Silent Winds, Dry Seas

by Vinod Busjeet

  “I hope Major Willoughby will take some time off to visit the château and have a conversation with his ancestor’s ghost,” I said.

  At that moment, I was irreverent and cheeky, an adolescent chafing at what I thought was pedantic. Decades later, I read the official history of the Coldstream Guards and found that my father was right about the lineage of the two Willoughbys. In another time, another place, where he had a university education, he would have been a professor or historian.

  The next day, Sunday, Papa and I went to check work done in Mama’s sugarcane field, Carreau Cocos, thus named because in the middle of her two acres grew towering coconut trees, so tall they were visible a mile away. The island’s airport was close, part of its boundaries skirting Carreau Cocos. At the time, the landing strip was small. On the tarmac, we saw a plane bearing the Royal Air Force insignia.

  “This must be the Argosy aircraft that flew the Coldstream Guards,” Papa said. “It’s powered by four Rolls-Royce engines.”

  My father’s knowledge of military transport aircraft surprised me. He had never talked about engines or airplanes.

  He then confided, “Before I was a teacher, I was an inventory clerk at the airport during its construction. It was right after World War II. My boss was an Englishman. When he left, he asked me to join him in England. Sometimes when I come here and see an airplane, I ask myself how my life would have been if I had accepted his offer.”

  * * *

  —

  For the first three weeks…the Platoons patrolled on foot and in vehicles round the villages and likely trouble-spots…almost invariably they were well received, though on a few occasions they were not made so welcome, but they were never attacked and never had to fire a shot…By the end of the month the situation had eased…on 12 June the Queen’s Birthday Parade was held in Port Louis…Thereafter patrols decreased…For the rest it was training, competitions, sport and entertainment and most hospitable the people were. It was a sad Company that finally flew away from the island and back to Aden on 18 July.

  Thus wrote the Coldstream Guard historian. A different sadness pervaded Mauritian homes. The air we now breathed tasted sour. The unspoken question in people’s minds was “Will Hindus and Creoles ever see each other the same way again?” For almost a year my friends didn’t feel comfortable or safe to walk to our home; I had to meet them near the church and escort them.

  * * *

  —

  Two years before these 1965 riots, my father was, for a brief period, headmaster of Trois Boutiques primary school. As he waited for the Mahébourg bus in the afternoon, some of the villagers would talk to him, and once in a while he would tell me about it. They asked about their children’s progress but would quickly veer to politics and what they read in the newspapers. Not unusual in a country where politics has been the national pastime for as long as I can remember.

  My father had related one such conversation that took place in November 1963.

  “Mr. Bhushan, some supporters of the Parti Mauricien have insulted us at the Champ de Mars,” said one villager. “They called Hindus ‘Malbars coolie,’ like in the old days. Why isn’t the government doing something about it?”

  “They screamed, ‘Malbars nou pas ouler, envelopés nou pas ouler,’ ” said another. “They don’t want Malbars, they don’t want Hindu women enveloped in saris. We are the majority in this country. How dare they talk like that?”

  Not to be outdone in venting grievances, a third villager added, “Remember Jules Koenig, Duval’s mentor? Remember what he said about giving Hindus the right to vote? ‘It’s giving a monkey a razor.’ ”

  Jules Koenig, uncle of my favorite French teacher, who once described him as someone from la vieille France, the France of the old days. A figure worthy of a Shakespearean or Corneillian tragedy: assaulted in the 1930s as a young barrister taking up the cause of Indian and Creole workers, he ended his political career by returning to the fold, fighting to maintain the privileges of the sugar barons.

  A fourth villager added, “Now their propaganda is ‘After independence, Hindus will force everyone to wear the dhoti. Shiploads of dhotis will set sail from India.’ ”

  Papa wasn’t surprised when someone asked, “Mr. Bhushan, are they blind? Can’t they see we all wear European clothes? I don’t even know how to put a dhoti on.”

