He pointed to the shirts on the asphalt. The sons bent to pick them up.
Men grabbed their bicycles, and within a few minutes the crowd was gone.
When I reached our gate, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief and vowed to myself never to venture that close to a fight.
* * *
—
Earlier that morning, on my way to the seaside, both brothers had said hello to me from the bar owned by the Chinese shopkeeper Chung Fat, three minutes’ walk from our house. Like many of the patrons, they dropped in on their way back from Mass. They stood at opposite ends of the veranda, Kalipa, glass in hand, chatting with Chung Fat, and Fringant pouring a drink for Tonton George. They were dressed in their Sunday best—white shirts, black trousers. No red, no blue.
* * *
—
The day before Kalipa flung his harpoon at his brother Fringant and missed, they attended a political meeting at Ville Noire, a coastal hamlet adjoining Mahébourg. Like many of the youngsters there, I went for the entertainment that such a gathering provided and to revel in the oratory of Harold Walter. A Labour Party member, Walter represented our district at the Colonial Legislature. A political meeting was a fun place to hang out. There was no TV at home, and though I enjoyed the two- or three-movie matinees on weekends, my meager pocket money or the rupee or two I sometimes filched from my father’s pocket could stretch only so far. Going out with girls? Like my classmates, I saw petting and sex in the movies but could only dream and grind my teeth in frustration; parents didn’t let their daughters go out alone after school. Like Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, we read the Romantic poets in school. Unlike them, we couldn’t indulge in actual romance. Unless we craved a good thrashing from the girl’s father or uncles.
I didn’t have the right to vote, but, strange as it may sound, I had caught the political fever sweeping the country. So had most of my classmates.
It was hard to resist the lure of posters glued to electrical and telephone poles, on shopfronts and walls that announced:
Grand Meeting
à la Ville Noire
Ténors du Parti Travailliste
Honorable Harold Walter
Honorable Jay Narain Roy
Honorable Iqbal Mohamed
Honorable Ah-Chuen
When I arrived, the crowd could barely fit into the makeshift soccer field where the meeting was being held. It was half a mile from the water’s edge. The sultry sea breeze blew in the stink of the nearby abattoir, the slaughterhouse. After the initial assault on the nostrils, I got used to the porcine smell, like everyone else. I spotted people from the nearby villages whom I usually ran into at the Mahébourg bazaar. Even the charcoal vendor, who never left his store by the southern side of the bazaar, near the Mahé Cinema, was there. Loudspeakers blared music at the four corners of the field, while the organizers waited for all the orators to show up on an improvised wooden platform decorated with red ribbons and flags.
Red-shirted Kalipa stood in the front row. Like a bouncer in a nightclub, he would handle hecklers who got too close to the speakers.
Blue-shirted Fringant, with other PMSD supporters, were at the far end.
A stout man with a square jaw and intense eyes, Walter thanked those who had elected him in 1964 and spoke about his contribution to the welfare of his constituents. After all these years, I’ve forgotten what he boasted about, but I remember the heated moments that followed.
A blue-shirted heckler burst forth. “You voted for birth control. You’re against the Catholic Church!”
Another blue shirt shouted, “Baby murderer! Immoral pagan!”
Walter, a Protestant, took them on. “Immoral? Is it immoral to have two or three well-fed children instead of many you can’t feed? Is it immoral to be able to provide an education to your kids?”
Some Labour Party supporters turned to the blue-shirted hecklers and screamed:
“Shut up, you morons!”
“Go home!”
Walter resumed: “Nobody is forcing you to use contraceptives. If you want more children, have them. Use the rhythm method if you want. A Labour government will finance all genuine family planning organizations.”
Then he added, “But I’m not here to talk about myself or birth control today. We are here to talk about independence. The independence of Mauritius. Independence is inevitable, whether Duval and the PMSD like it or not.”
The red shirts, mostly Hindus and a few Creoles, clapped their hands.
