Silence of the Chagos

by Shenaz Patel

  The women stepped forward. Their feet landed flat on the ground, their lower backs curved as their bodies enacted a rhythmic tremor. The onlookers’ voices responded. The cadence accelerated. The flared skirts started twirling, sweeping the ground in wide circles as the women’s hands lifted them up to reveal the voluminous white underskirts covering their legs down to their ankles.

  The tunes followed upon each other in the yard, where the oil lamps’ light danced in the night. Everyone took turns going up to the fire to warm the drum skins again as soon as they started to soften. There was no question of breaking the rhythm, or dampening everybody’s high spirits. Rita didn’t need to be asked twice for more of her famous kalou, which she’d made by mixing lentils and mashed corn kernels, putting it all in a gunnysack, then plucking out the seedlings to let them ferment. Every so often she added some sugar. It was far stronger than baka.

  The hours flew by. The sky started to turn pale over the sea. The men let the fire die down in a quiet crackle. One last dance, then it was time for them all to head out together and descend upon the midpoint where they would meet the other group, the one that had gathered at Amelia’s the same night on the other arm of the atoll.

  “Ale nou ale, nou gete ki sannla inn fer pli zoli fet!”

  Amid fits of laughter and joking, the troupe pressed onward to the rhythm of their drums. Yes, every proper Saturday night ended with a friendly spar to decide which side had had the most fun. Soon they would hear the sounds of other drums, accompanied by a burble of voices presuming victory.

  The sun weighed down already heavy eyelids. Each group insisted the other wasn’t half as good, bragged about their night’s exploits, boasted that they’d outdone themselves in ambience.

  The only way to decide once and for all was to call the sun to judge one final dance right there and then. The signal to start was accompanied by cheers and shouts of encouragement. The two groups’ drums sized each other up, taunted each other, pushed back at each other, and ended up combining in a final conflagration that drew the dancers into a frenzy before casting them out onto the sand, out of breath, practically unable to laugh.

  Little by little, they got back up and went their separate ways to their shacks. They had just enough time to change their clothes before they headed to Mass in the little church, where the administrator officiated perfunctorily at the pulpit, in between the priests’ occasional visits and more elaborate services.

  Charlesia splashed water on her face hurriedly. The children, who had all come home last night once they were starting to feel tired, were now starting to wake up. But what was Serge doing? He knew he needed to get to the tap before the children did, or else they wouldn’t be ready in time.

  “Serge, kot to ete?” Charlesia called out to him once, then again, but to no avail. He must have been in that deep sleep that comes after a night of sega.

  “Serge?” Charlesia stepped inside. Huddled over the edge of the bed, Serge was contorted in pain, his face flushed, his hand gripping his right side.

  ‌Mauritius, 1973

  At the port’s entrance, six photos were at eye level on the wall of the sentry box, next to the chair where Tony watched the comings and goings. Six. One for each birthday of his angel. Every so often he imagined that he could have had others. This too-gray wall papered over with their faces. His wife miscarried a year after their little prince was born, and the doctor hadn’t minced his words: there would be no more children. But this one he did have made him so happy. “A gift from the heavens”: he loved to repeat those words. And his little boy’s laughing face did brighten the frame of the sentry box.

  The other day, the woman in the red headscarf had told him that the boy was as charming as a Cape canary, but that he must be getting a bit boisterous now. He had to concede that she had practically seen his birth and been there the whole time he’d grown. Seven years had gone by since Tony had first seen her, standing at the far end of the quay, scrutinizing the sea as if she wanted to wrench it open, and she was still there. She always came back, not regularly but constantly. The furrows around her lips had deepened. The threadbare cloth of her red headscarf revealed a few strands of gray, right at the top of her forehead. But her posture hadn’t changed. Still the same way of turning her back, like a bristling barbed-wire fence, to the city buzzing behind her. She gave herself over completely to this sea and this sky, as if, at any moment, she could walk right into the water and dissolve into the blue. That was what Tony told himself sometimes, when the heat of the Port Louis summer was so fierce it could have melted his brain.

  It was on one such day that he decided at long last to talk to her, to offer her some water. She had stood so long on the quay that it made him sweat just to look at her. She didn’t refuse the bottle he held out. A silent agreement of sorts seemed to have been established. He let her enter and leave without any questions. Sometimes he struck up a conversation with her when she was walking out. Nothing serious. Some thoughts about the weather. At first, she had not deigned to respond. Then, she’d allowed a slight nod, a small grunt of agreement, a few words. A yes, a no, a maybe. Until the day he showed her the photos of his little gentleman. It made her smile, or almost did. Her youngest son was a bit like him, just two years older. It became clear that she knew practically everything when it came to children, and he started asking her advice about bronchitis, teething, first nightmares.

  And she asked him about the port, its routines, about each boat’s arrivals and departures. One day, it must have been in 1969, but he couldn’t remember the exact month anymore, she swooped down on him, frenetic.

  “Ki ete sa bato la?”

  “Ki bato?”

  “Sa gro bato dan milie la rad la?”

  He sensed that she wanted to know more about this ship that had arrived the day before. The MV Patris. It looked like a luxury ship, but he said it was just a vessel for middle-class passengers. An aging liner, with dining rooms, a ballroom, separate swimming pools for adults and children. It had come from Djibouti and was making a stopover in Mauritius on its way east. A gleam shone in her eyes as she asked, “Li pa al Diego sa?”

