Silent Winds, Dry Seas

by Vinod Busjeet

  Mama carried on. “Dr. Curé had said that your underweight body needed special attention. You had no energy to suck my breast and swallow; I soaked wicks in the milk and squeezed them in your mouth. I bathed you in rice water and Grandma massaged you with coconut oil. You were a great baby; you didn’t cry. Over the next few months, I worked constantly. I wanted to show Grandma and the world I could make it. Until the day I walked to the public water fountain, about a year after your birth.”

  Having grown up in the vicinity, my mother knew all the neighbors. That day, she felt uncomfortable as she collected water in her bucket. Before she got married, the men sitting around the fountain to exchange news and gossip and play dominoes greeted her with a simple “Namasté” or “Salaam.” Now they leered at her. It was known in her part of the village that her child was not acknowledged by the father.

  “Arey, who’s the father?” someone said.

  Another followed with a wolf whistle.

  When one guy tried to grope her, she threw the bucketful of water on him and ran home. Within an hour, Mama’s uncles beat up the groper and told Grandma not to send Mama to the fountain.

  “Your father and the Bhushans talked about their disgrace. These men saw me as the disgraced one, the discarded woman,” Mama said.

  I saw the pain on my mother’s face as she recounted her story, and my body shook with rage—rage at the way the Bhushans and the village men behaved. Why had she waited that long to tell me about all this hurt? Only the thought of my father recuperating in the bedroom next door tempered my rage.

  Mama continued. “At least if your father acknowledged you as his son, I could face these men. I decided to fight for that.”

  My mother was aware of the Bhushans’ attachment to their ancestral traditions. Shaving a child’s birth hair, especially a boy’s, was an important rite of purification for them; hair from birth bears negative experiences and attitudes from past lives that must be shorn. “If I can somehow arrange to have your mundan ceremony performed at the Bhushans’ by their priest, I would have achieved recognition for you.”

  Uncle Mohan’s wife had given birth to a boy. “I went to see her early morning, when her husband was out cutting cane in the fields. I brought her baby clothes I had embroidered and a set of monogrammed pillows and bedsheets. She was thankful, and I told her how much I would appreciate an invitation to her child’s mundan.” My mother planned to take me along and ask the Bhushans to include me in the ceremony. “How can they refuse in front of their pandit?”

  She waited in vain for that invitation.

  “I had to do something that would force the Bhushans to pay attention,” Mama said.

  She consulted an aunt who was the mistress of a Brahman. “Nothing prevents you from hiring a pandit to perform the rite in public. Shame them,” said the aunt. “Can you do it the Bhushan way? They are of the sheep farmers’ caste and offer a lamb in sacrifice. They invite the whole clan and half the village and serve rum. Can you afford that?”

  “Who says the Bhushan way of lamb and rum is the right way? Our ancestors left India a hundred years ago. Who really knows how they did things in the old country? Each family in Mauritius has its own pandit, and every pandit does his own thing,” said my mother.

  The aunt arranged a ceremony on the beach in Mahébourg. Even though the Bhushans no longer lived there in the 1950s, everyone in town knew them. They were the first descendants of Indian coolies who had owned horse carriages in the south—and many Hindus commented on the way they flaunted them throughout the district. “Aping the whites,” they said. A thriving jewelry shop had further enhanced the Bhushans’ position as “a prominent family.” Many still remembered because they were stunned by the Bhushans’ subsequent bankruptcy, which drove them away from Mahébourg.

  Mama continued. “My aunt and I chose a Monday, market day, the busiest day of the week. Grandma invited your maternal uncles and aunts, and my Catholic friends from childhood came. Your screams made the barber’s task difficult. After he shaved your head, my aunt walked me waist-deep into the sea, facing the sun. As the pandit recited the prayer to Surya Devta, the sun god, I released the tufts of your hair in the ocean.”

  No lamb’s head was chopped and no rum was served. Only the sea breeze blowing the scents of camphor, sandalwood, and incense through the filao trees was there to be relished.