  As I tried to make sense of the Trois Boutiques Hindu riots and the Creole riposte in Mahébourg, I remembered César, Fringant, and Kalipa, their blue shirts fluttering in the wind, boarding the “Special Route” bus that took them to the Champ de Mars demonstration of “malbars nou pas ouler, envelopés nou pas ouler” fame.

  * * *

  —

  When, two years after the 1965 Hindu-Creole riots, Kalipa and Fringant faced each other with harpoons in front of our house, Kalipa had discarded his blue shirt for a red one. Unlike his brother, he had switched political allegiance from the Parti Mauricien to the Labour Party and canvassed hard for independence. In August 1967, the pro-independence coalition won the elections.

  A few months later, around the time the shop windows started displaying Christmas toys and New Year’s firecrackers, Mama and I were relaxing on the veranda when we saw Papa walking to the gate, flanked by Kalipa and Fringant. I was mystified. Mama’s face turned pale. Had Papa suffered a malaise at the bazaar and they were escorting him home? Or was there something more sinister?

  Before we could run down the steps and ask if anything was wrong, Papa said, “The seas are rough, and Kalipa and Fringant need work. I told them to fix the gables.”

  I knew their father, Tonton George, was a carpenter who enjoyed a reputation for refined workmanship. His clientele included the sugar barons who owned beach houses in nearby Blue Bay. But neither Mama nor I had ever heard of the sons doing construction work. Besides, the gable repairs could probably wait another six months.

  Their survey of the repairs to be done and their negotiations didn’t take long. After they left, I told Papa, “I hope Tonton George’s construction skills have rubbed off on them.”

  “This is a special time of the year, and they need the money,” Papa said.

  Over the Christmas holidays, Kalipa and Fringant worked on the gables, and I would bring them sardine-and-tomato sandwiches that Mama made for them. On the second or third day, as they washed their hands at the outdoor tap, they asked me to join them for a chat at lunch. We sat on tree stumps. I realized that, in the four years I’d been living in the neighborhood, this was the first time I was having an extended conversation with adult neighbors. They asked me about school and my favorite movies, and I asked about fishing in the high seas.

  “Come with us one day,” Kalipa said. “You’ve been to Île de la Passe?”

  “Papa won’t let me.”

  “You’re sixteen or seventeen and you’ve not been there? You can see that islet from your roof,” Kalipa said, staring at me in disbelief.

  “Mr. Bhushan is afraid his only child will drown,” said Fringant.

  “Right. Whenever I ask my father to let me go, he reminds me of the night you two went missing in the storm, when the whole neighborhood waited by the shore till dawn for you. I remember all the lanterns flickering in the wind. Everyone worried that you had drowned.”

  Kalipa shook his head. “They make you read crap about Napoleon and how his fleet defeated the Royal Navy at Île de la Passe, and you haven’t set foot there!”

  Soon after they completed the repairs, in early January 1968, the brothers had a belated Christmas present for me: a trip to Île de la Passe, on a day my parents were out of town. The occasion presented itself when the latter went to a wedding in Cap Malheureux, the northernmost village in Mauritius, almost fifty miles away by bus. That Sunday, I met the two brothers at their home. “We’ll leave in the afternoon and come back late in the evening, so you can see the high
and the low tides,” Kalipa said.

  Their house was made of corrugated iron sheets that had turned reddish brown from rust. All doors and windows were open for maximum ventilation, and I could see their three rooms. One had a double bed, which I assumed was Kalipa’s and his wife’s. Adjacent to it, a room with a crib and a single bed for their two kids, who were gamboling on the street, there being no yard to play in. On the wall hung a picture of brown-robed Saint Anthony of Padua cradling a chubby child Jesus with lilies in his hands. And at the far end, a room with two mattresses on the floor, where Fringant and Tonton George were getting dressed. No living room or veranda.

  Kalipa’s wife asked me into the kitchen, a shack outside the house. With apprehension on her face, she opened the three aluminum food containers on the table. Macaroni, fried mullet, and rougaille of prawns. I inhaled the tangy aroma of seafood cooked with cayenne pepper and tomato. “That’s the kind of meal Mama makes on festive occasions,” I said.

