemed to be speaking to him.

  “What about it?”

  “The boat where you were born.”

  It took him a minute to understand what she had just said, in a subdued voice that he didn’t recognize at all.

  “Born? I was born on a boat? Where was it? Here? On the beach? How? Didn’t we have a house?”

  He watched his mother’s back as she sighed.

  “At sea. You were born on a boat at sea. The open sea. And no, we didn’t have a house anymore. Or a land. Or anything.”

  They had lost their house. And their land. That was what she had explained to him. To the degree that she could explain anything when even she herself didn’t understand it all. Huge swaths of silence hung over her lips and eyes. The more he asked, the more she withdrew. Her eyes didn’t reflect his face anymore. He saw something else there. He wasn’t sure what exactly. A slight tremor deep within her pupils, like damp air shimmering above overheated asphalt.

  “What’s the story about this boat?”

  She looked at him. And she wondered. How she should tell him. Where she should start. His birth, the boat, the land, the other land. The real one. The one that spreads outward in her mind and her heart, in her belly and her guts, every night. The land before.

  Before fear, incomprehension.

  Before loneliness and the sea’s wild anguish.

  Before the thieving boat that had turned what ought to have been great pleasure into pain.

  Before this new land of high, indifferent mountains, of sneering, distant inhabitants.

  Before rage.

  Before trying to resign herself to keep incomprehension and impotent fury from exploding into madness.

  How should she explain to him, her dearest Désiré, about these waters she couldn’t hold back?

  She could feel it breaking, this portentous water, a damp warmth slipping between her thighs and blooming across the cover beneath her. She knew this signal. But she had hoped. Hoped that this would wait.

  The last few weeks, she had walked around with her stomach as big as a globe stretching the shapeless dress she’d made with the last offcut from the island store. A brown cloth that would hide most dirt and marks, brightened up with little beige flowers that spread their petals over her stretched skin.

  “Alors, Raymonde, boul pre pou rant dan bit!”

  Everybody she saw remarked kindly on her size and shared in her delighted hopes for this moment. She was nearly at term, spending long stretches of time gently stroking her belly, excited and impatient. Amused by the elder women’s predictions about whether the baby would be a boy or a girl, which always ended in bursts of laughter. They all knew, deep down, that nature gave as she wished, that all they could do was simply prepare to welcome whatever they were granted.

  Raymonde was happy. Her pregnancy had gone by without any problems, like the three before it, and she could feel the baby kicking with an energy that foretold vim and vigor. The nurse and the midwife had assured her that everything was going well, that she had nothing to fear, that they would take care of her. She knew it, all the new mothers got special attention, they were kept at the hospital for eight whole days and fed the best food so they could have plenty of time to rest before going back home with their newborn.

  Lately, the administrator had only been assigning her very light work. No longer was she stripping the straw and husk from coconuts in the convector with the other women, just a few small jobs mending clothes or dusting furniture at the administrator’s house. Was it because she was moving more slowly? She had the impression that the others were also working at slower rates, that they were being given much less to do.

  Maybe this was because the next shipment was delayed. Every so often, the boat came late. The Zambezia, the Mauritius, and the Nordvaer all moved at different speeds, and they weren’t safe from the whims of the sea, where they frequently faced cyclones, especially a bit further south.

  But this time, the wait was far longer than usual. The store had been empty for months. No more sugar, flour, or rice, the gunny sacks were piled up in a corner like dead skins, the dull smell of dust had taken over from the vibrant smell of foodstuffs. Maybe a boat would come in the next few days, maybe the store would be full soon and they could pick up their weekly rations there.

  The administrator didn’t say anything. He, too, was seen less and less often. It was fortunate that the island could give them fish and coconuts, that they could draw on their backyard and the chickens they’d raised. But even those resources were being worryingly depleted. Her husband sometimes came back with a freshly caught fish, or some crabs, or a few pounds of a tortoise he was splitting with other families. The last pigs had been eaten. With the vegetables they’d gathered from the garden, she could put together a fricassee with tomato sauce or a seraz with coconut milk. Lately, she’d particularly relished banana fish. The light flesh with a slightly bitter flavor suited spicy bouillabaisse, and the bilimbi and chilies added to it all made it possible to forget, briefly, that they hadn’t had rice in a very long time. Dishes that she and her husband shared, sitting in front of their shack, in the sweetness of falling night.

  Everything would work out. He kept on saying this in answer to her increasingly insistent questions. She could tell something was happening. Something they didn’t want to tell her, because of the state she was in. That was what he was saying to her, that pregnant women tend to exaggerate little things, that everything was fine, that there was no need to worry about anything.