  Mama continued. “It was a feeling most strange. As the waves ebbed and flowed around me, I remembered what my great-grandmother, my ancestor from India, had told me: ‘Thousands of miles under the sea, there is a holy canal linking this sea to the Ganga River in India.’ For a second, I saw myself in Banaras praying on the banks of the Ganga. Banaras, the city founded by the god Shiva.”

  Mama closed her eyes.

  Like most Mauritians, she had never been to the land of her ancestors, and her vision of Banaras derived from calendars depicting holy festivals and Hindu gods in all their splendor.

  How the Bhushans learnt about the seaside ceremony wasn’t clear. Creole fishermen hauling fish from their boats and Indian planters carrying their vegetables to the bazaar stopped to look. “Up the slope from the beach,” Mama added, “the servants of Monsieur Le Juge de Segrais, the Franco-Mauritian aristocrat, were watching from the vast veranda of his mansion. The green roof and gables sparkled that day.”

  “Maybe the Creoles thought of their Catholic baptism,” I said.

  “A week later your father and Uncle Ram were at our doorstep.”

  Mama paused for a second.

  “Let me check on Papa in the bedroom,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  I relived my earliest childhood memory. I was playing by the public water fountain with the other boys in the neighborhood. We were watching an airplane fly into the clouds after it grazed the treetops at the far end of the road. So it seemed to us at the time. The island’s airport was nearby, but I didn’t know that yet. I was around three years old. As I took the path leading home, the sugar factory siren blared, announcing the end of the workday, and Grandma appeared, a huge bunch of sugarcane leaves balanced on her head, a sickle by her waist. We walked to the cowshed and Grandma fed the leaves to her two cows. Behind the cowshed there grew fruits—pineapple, mango, bananas, and lychee—and a curry leaf tree and betel plant, and there were steps that led to a stream where my mother washed clothes and chatted with other women while I entertained myself by clinging to a fallen tree trunk floating in the river.

  “Vishnu!” my mother said.

  I ran to our thatched house. Mama was bent over a pail, mixing water, mud, and cow dung into a paste.

  “Pour me some water,” she said. I can’t recall how long she took—minutes or hours—but I watched her apply that paste on the soil. Once dry, that was our floor.

  That evening, I heard my mother moan, “Be careful, Ma, don’t burn me.”

  I parted the drapes that separated the kitchen from the bedroom and saw her on the bed, flat on her belly, Grandma by her side. On her naked back, a flame was burning under a glass. Mama’s fair skin was a glowing red. In the darkness, the flame cast shadows that flickered on the newspapers decorating the walls, made of dried sugarcane leaves. The play of light and shade frightened me, and I closed the drapes.

  Later, much later, my mother explained that Grandma was using an ancient Indian therapy called ventouse, or cupping: the vacuum created by heat in a glass eases knots in the body and reduces aches and pains.

  While Mama was with my father next door, other childhood memories came back, all populated with relatives. The noisy wedding where I saw a gramophone for the first time and was allowed to touch it. Glued onto the wooden base was a photograph of a sweet dog listening to the music coming out of the trumpet, and a label I couldn’t read at the time: his master’s voice. A religious ceremony where the kids giggled when the dhoti-clad pandit ch
anted “Om Swaha, Om Swaha, Om” over the holy fire. My first trip to the cinema: the enormous moon laughing at me, the shaky wooden frame of the bus with its blinking headlights, the conductor handing passengers tickets from his wooden dispenser, the curved staircase at the Salle des Fêtes Cinema, the hero on a galloping horse who sang in a language I didn’t yet understand:

  Chal chal re musaafir chal

  (Let’s go traveler, let’s go.)

  On all these occasions, my mother and maternal grandmother figured prominently, holding my hands, twisting my ear to shut me up, buying me grilled peanuts and gâteaux piments.

  My father, however, was absent. I don’t remember seeing him in that thatched house in Mon Désert.

  * * *

  —

  “What did you do when Papa and Uncle Ram showed up?” I asked Mama when she returned.

  “My sewing machine had to go with me. I didn’t want to be totally dependent on your father.”