  Her eyes brightened. “I can see you’ll enjoy your picnic,” she said as she closed the containers and put them in a basket.

  Though I was curious about the Île de la Passe, it was with some trepidation that I stepped inside their pirogue, a narrow boat built from wooden planks. No life jacket or life buoy in sight. The brothers punted the boat out of the shallow water with push poles, then unfurled the cotton sails. The pirogue felt unsteady, and I held on to the gunwale, but the brothers looked comfortable and smiled at me. Fringant noticed that I was eyeing the diesel motor on board. “No need for that today,” he said. “We have fair winds.”

  The brothers tried to make conversation, but it took me a few minutes to relax and overcome my worry that the boat would capsize. The wind blowing on my face took the sting out of the brutal summer heat. I looked behind me. The sight of Mahébourg and the coastline receding was, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, calming. I looked up. The confidence of the birds soaring over the neighboring islets was inspiring and made me question my fear of the water. Fringant and Kalipa showed me the areas with the highest fish catches, where they cast their nets.

  After we disembarked on the Île de la Passe, I saw a different Kalipa and Fringant. They spoke of French corsairs who raided the ships of the British East India Company off the coast of Mauritius. They morphed into unofficial guides proud to show off their knowledge of the remains of the French garrison. “Do you hear the cannons firing and exploding? Do you see the blood of British and French soldiers turning the sea red-purple?” Kalipa said. He spoke of “our” lost strategic importance: “When Ferdinand de Lesseps built the Suez Canal, ships bypassed us on their way to India and China, and we were no longer the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean,” he said. Fringant was more down-to-earth. He showed me the powder house that stored wooden barrels of gunpowder, now overrun with shrubs growing in the cracks of its walls, and the graffiti of regimental flags soldiers had carved on the sides of the storehouse. Both, however, had a similar fascination with the hot-shot furnace. Their eyes glowed when they explained how iron cannonballs were heated red-hot before being launched to blast and set fire to enemy warships.

  By the time we sat at the corner of the battery wall and the storehouse, and Fringant opened the picnic basket, the sky had turned a reddish-orange hue and the sun was dipping behind the Mahébourg coastline. The sea around the islet was calm, and we were the only ones there. Kalipa took out a bottle of A-1 Rhum de Prestige. With twigs, sticks, straw, and leaves that Fringant and I gathered, we built a campfire. Not long after, the brothers transformed the emptied food containers into improvised ravvan, percussion instruments to accompany “Noir noir noir do mama, guette couma faire noir” and “Lotte côté Montagne Chamarel.” The light of the campfire softened their features, and the way they interpreted these songs, with their hypnotic rhythms and jagged edges, revealed to me the richness of the séga. It was no longer simply a song to dance to, one that disturbed my weekend study. In Kalipa’s and Fringant’s resonant voices I heard more than two centuries of suffering and resilience compressed into a two- or three-minute melody. In that islet surrounded by the endless expanse of sea and sky, the brothers transported me to the days of Maroon slaves fleeing oppression to find joy in music and sex in the ravines near Chamarel.

  On the way back to Mahébourg, it was dark, but now I wasn’t afraid. I trusted the two brothers to bring me home safely, and I enjoyed the sea.

  Fringant pointed out the treacherous spot where they had nearly lost their lives in a storm. “Now that we’re almost home, I’m telling you. Didn’t want to alarm you when we were sailing to Île de la Passe.” I recalled that dawn when all the neighbors had gathered on the beach, apprehensive because the brothers had not returned.

  Ten minutes from the coastline, they questioned me about my plans for the future. I told them I was studying hard for the university scholarship.

  “You’ll be the first one from the neighborhood to win that scholarship,” Kalipa said. “Mahébourg will be proud!”

  “Everyone here is rooting for you. Bets have already been placed,” Fringant added.

  “You’ll go beyond the seas to bigger and better things,” Kalipa said.

