“Do you remember what the oja chanted? I’ll write it down for you.”
* * *
—
No Beverly Hills mansion this time. We walk straight into the doctor’s office.
“You look better, Vishnu.”
“I’ve deplumed the rooster. You should join the conclave of goons, Doctor.”
Another medical certificate, another month of school leave, more tablets.
* * *
—
The trees stir, birds shriek. I hear the vegetable seller on his bicycle shouting “Brède cresson! Margoze!” Watercress, bitter melon!
I ask Mama to cook me dal puris.
I’m glad Shankar brought back the books I threw away. I devour them.
I sneak into Papa’s clutter while he’s teaching at school and unearth Zola’s Thérèse Raquin with its sulfurous book cover, and Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. He inveighs against immorality in films but relishes the passions in the classics.
* * *
—
Mama offers Shankar and me parsadee, sweets for celebratory Hindu prayers.
“Why are you in brown today?” I ask Mama.
“I promised Saint Anthony in church that if you get better, I would wear brown every Sunday till you turn eighteen.”
“Did you go to the mosque and ask Allah to intercede? When are you going to wear green?”
Mama laughs in a way I haven’t seen in a long, long time. “Don’t be ridiculous. They wouldn’t let a woman in.”
* * *
—
Dr. Curé visits at home.
“I have some catching up to do at school.”
“Spend some time at the beach to get used to sunlight again.”
“He should go to the cinema for relaxation,” he tells Papa, who looks dismayed.
* * *
—
On my first day back to school, some kids on the bus asked questions about the rooster sacrificed at Hanuman’s altar. The oja must have spread the rumor, my father speculated. The story was now embellished with a counterclaim—that Papa had met the Tamil mystic to discuss supernatural ways to accelerate Uncle Ram’s demise. In those days, there were still people for whom there was no such thing as a natural death. No matter if one is an alcoholic and can therefore succumb to liver cirrhosis: death has to be caused by some supernatural intervention or the machinations of a longanis hired and paid to invoke spirits.
* * *
—
When Papa’s case against Auntie Ranee came up for a hearing—nine months after the goonda sabha—I went to the Mahébourg District Court. My father caused a sensation. Having learnt that his lawyer, stuck pleading at another district court, was going to be late, he asked the judge for permission to start, and quoted extensively from the Napoleonic Code to support his claim. The audience, mostly retirees of Indian and African origin, was thrilled when he scored points against Auntie’s lawyer, a prominent member of the Franco-Mauritian upper class. My father lectured him on the subtle meanings of an archaic French word in the Code. Even some of my classmates’ parents were talking about the self-taught laborer turned schoolteacher who humiliated a barrister! Though all the goonda uncles testified against him regarding the parentage of Uncle Ram, my father won the case.
Auntie Ranee sought advice from a nephew who had just returned from England after graduating from one of London’s Inns of Court. Bhushan v. Bhushan would be the first case this barrister would litigate in his career—pro bono. Auntie Ranee and the nephew lost two rounds of appeals: the Intermediate Court and the Superior Court upheld the District Court’s judgment. Three years after the initial district court judgment, the case landed on the docket of the Supreme Court. Auntie’s tenacious nephew recruited a QC—Queen’s Counsel, a senior barrister recognized by the bar for his mastery of the law—to join him. Unfortunately for my father, his lawyer died soon after, taking to his grave the French tradition of green-robed avoué plaidant on the island. He scrambled to secure a lawyer who had to be briefed from scratch. The Supreme Court quashed the verdict of the District, Intermediate, and Superior Courts. In their ruling, they dug up an 1866 judgment issued by a French court in Toulouse that established the doctrine of tacit renunciation of rights. By remaining silent and not claiming his rights to his father’s land for so many years, my father was deemed to have renounced them.
In late 1964, Papa had moved back to Mahébourg. While the Bhushan v. Bhushan case meandered through the courts, I slowly recouped the academic ground lost through my extended absence.
I submitted a poem to the school magazine:
THE PRAYER ROOM
Multi-armed Hindu goddesses with ample bosoms
embrace Kufic verses
on sumptuous silk.
A red and lapis lazuli icon
jeers a sober menorah,
and is mocked in turn by
ritual masks from the Congo.
A Bible, a Koran, and a Bhagavad Gita
lean on each other.
When everyone is asleep,
do the gods fight or make love?
The editor rejected it. “I love it, but it will likely offend the religious sensibilities of many parents.” I surmised I would have better luck with a French poem. Next day, I went to my French teacher, Daniel Koenig, and asked him to recommend the following to the editor:
LUMIÈRE
Enfant de l’agonie qui brise mon âme,
Mon coeur, révolté, me revendique, me réclame—
Moi, vile vomissure de mes vices,
Enfer où les fluides pourries de l’obsession
Dansent l’indécence.
Coeur qu’enflamme une frénésie salvatrice
Délire du Moi en fervente ébullition
Extase de l’être trempé au feu expiatoire.
Incandescence.