  Her words took me back to the first memory of my father, Shiv Bhushan. It was a bus ride when I was around the age of five or six. He sat next to Mama, with me across the aisle, next to Uncle Ram. The passengers were gawking at us. I’m not sure whether it was because Uncle Ram and Papa wore smart, well-ironed suits that made them the best dressed on the bus, or because of the incongruity of Uncle Ram carrying a Singer sewing machine on his lap.

  At our destination, Mapou, forty miles north of Mon Désert and three bus changes away (including one in the island’s capital, Port Louis), Papa and Uncle Ram brought us to a very different dwelling. A solid house, not rich, but definitely more comfortable: a roof with shingles, shiny wood floors, walls adorned with painted oranges, lemons, and flower patterns. Instead of the candles and oil lamps at Mon Désert, electric bulbs hung from the ceiling. There were books on shelves, and even some magazines hidden under a bed. Later, when I shared the bedroom with him, I found out that these were magazines belonging to young Uncle Neeraj, then learning the tailor’s trade and not yet a dandy and a counterfeiter. The house had a living room and three bedrooms.

  The outdoor stone kitchen, which was as large as the house in Mon Désert, stood next to a huge banyan tree from whose tresses I remember swinging to and fro. The fruits in Mapou were different. Split pomegranates and their red seeds blanketed the backyard, and formed a mantle around a lone cotton tree. A road lined with grapefruit trees ran in front of the house, and across were the railway station and rail tracks. About a hundred yards away was a hangar where locomotives were parked and metal pipes, coal, and timber were stored. It soon became a playground for me and the neighbor boys and girls.

  Mama and I had moved to a house provided by the Railways Department to the railway stationmaster, Uncle Ram. The steam whistles of the trains puffing to a halt or leaving the station fascinated me. It was a world far removed from the oxcarts and the few lorries that passed by our thatched house in Mon Désert, on their way to the factory with their loads of sugarcane. The clatter of oxen hooves and cart wheels was gone; the thunder of locomotive engines now filled my ears.

  I liked Uncle Ram. He often took me down the road to Ah-Kam’s and, while smoking and savoring drinks with his friends at the bar—it was hidden at the back of the shop owned by the Chinese family—he spoilt me with sweets. Sometimes he brought me to the Mapou District Court, two minutes’ walk from Ah-Kam’s. The barristers walking around in their black robes and stiff white collars and the disheveled, unshaven men in handcuffs escorted in and out of black vans marked his majesty’s prisons awed me. And on many Saturdays, we traveled by bus to Port Louis to enjoy the horse races at the Champ de Mars. Papa and Mama stayed home.

  “Why had Uncle Ram been so harsh with you and yet always spoiled me with sweets and gifts?” I asked my mother.

  “You were the son he never had,” Mama said. “Do you remember his planter’s chair—the rattan armchair with the extended arm serving as a leg rest?”

  “Oh, yes! He used to boast that it was made by craftsmen from Pondicherry in the style of the Compagnie des Indes. He admired French colonial furniture.”

  “You were the only one allowed to relax in it apart from him,” Mama said. “None of his brothers dared touch it in his presence.”

  I recalled Uncle Ram relaxing on that armchair. “Vishnu, the big white man used to sit here and look over his plantations, extending far into the horizon,” he said, pointing to the Belle Vue and Labourdonnais sugar estates in the distance with a sweep of his arm, as if they belonged to him.

  At the same time, I couldn’t forget Papa convalescing next door in the bedroom. At eighty-eight, he had outlived all his classmates and friends. On January 1, 2000, when I had called him to wish him a Happy Millennium New Year, he confided his secret for longevity: “I have a special mantra which I recite every night.” I suspected he got it from the Tamil mystic who had been his father’s friend and spiritual guide. I asked Papa to share it. “It’s a secret; and you have to earn it through tapasya. You never cared for this Hindu practice of austerities and spiritual purification, Vishnu.”

  In his long life, did he ever tell Mama he was sorry for what happened in Mapou and for his abandonment of her?

  Before I could ask Mama that question, she went on: “Do you remember your original birth certificate?”

  “Original?”

  “Yes, the handwritten one, not the one that comes from the computer.”