  There was change in the air. She saw the crease running across her husband’s forehead more and more often, and the muscle that twitched when his jaw clenched. She watched him, sitting on the flat stone that held open the door of their shack, his eyes lost in the distance. He used to be so animated.

  Despondency had taken hold of the island over the last months. A muted worry that nobody acknowledged directly, especially not in front of her, even as it seeped through everything, the worried faces of her circle, their actions often withheld as
if they didn’t realize it, the sky itself which seemed closer than ever. Some of their fellow islanders had left for a few weeks in Mauritius but had not come back, had not sent any news. The boats were increasingly far and few between; they couldn’t really measure the time by them anymore. Maybe this was all connected in some way to the presence of these white men wearing uniforms that they were now seeing on the other side of the water at Diego Garcia.

  Something was happening. The wind bore vague rumors, which picked at the tall trees and fell to the ground in inchoate particles. But there was no fooling a pregnant woman’s instincts, as she kept telling the other women, who invariably told her to stop getting ideas in her head and to pay more attention to the baby soon to be born.

  She did think about the baby; she thought about it unceasingly. She imagined it playing in the warm waves that licked the beach at the foot of their shack, clinging to her skirts before going to frolic with the other toddlers. She would give this baby the best of what they had: the best fish its father could bring while it was still wriggling, tortoise oil to make him strong and tough, nights cradled in her gentle arms as they listened to the blurred murmur of the wind and the waves, the stars their eyes could pick out in the velvet-dark sky.

  That was what she told herself before the boat came.

  The Nordvaer. Finally. A neighbor had come to tell her that it was maneuvering so it could dock. She wiped her hands on her dress as she thought to herself how strange this was. Usually the deputy let the men know the boat was coming. They would perch atop the trees, at the island’s edge, watching for the moment when a dot would appear on the horizon, off the end of the channel, and they would trumpet it as soon as they could see it coming.

  “Ship ahoy! Ship ahoy!”

  Their shouts accompanied its slow progress around the strip of land. The bell announced its docking, and the men immediately broke up into groups to streamline its unloading.

  That day it had caught them by surprise, surging out of nowhere into the jetty. They almost felt resentful. It had been such a long wait for this furtive arrival that deprived them of their ritual.

  All the same, many of them had crowded together. The work of unloading clearly would be far more vital than usual with everything they had run low on in this time. Raymonde wanted to see the big bundles that would signal a return to normalcy.

  The minutes felt excruciatingly long. Long. Heavy in the stifling heat of that unyielding morning.

  The light movement aboard the boat bore no resemblance to the usual hustle and bustle. She thought she could see the captain standing on the deck, gazing at the island for a long while, looking at them steadily, without making the least gesture, without indicating any recognition of their presence. The Nordvaer was unmoving. Silent.

  It was on land that the commotion began. A thin noise that grew until it became deafening. A shock wave that brought her to her knees as she looked at the Nordvaer and wondered if being so close to term was making her hallucinate.

  “Hurry! Hurry! Bizin ale!”

  What did they need to hurry for? The laundry could wait a bit, they had been expecting this boat for so long.

  “Degaze! Bizin ale!”

  They were telling her to go—but where? And where was this voice she’d never heard before coming from?

  They had to go. There. Now. Right away. It was an order. No explanation. No discussion. No ifs, ands, or buts. They had to go.

  The Nordvaer hadn’t moved from the dock, its white mass huddled at the end of the jetty like the head of a hammer. Maybe that was why it had come so quietly, so treacherously. It wouldn’t be waiting. They were saying this would be its final trip. And they all had to get on. Every last one of them.

  But what about their belongings, their home, where were they going?

  One hour. They had one hour. Not a minute more.

  A succession of hazy images collapsed in Raymonde’s mind. She vaguely remembered everyone racing to their shacks, the frenetic, half-blind rush to try to choose what they would or wouldn’t take. Life wasn’t as cut-and-dry as a husked coconut. They needed to take everything, but how could they? They didn’t even have a suitcase. She had thrown a huge sheet on the ground and filled it with whatever she could lay her hands on. Some clothes, pillows, two pots, the treasures that the children added to the pile, a pearly-white seashell, some filao-seed spinning tops, some kite sticks, the dog… The dog?

  How could anyone pack up an entire life in one hour?

  All they were able to carry, in the end, was a few tied-up baskets, bulging at the seams with the things they’d crammed inside. A whole life in a basket that she used for carrying a week at best, the seven days of rations from the store.

  With her husband and her three children, Raymonde had dragged the parcels to the pontoon. All around them were so many lives in bags and poorly tied bundles being dragged through the sand. Muted footfalls, the strange rut they had all carved through the sand, leading them all toward the jetty.