Active in the Catholic Church and nephew of a prominent politician, Daniel became my favorite teacher the day I argued against the doctrine of Papal infallibility in class: he told me I would make an infallible pope were I a Catholic. About the poem, he was gentle. “ ‘Agony’s child…revolt of the heart…the vile vomit of your vices and the rotten fluids of obsession…delirium of the self.’ Vishnu, these are well-chosen, strong words.” The lanky descendant of settlers from Alsace-Lorraine paused, took a Gauloise from its pack, and assumed an ironic, jesuitic tone: “I see the ghost of Baudelaire over your shoulders, advising you to broaden your experience and develop your own voice before you submit poems about agonizing souls and salvation. Baudelaire loved, caught syphilis, suffered. You have to live some more, Vishnu. At the same time, I can imagine him admiring your efforts and offering you his helping hand on the hard climb to Parnassus.”
The following month, my poem appeared in the magazine. I took up debating to overcome my shyness. Mama asked Shankar if my more extroverted ways were the long-term side effects of Dr. Curé’s medicine.
* * *
—
On the day the judgment in favor of Auntie Ranee was rendered, the Oxbridge A-level examinations results were announced: I was fourth in the National Scholarship Competition. Shankar joined us for dinner.
Papa congratulated me. “We have to focus on your university admission and scholarship now. You know I lost the case.”
“The goonda uncles think you are taking the case to the Privy Council in London,” I said.
“The Supreme Court says I should have filed twenty years earlier, but I couldn’t afford the legal fees then.”
“You can make that point at the Privy Council,” I said.
“Where will I get the money for an expensive British barrister? The local lawyers have eaten up my savings.”
Papa sighed. “You and Mama never wanted me to win. But no matter. We have to cele
brate your achievements now. We are all proud of you. Aren’t we, Mama?”
My mother’s face sparkled. As she served her crab curry, she said, “Who knows? Maybe you’ll be a famous lawyer someday.”
Papa could not resist. “Maître Vishnu Bhushan, QC, advocate for Shiv Bhushan in Bhushan v. Bhushan at the Privy Council.”
* * *
—
Eight years after my Oxbridge results, the day after I earned my doctorate at Harvard, I wrote Shankar a letter:
You wrote that Papa and Auntie Ranee have fully reconciled. This is wonderful. Maria was with me at the graduation ceremony. Not the Maria who sang to me after the Conclave of Goons but the woman I’m going to marry. She is not exactly what Uncle Ram would have wished: she’s neither English nor European à la Brigitte Bardot or Sophia Loren—but she comes pretty close to his criterion of “defiling the purity of Hindu blood.” She’s American and, like him, a non-believer. I’ve told her about my nervous breakdown, my adventures with Natalie Wood, the oja and the black rooster. She knows how Dr. Curé (Dr. Seegobin?), Papa and Mama spared me a lifetime at the lunatic asylum and saved me from the stigma of madness. I’ve asked her to do the same if ever I behave strangely: don’t ever take me to a mental hospital.
I sometimes wonder if Mama and Papa feel bad, that they may have driven me to that state. In truth, I’m forever grateful to Papa for insisting that I be treated at home, insisting that there be no mention of “nervous breakdown” in my school or medical records.
When I was in Mauritius, I blamed the whole thing on him. I’ve had other thoughts since. A sudden growth spurt with all kinds of hormonal imbalances may have caused it too. Maybe you were right—I needed sex and should have listened to you and gone to Rekha’s. Maybe in the society we had at the time, Dr. Curé couldn’t say sexual repression caused my breakdown. How could I have sex? Too young to have a girlfriend, Papa and Mama said. Too young, the priests, the imams and the pandits would say. What they didn’t know, or didn’t want to hear, is that at every opportunity, the stronger guys groped and caressed a classmate, the Adonis in our class—the dainty boy with the soft face, smooth skin, and rounded derrière who reminded them of the girls they couldn’t touch.
P.S: Did you hear that Natalie Wood drowned last week? I was melancholic all day.
Shankar replied by sending me a copy of the oja’s incantation as I had written it down:
Alpha Omega Swaha
Paternum Nobiscum Christum
Allah Akbar Mashallah Subhanallah
Jadoogar Agram Bagram
Lingam Yoni Spiritus Concupiscentia
Chatvari arya satyani
Om Shantee Shantee Shantee
Sanskrit, Latin, and Arabic words from Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim prayers mixed with words denoting sexual organs. An interpretation of the oja’s chant by a delirious adolescent, part sacrilege, part ecumenism.
XI
A Safe Place
He lent us his Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden,
our private tutor in maths,
guaranteeing top marks in exams—
a genius in the eyes of our parents
until his unmarried sister got pregnant.
At the market, beach, and barbershops,
at church, mosque, and temple,
the townsfolk dissected the news:
her lover was unknown, she an orphan,
her brother an alcoholic.
Our parents got us a sober tutor
who disapproved of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
XII
Tamasha
Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine. The commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel.