  The neighborhood appeared to me in a new light. They consider me one of their own. I’m their horse in the race. I had wanted to move away, but now I had to question whatever I believed about the neighborhood. The racket in the streets, the outbursts of violence, were suddenly irrelevant. I smiled, but I didn’t know what to say to Fringant and Kalipa. Sure, my goal was to thrive among the elite. I was flattered, but what if I let them down? More than a thousand students were taking the A-levels and competing for four scholarships.

  Kalipa patted me on the shoulder. “Whatever you do in the future, avoid politics,” he said. “Politics in this country, it’s a predator. It devours you.”

  “You’re not an election agent anymore? You were so into politics, you were about to kill each other over Gaëtan Duval once,” I said.

  Kalipa lit a Matelot and inhaled. “Duval’s party couldn’t buy my vote with promises of jobs and rum. Duval can’t stop history. Vive l’indépendans!”

  “Elections are over,” Fringant said. “Time to move on.”

  Kalipa took the cigarette out of his mouth, blew the smoke through his nose, and said, “You voted dumb.”

  My eyes flitted from Kalipa to Fringant.

  In the glow of the hurricane lamp, I saw Fringant frown, but his voice remained calm: “Your friend Harold Walter talks big. He babbles about the winds of change. I know about winds, and I can tell him they don’t blow the same for all.”

  “It’s the same fucking wind,” Kalipa said.

  “It’s not the same for us, on our peanut shell of a boat, and for the big shot on his giant yacht. Some will sail smoothly with the winds of change, some will withstand them, and others will be swept away.”

  Kalipa ground his barely consumed cigarette on the floor of the boat.

  * * *

  —

  Barely two weeks after the peanut shell boat conversation, in late January 1968, Creole-Muslim riots broke out in the capital. They made the 1965 Hindu-Creole riots look like a barbecue on the beach.

  The talk among my friends: “Will Kalipa and Fringant get involved?”

  “They’re fed up with politics,” I tell them.

  “Are they fed up with knives and harpoons?” was the rejoinder.

  More than thirty dead and hundreds wounded, compared with three dead and a dozen wounded in Trois Boutiques–Mahébourg three years earlier.

  With a total population of 790,000, thirty dead is no small number.

  Again, the lines between rumor and fact blur.

  “The official figures lie,” a neighbor told Mama at the time. “Three of my cousins have been missing for two weeks. Bodies have been dumped in the sea. More than two hundred have been killed, believe
me!”

  The neighbor also said that the Muslim “Istanbul” gangs and the Creole “Texas” gangs, fighting for control of drugs and prostitution, started the battle after some Muslim women had been molested at the Venus Cinema. Fringant gave me a different version: “The match was lit when a Muslim pimp killed a Creole whore who stopped working for him.”

  * * *

  —

  Women raped.

  Houses looted and torched.

  Molotov cocktails hurled.

  Hundreds displaced. Mixed neighborhoods denatured into exclusively Creole or Muslim neighborhoods. Plaine Verte becomes a Muslim fortress, Roche Bois a Creole citadel.

  Penises inspected at improvised neighborhood checkpoints. Muslim males are circumcised; Creoles are not. Woe betide if you have the wrong penis!

  Dried blood on the ground.

  A hundred and forty British troops dispatched from Singapore in three Hercules aircraft—the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry.

  “These soldiers don’t have the pedigree of the Coldstream Guards,” Papa said. “They’ll take longer to quell the riots.”

  HMS Euryalus, a Royal Navy vessel, arrived to guard the island’s gasoline storage depot.

  Three Sioux helicopters flew into the capital.

  In Mahébourg, we were all anxious—our family, the neighbors, Hindus, Muslims, Creole, Chinese, everyone. The miracle: the riots are confined to Port Louis and its environs.

  * * *

  —

  Abiding by the election results, the British announced that they’d transfer power to Mauritians on March 12, 1968. Kalipa had no doubt the riots had been fomented to show Britain that Mauritius was not ready for independence: “Politicians who owned metal-making factories in Port Louis supplied the knives and sabers, my father told me and Fringant. He warned us not to get involved.”