  From her armoire, Mama pulled out a plastic folder that smelled of mothballs. Inside it was a legal-size stamped paper embossed with a wax seal, the kind one sees in colonial museums throughout the Commonwealth, from London to Delhi, from Canberra to Cape Town. Under the printed column headings were specimens of fine penmanship from another era, in black ink.

  Date of Birth: July 31st, 1949

  Name/Surname: Vishnu Gopal

  Natural or Legitimate: Natural, acknowledged by the mother.

  Name/Surname of Father and Mother: Seeta Gopal, no calling, of Mon Désert.

  Running horizontally across the page on the bottom half, in equally fine penmanship, in red ink:

  Acknowledged by Shiv Bhushan as his natural child—October 1, 1955

  Legitimated by Marriage—September 20, 1956.

  II

  Questions

  1956

  Grandma, harvesting watermelons,

  collapsed in the sunny field.

  The nurse shouted at Mama:

  “No visitors after four o’clock!”

  Mama knocked on the door of the head nurse:

  “Against regulations.”

  The doctor’s secretary:

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Where is my mother?” she cried.

  That evening, Papa dropped me at Cousin Shankar’s.

  All the children were there, sitting on bales of potatoes,

  drumming on pots and pans.

  “How dare you?” Uncle shouted.

  Next morning Auntie took me to Grandma.

  She was wearing red, her wedding sari.

  I thought of the toys she gave me at Christmas

  and the shirts, chocolate bars, Pepsi.

  My uncles and Papa lifted the coffin.

  Mama clung to it, wouldn’t let it go.

  When the procession passed the village fountain,

  I asked Mama, “Why can’t we go with them?”

  III

  All the Same Sauce

  1957

  When the ambulance arrived, I was standing in the middle of the room, the screaming baby boy in my arms, his excrement dripping all over my white shirt and elbow. My mother was rubbing cologne on the face of Mrs. Kajal Desai, the baby’s mother, who lay silent on the brass bed, shivering, her blouse soaked with perspiration, her sari in a mess. For more than ten minutes she had bee
n writhing like an angry serpent on that bed, her mouth and throat struggling to tell Mama something. The two paramedics rushed her into the ambulance. Mama took the baby out of my arms, asked old Madame Joseph, our Creole neighbor who had just walked in, to take care of me, and ran into the ambulance, which sped off. I was eight years old.

  Madame Joseph grabbed the hurricane lantern from the veranda and led me to the dark bathroom—a shack in the backyard, some six feet by six feet, with a water pipe hanging from the ceiling, no showerhead. She let the water run full force over me, asked me to wait for her, and left.

  I stood shivering in the darkness. Through the holes in the rusty corrugated iron roof I could glimpse a few stars and the moon.

  We had moved to the Desais’ house in Rose Belle village a year earlier, in 1956, when Papa, recently confirmed in his primary school teacher’s job, was transferred there by the Mauritius Ministry of Education. During the day, buses plying the Route Royale, which linked Port Louis to Mahébourg, drove by the house every half hour. Bus passengers and those in the much rarer taxis and private cars could not miss the hand-painted advertising board nailed to the huge mango tree in the front yard:

  Desai Printers

  Wedding Invitations

  Rubber Stamps etc

  My parents were renting two rooms from Mr. Desai, whose family occupied the six other rooms in the house; our two families shared the veranda and the kitchen. I remember clearly the Desais’ furniture, luxurious compared with ours: carved wooden chairs decorated with flowers and birds and, Papa told me, imported from India and Yugoslavia; velvet sofas; and a German tube radio—a Grundig, in a rich brown wooden cabinet. The walls separating the rooms were made of thin wood planks, so we heard the radio music and the news, and didn’t complain. We had four simple plywood chairs, a dining table where I did my homework and Papa prepared his teaching notes, a cupboard, and two beds. Even their gods were richer: the Desais’ elephant god Ganesh, in shiny metal, shared an entire room with Lakshmi, the curvaceous goddess of wealth—a room with drapes and rugs. Our Ganesh, made of wood, stood solitary on a shelf in a corner of my parents’ room.