“Causer, frère! L’indépendans nous ouler!” Say it, brother! We want independence!
Kalipa and I exchanged smiles.
By that time Fringant had moved closer to the speakers’ platform. He saw us but didn’t smile.
Walter’s sonorous voice went on: “The British prime minister has said the wind of change is blowing through Africa. But Duval doesn’t hear it. Duval doesn’t feel it. Duval doesn’t taste it. How can he? He’s in the pay of the white sugar barons who want to keep their privileges.”
The blue shirts, largely Creoles and a sprinkling of Hindus, were for the most part quiet. Fringant frowned. One blue soul brandished a poster of a skeletal child with an empty bowl; the caption read independence = famine. Other posters read:
down with independence!
we want integration with england!
A blue shirt screamed, “Long live Duval, lé roi Creole!”
Walter was a Creole like Duval, but lighter-skinned and therefore assumed by quite a few to be a mulatto.
His voice turned pugnacious. “Duval king of the Creoles? How can he be when the sugar barons are his paymasters? Have you forgotten how the sugar estates exploited your slave ancestors? My Creole brothers, vote for independence, for your dignity, for freedom.”
Walter sized up the crowd.
“They talk about Hindu hegemony. They tell you after independence the Hindu majority will dominate the minorities. Don’t let the fat cats who own the Parti Mauricien divide you! Creoles and Hindus share a common destiny—we are brothers in suffering.”
Walter paused. Then he thundered, “It’s time for our freedom. Freedom now! Independence now!”
Walter had fired up the red shirts. The wind carried the applause beyond the Ville Noire bridge to Mahébourg, I was told later by the blacksmith hammering away by his forge at the edge of the bridge, as his sooty assistant pumped the bellows.
Throughout the meeting, Kalipa and Fringant had their ears glued to the orators and stayed quiet. When the meeting was over, Kalipa shook Walter’s hands. They chatted for a while and hugged each other as they took leave.
Most of the crowd, including the blue shirts, was good-humored when they dispersed. However, with their clenched jaws and frowning eyebrows, Fringant and a few of the younger blue shirts didn’t look happy.
* * *
—
When my parents returned home from the market and I told them about the Kalipa-Fringant tamasha, Mama’s perennial worried look turned into one of alarm.
“Oh, my God! I hope nothing happened to you,” she said as she touched my cheekbones and lips. She was checking whether I had sustained any blows! “Couldn’t you just stay home after we left?”
“They won’t do anything to him. It’s between two brothers,” Papa said. “That’s the way they settle their political differences. Tomorrow they’ll be hugging each other.”
“I don’t like politics,” Mama said.
“Papa, we should leave this place,” I said.
“We’ve had this conversation before, and you know the answer,” Papa said.
“You expect me to study with all that fighting and noise? I can’t win that university scholarship living here.”
“Vishnu, you’re at the best secondary school in the country. At your age, I labored in t
he sugarcane fields. Instead of secondary school, I had to take a correspondence course years later.”
“I know. And you walked three miles every day to your primary school.”
He went on: “You have good genes. I passed the entrance exams to the Teachers Training College with higher scores than the guys who went to secondary school. You have it in you, Vishnu, believe me!”
“You lived in quiet Ferney,” Mama said. “Here we have to put up with drunks gambling at our doorstep and stray dogs barking all night.”
“Papa, we wake up to the tune of gogot; I come back from school, it’s a chorus of liki to mama; in the evening, I start my homework and it’s a concert of fallou to mama. On the weekend, the whole neighborhood is drinking the night away and dancing the séga.”
Mama handed me sweets she’d bought at the market and shook her head. “You can’t win with the old man,” she said, and went to the kitchen. “I’m getting dinner ready.”
“Remember Disraeli?” Papa said.
“You mean the clown who was jeered in the House of Commons for wearing multicolored trousers?”
“Vishnu, don’t make fun of me!” Papa said. “You know very well what I’m driving at.”