—John Keats, Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, March 19, 1819
As I walked left into Colony Street, about five minutes from the Catholic church in Mahébourg, I saw a crowd gathered in a circle in front of our house. On the outer fringes, men had put their shopping baskets on the asphalt. From the verandas and windows of the surrounding houses, women and children stretched to watch whatever event was unfolding at the center. As I got closer, I noticed the younger men were on the inside of the circle. A gambling match, I thought, but immediately realized that would not attract so much interest, especially from women and children. There was no festival, religious or otherwise, that Sunday. And the days of cockfighting were long since gone, even in remote villages. It was election season in Mauritius, but there were neither loudspeakers and microphones nor orators.
“Vishnu, vin guette tamasha,” someone shouted to me. Come see the tamasha!
Tamasha: a Hindi word I often heard in Bombay movies, a word that had become part of the Kreol language on the island. A word whose meaning encompasses song and dance, fun and excitement, as well as commotion and drama.
I wondered once again why my father, a schoolteacher who enjoyed reading his books and newspapers quietly in his room, had chosen to live in such a noisy neighborhood. That afternoon, he had gone with my mother to the market.
Just as I was about to reach the perimeter, the circle swelled outwards, with people shouting, “Watch out! They’re going to hurl it!”
Some twenty-five feet away, Kalipa, barrel-chested and wearing the red shirt of the Labour Party, moved towards Fringant, lean and supple and wearing the blue shirt of the PMSD, the Parti Mauricien Social Démocrate. Two brothers in their thirties, both fishermen. Each held a harpoon pointed at the other’s stomach.
I thought of Moby-Dick, which we read the previous year in secondary school, of Queequeg the Polynesian and Ahab’s harpoon crew. Indeed, Kalipa, a Creole, could pass for a Polynesian. Fringant, had he been a shade or two lighter, could have passed for a mulatto in the complex color scheme of Mauritius.
“Éta gogot, to marche ek sa pilon-là,” Kalipa said to Fringant, expressing his disgust at his brother’s support of Gaëtan Duval, the supposedly gay politician. Duval, the Lord Byron of Mauritian politics, whom I would meet fifteen years later in Washington at a Mauritian embassy reception, resplendent in a satiny pink shirt with ruffles, kissing the women’s hands and generating envy among the men. Duval, the leader whose pedigreed horses stole the show at his funeral.
“Vini, liki to mama, mo paré pou toi,” said Fringant, egging on his brother to fight.
In 1967, genitalia-rich profanities like gogot and liki to mama were common currency in our neighborhood, uttered so loudly in the streets that they penetrated our walls.
In the crowd, I recognized neighbors, hardworking Creole fishermen whose livelihood was earned at the mercy of the vagaries of sea and weather. Among them were two who had suffered a beating at the hands of the belligerent brothers a few months earlier at the débarcadère, the historic fishermen’s wharf. They had been showing off, to a gawking crowd, a wounded yellow-nosed albatross they had captured in the high seas, each stretching wide the giant white-and-black wings of the bird; in its helpless posture and suffering, it looked like Christ on the cross. Fringant and Kalipa smashed their noses and teeth and took the bleeding bird to the parish priest, asking him to drive it to the nearest veterinarian, fifteen miles away.
I also spotted the neighbor who, it was rumored, had raped his concubine’s daughter, and the soft-spoken carpenter vilified by his mother-in-law for being a hunchbacked dwarf. “You ugly frog! I know you’ve spent a fortune on sorcerers to seduce my daughter.” It was on a market day and on a street corner that the mother-in-law yelled the accusation.
Supporters of both political parties, clad in red or blue shirts, were at the Kalipa-versus-Fringant event. Someone shouted, “This is Muhammad Ali versus Sonny Liston”; whistles followed. “Cain and Abel,” said an old man standing next to me. His remark got no response. Part of me was puzzled that so many men were leaning on their bicycles,
waiting for the outcome of the confrontation instead of intervening to stop it or riding to the police station, about half a mile away, to ask for help. The other part of me was a sixteen-year-old who wanted to stay and enjoy the tamasha.
The two brothers put down their harpoons, took off their shirts with a flourish, and cast them on the pavement. Their chests glistened in the sun.
I moved towards the inner circle, close enough to Kalipa and Fringant to see their rib cages moving up and down as they breathed. My heart beat faster. At first it was in anticipation of their next move. Then it was unease. A devilish trembling of my knees. When they picked up the harpoons, I got scared. One miscalculation by Kalipa or Fringant and a harpoon would skewer my entrails. Or the groin of the guy next to me. I turned and tried to walk back to the gate of our house, but there was no turning back. Behind me were sweaty and sinewy men reeking of rum who wouldn’t budge; they were here for the tamasha and didn’t want their show disturbed. I felt like an early Christian trapped in the pit of the Colosseum, forced to watch the gladiators kill each other. Except this was no Hollywood film or novel. It was the real thing.
As the tension grew, the crowd turned quiet. The scent of papayas from our yard wafted on the wind. Kalipa’s shorts exposed calves as thick as Fringant’s thighs. Fringant taunted his brother by shuffling his feet rapidly, as if he really were in a boxing ring. In a split second, Kalipa aimed and flung his harpoon. Fringant ducked. The harpoon landed at their father’s feet just as he rounded the street corner.
The crowd gasped.
Tonton George ignored the harpoon and walked straight to his sons.
Silent Winds, Dry Seas Page 11