  She had let herself be borne by the current. The straw hat in her hand had fallen away. Not a breath of wind. She had turned around to pick it up again. Her husband got there first and leaned down despite the bags tied around his back. As he looked back up, he saw the calm sea offsetting a field of beige flowers that exhaled slowly along the curve of a brown hill.

  Raymonde’s husband interjected: “You can’t do that! Don’t you see, she’s pregnant?”

  Nobody paid him any attention. Nobody even heard him.

  “You have no right! Absolutely no right to put her on board!”

  His protests bounced off the flat surface of the warm air. The movements around him stopped.

  A man in a white uniform rushed toward them and indicated that they were to wait on the beach. Their bags were unwieldy, and they set them down in relief. Sitting on one of the bigger bundles, Raymonde looked at the line of ants headed toward the white boat that reflected the sunlight onto the blue water.

  She watched as the flow subsided. Only a few blotches of dark color remained on the jetty: parcels abandoned here and there in wobbly positions. Her eyes showed her strange sights. A Nordvaer bristling with outgrowths, a Nordvaer pulsating beneath the sun with a muted energy that it could barely contain, like a white tooth weakened by the dulled pain of an abscess deep within its roots. That had to be the sun. The tension. The baby. My God, the baby. They couldn’t, they didn’t have the right to do this.

  It was at that moment that the little man in white came back to her. He gestured for her to follow him. She got up painfully, holding her lower back, sweat had plastered her dress to her legs. She paced behind him. What did they want?

  She saw that he was headed toward the hospital. After talking quietly to the nurse, he left Raymonde to be cared for.

  The nurse wasn’t his usual self as he examined her quickly. His face was withdrawn, his silence heavy. Everything happened very quickly. They were both in a rush to be done. He told her that she could go back out. The little man in white was waiting at the door. He had a brief conversation with the nurse and told Raymonde to follow him.

  She walked behind him to the beach, where her husband was waiting with their three children and several bags.

  “Go on, take your things and get on the boat! Hurry up! They’re waiting for you.”

  His voice was curt, loud, and sharp. An abrupt order. They hurriedly gathered up their bags on the sand. They climbed aboard, pulling their feet and their possessions from the ground one by one. An officer with a white hat had pulled the man to one side. Raymonde remembers bits of the lines he had said in an urgent voice. International law… no right… a pregnant woman… more than seven months.

  Raymonde couldn’t understand the little man’s response; all she heard was some bluster that betrayed his fury. Then he turned toward her and declared, enunciating each syllable emphatically, “In-a-ny-case-the-nurse-looked-her-o-ver-and-con-firmed-she-can-tra-vel.”

  The little man went back down. She tho
ught he was going to find the nurse to confirm what he had said. But the minutes went by with nothing happening. The boat was waiting. Maybe the nurse was nowhere to be found. Would the captain decide they couldn’t leave without the nurse’s confirmation? Maybe he’d tell them that, in the end, no, they couldn’t board her and take her like that.

  But what would happen if they decided to leave her ashore? Would they bring the others down as well? Would her baby be enough to save them all? A baby, just one, in her belly, her own belly. What if they left her by herself on the island? Her baby, all alone with her, no, they couldn’t do that, they didn’t have the right.

  Raymonde remembers all these burning questions. The boat was waiting. She had been shivering. Her eyes were darkening. She wasn’t going to let herself get sick. The children were crying, she needed to take care of them, reassure them, they needed to eat, she hadn’t cooked anything.

  It was only when she felt a quiver beneath her that she looked up and realized that night had fallen. It was the indication that the manœuvrage had begun. The vibration increased quickly, she felt something bracing itself in the depths, the boat jolted, and then it started moving. She had barely had time to stand up before the jetty was already out of sight. Complete darkness. That was all she could see. The filaos and coconut-palm trees were exuding their woody, milky aromas in the twilight.

  Later on, she wondered whether that was why the boat had been waiting to start their journey. For night to fall, so they couldn’t see what they were leaving behind. So their eyes couldn’t etch in their mind one last image of their island, their life.

  Half-glimpsed nights and days, murky nausea, bouts of vomiting that turned the confined air of the hold acrid, crying children, and momentary flashes in her mind: images of her shack, my god, she had forgotten to close the door, and the stove, had she made sure it was off, but there was no way it could be on, she had been in the middle of hanging up laundry when the Nordvaer had come. They had left the shack in disarray, she hadn’t had the time to tidy it up, all their things were scattered everywhere, and she had forgotten, damn it, she had forgotten the doll she had made for her little girl’s birthday in a few days, a pretty doll dressed in coconut straw, with a necklace of tiny seashells collected every afternoon on the beach, with its dress sewn from the silk lining of an old skirt that her neighbor had brought back from Mauritius.