I knew what was coming, for Papa had shown me the course materials from his correspondence school, Wolsey Hall, Oxford. On the word “Oxford” he would linger.
“Disraeli, the first Jew to be Britain’s prime minister. What did he say when the establishment scoffed at him?”
I didn’t want to answer.
Papa went on: “ ‘The secret of success is constancy to purpose.’ Bear Disraeli’s words in mind and you’ll make it.”
“Why don’t we move to the Quartier neighborhood, where we used to live with Uncle Ram?” I said.
“You know very well that I offered to buy Uncle’s house after he died, but Auntie Ranee got a better offer. I don’t have the money for that neighborhood. Have some patience. Two more years here and off you go to England!”
“Aren’t you afraid of the violence? We Hindus are outnumbered by Creoles here.”
“Their fear of independence is temporary. Once they realize we depend on each other, the violence will pass.”
“In the meantime, we stay here and get harpooned!” I said.
“They won’t harm us. You forgot what happened in 1965?”
* * *
—
I hadn’t forgotten what happened in 1965. In early May, I woke up one morning to find a policeman on the veranda. He was addressing my parents: “Don’t worry, we’ve posted riot police in front of your gate and on the street. This will dissuade anyone from attacking your house.”
After he left, I asked my father what had happened.
“A white man driving through Trois Boutiques has been killed by Hindus there and some Creoles are seeking revenge. Creoles and whites are allies now.”
Trois Boutiques, five miles away, a village with a Hindu majority. Mostly sugarcane laborers and planters, and vegetable growers. A village so somnolent that some of my classmates had never heard of it.
Mama was shaking. She could hardly breathe as she spoke: “We’re one of the few Hindu families in the neighborhood.”
Papa shook his head and said, “Hindus and Creoles killing each other! This has never happened in Mauritius. It must be the politicians stirring trouble.”
“I don’t like politics,” Mama said.
I raised my arms to open the window. I wanted to see the riot police.
“Don’t,” said my father.
We had breakfast with the doors and windows closed. It was eerie. Mama always opened the doors and windows at dawn, when she got up to pray outdoors to the Sun God, and they stayed open until sunset. Everyone kept doors and windows open; theft was never a problem, even though the neighborhood was rough. That early morning, however, life was different. The habitual sounds of daily existence were missing. We didn’t hear, even in muffled tones, the bicycle bells ringing on their way to the bazaar, the milkman squeezing his bulb horn to announce his arrival, or the fishermen greeting one another after spending the night at sea. The silence was menacing.
By the time the church bell struck ten, I could hear some of the familiar sounds returning to the street. Shoes and flip-flops hitting the asphalt, mingled with conversation. The itinerant fruit seller shouting, “Goyaves de Chine! Jamblons!” We opened the windows.
The helmets of the riot police gleamed in the sunshine. It was the first time I saw fully armed police that close. I often walked by the sleepy police station on my way to Papa’s sugarcane fields: the guys in there were not armed; they looked like boxers in khaki uniforms, boxers condemned to a life of paperwork. They often smiled and said hello, and when they patrolled the streets, their only weapon was a baton. The men standing stern in front of our house that day looked like they had parachuted out of a World War II movie, with their boots and rifles.
Papa asked one of them if it was okay for us to walk around.
“The situation is quiet now; but stay alert,” he replied.
“Let’s check out the bazaar,” Papa said to me.
We passed by the bar. Chung Fat was sweeping peanut shells and bread crumbs off the veranda floor, getting it ready for his lunchtime customers.
On the way, we saw small groups, not more than four at a time, talking softly, whispering almost. The air was heavy with disquiet and suspicion.
We reached the house of a police superintendent, a Hindu acquaintance of my father’s. The windowpanes had been shattered. A smashed television set lay on the floor of the veranda.
“That’s a warning, Pa. They want us to decamp,” I said.
My father didn’t respond, but his nervous tic flared up. He kept turning his head to the left and blinking his eyes. He went to knock on the door but was stopped by a policeman who told him that the occupants had left.
Another quarter-mile walk and it was evident that the other Hindu families in the vicinity had also vacated their homes.
At the bazaar, we heard that Creole families in the Trois Boutiques area had moved out of their homes. Some Hindus claimed that the white man killed in Trois Boutiques had been delivering arms to the Creole election agents of the Parti Mauricien. “They want Hindus and Creoles to fight and kill each other so they can convince the British that Mauritius is not ready for independence” was their refrain. Creoles said that Hindus were storing arms in their baïtkas and temples; Hindus said that Creoles were hiding guns in churches. News reached the bazaar that the riot police had rounded up all the adult Hindu males of Trois Boutiques and herded them into the village soccer stadium. When we left, I was dizzy with the flood of rumors jumbled with information, and asked Papa to buy me two tablets of aspirin.
“Too many hotheads on both sides,” my father said to me as we walked home. “The truth is slippery.”
As we neared the district court building on Maurice Street, a tall wiry fellow named César advanced towards us. I never figured out how he earned his living. A Creole, he stayed in a comfortable bungalow near the beach; he dressed smart, and I sometimes saw him coming out of Pac Soo with a shopping bag. At that time, Pac Soo was the only Chinese retailer in Mahébourg that stocked the fancy goods affluent Franco-Mauritians from the sugar estates sought: French wines and cheese, Scotch, Gauloises cigarettes, magazines like Paris Match, crystal glasses. Some said César was an election agent of the Parti Mauricien; others described him as a tapeur—a goon—of the party. In those days, most parties had their tapeurs who acted as bodyguards to party officials but could also be relied on to execute assignments requiring strong arms. In a respectful but firm voice, César told Papa that we should leave our house if we care about our safety. He was gone in less than a minute.
I felt my pulse racing and my heartbeat quicken. I wanted to ask Papa about his plans but felt too weak t
o do so. Maybe I had ambivalent feelings. I was angry at him for moving us into such a neighborhood. At the same time, I felt sorry for him: he would lose much of his hard-earned money if he had to sell the house at a distressed price, and he would feel humiliated by the move. He remained quiet.
When we reached Chung Fat’s bar, two men came out to greet us—Kalipa and Fringant, both of whom supported the PMSD at the time. I felt my sweat go cold. They are here to enforce César’s wishes, I thought.
Papa didn’t wait for them to speak. “So you want me to leave,” he said.
“Mr. Bhushan, César talks from his derrière,” Kalipa said, using the relatively mild, almost polite, word for backside. I expected him to use the Kreol equivalent for ass or asshole.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Bhushan, we won’t touch you and your family,” Fringant said. “You were our teacher—how can we forget that?”
“Stay put, but don’t leave the lights on at night,” Kalipa added as he waved good-bye to us.
That evening, we heard on the radio that British troops were being dispatched from Aden to the island to quell any further disturbances.
“Not just any British troops,” Papa said when he heard the news. “The Coldstream Guards,” he emphasized.
His mood changed. The two brothers had assured him that we would be safe. But the arrival of the Coldstream Guards gave him an extra measure of reassurance, and Papa the schoolteacher launched into yet another history lesson.
“The Coldstream Guards is the oldest English regiment serving continuously in the British Army. They fought against Louis XIV in Flanders. Crack troops guarding the monarchs of England.”
On Saturday May 15, the Coldstream Guards were deployed throughout the island. Three of them replaced the riot police stationed in front of our house and at the crossroads. When my father learnt from one of them that their commander was a Major Willoughby, he embarked on speculation.
“What a coincidence!” he said. “He’s probably a descendant of Captain Nesbit Willoughby, the commander of the British frigates who fought the French off our coast in 1810. Imagine! His ancestor lay wounded and was treated at the Château Gheude, here in Mahébourg.”
Silent Winds, Dry Seas Page 12