  He had laughed. Diego? No, that boat was certainly not going anywhere near Diego, it wasn’t sailing upward, it was going downward, much farther downward, to Australia.

  “Lostrali? Ki ete sa?”

  She had never heard of it. He explained Australia to her. At least what he understood of it. The place was apparently a new land of plenty where some Mauritians, terrified by independence, had pinned their hopes. For them, staying a resident of a British colony was preferable to a change that, according to some, was just a step along the way to bringing the entire island and its inhabitants under Indian control. The MV Patris was carrying a Creole middle class that would rather sell off everything and leave their native land than have to count in rupees. A portion of society that would leave for Australia in order not to risk becoming aborigines in the land of the dodo.

  Tony was repeating a line he’d read in a paper, condemning this “ridiculous, unpatriotic” campaign. But Charlesia didn’t ask him what “aborigine” meant. In fact, she seemed not to hear him at all, so absorbed was she in the drama unfolding before her eyes.

  Because she did not want to miss a second of what was happening, she came back to the quay three days in a row. On the first day, she could see the women with sharp features wearing dark headscarves and the men with overcoats and weary faces walking up and down the lower deck. Those had to be Greeks, Tony told her. The next day was bustling. Small boats full of cases and luggage went back and forth between the quay and the Patris all day. Finally came the third day, which was full of farewells. A crowd packed the quay from the earliest hours of the morning. Charlesia was somewhat withdrawn as she took in the hugs, kisses, exhortations, and tears on one side and the excitement on the other, as well as the children chasing each other in every direction. The passengers who had already embarked looked down on the scene from the gangways. Charl
esia was struck by the odd combination of sadness and forced optimism in the commotion. She stayed there, a few yards from the waving handkerchiefs and the shouted cries.

  Other boats had come and gone. Cargo ships filled with massive containers full of goods. She also saw many Chinese fishing boats riddled with rust lining up along the edge of the harbor. They floated there placidly, hardly in a rush to leave again, just like their straitlaced sailors with brisk gaits and steely gazes as they prowled the red-light district in search of whores. She didn’t like those boats. She had the vague feeling that they were filled with too many screams, too many echoes of blows or struggles, which seemed to seep out of the hull, bouncing off the scrap iron of the bridge and landing at last on the jumble of steel masts with no sails hoisted high and no wind driving them onward. They were bits of metal reeking of fish and violence.

  But they had not kept her from coming back ever so often, in the belief that maybe, somehow, the Mauritius or the Nordvaer would surge forth at long last. Today, once again, she was there. She’d heard from a dockworker living in the same slum that a boat from the Chagos had been at the harbor for two days. And that its occupants were unwilling to get off. She rushed to the harbor. The man had been right. It was there. The Nordvaer. She would have recognized its white hull and haughty appearance anywhere.

  But she couldn’t get close; metal barriers stood in her way, and Tony wasn’t there. Just men in green battle fatigues refusing to listen.

  “Les mo pase. Mo bizin pase!”

  Her requests to be allowed past the barriers were in vain; they didn’t want to hear any of it. My God, the boat is going to leave again, and she won’t be on board, it’s going to head off without her, she can’t let that happen, she has to find a way to come aboard, she has to, she absolutely has to.

  Suddenly, two men showed up to move one of the barriers. They understand, they’re going to allow her aboard. But then strong hands pushed her aside as a convoy of trucks entered the quay, headed toward the Nordvaer. The barriers were shifted back into place.

  Something was about to happen. Charlesia could tell. The men were negotiating. Long minutes went by. Then a woman appeared on the deck. She stepped forward carefully, almost fearfully. She was bent over, holding her chest tight. She seemed to be carrying something in her arms, like a blanket, the way someone might hold… My God, a baby! She was clutching a swaddled baby to her breast. Charlesia stared at her. She looked like a woman she once knew. What was her name? Rolande? Rosemonde? No, Raymonde. Yes, that was it. Raymonde. She lived in Salomon, and they had met one day at the Diego infirmary.

  Charlesia held fast to the barriers. She wanted to call out to her, talk to her, ask her what was happening, whether she knew anything about her mother and sister-in-law since she’d never gotten to see them again. But the woman hurried into a truck with her baby.

  Others followed. Many others. She could hardly believe her eyes, so many men, women and children coming down from the ship. She would never have imagined that so many people could have fit inside. And she noticed that there was barely any baggage. A few bags and hastily tied bundles that failed to hold their contents securely.

  The trucks started up, went around through the barriers. Charlesia wanted to block them with her body, but the men rushed forward and held her against the iron bars. The trucks disappeared at the end of the road.

  She turned around and saw the Nordvaer swaying gently at the end of its mooring rope. The boat seemed so old. The setting sun set the horizon ablaze. This boat would never return to the Chagos again. This Charlesia now knew.

  les méduses hantent les chemins

  toutes les îles du monde chaussent les cendres de l’illusion

  glissent les nuages sur la branche des ténèbres

  et voici l’enfant vêtu comme un marin

  …

  l’île se détourne des bateaux qui passent

  esquif de pierre sèche sous les sabots de la pluie

  jellyfish haunt the paths

  all the islands of the world wear the ashes of illusion

  and push the clouds onto the branch of darkness

  and here is the child dressed as a sailor

  …

  the island turns away from the passing ships

  a dry stone skiff under the hooves of the rain

  —Riel Debars,

  Archipels de Cardamone, translated by Belinda Jack

  “Nord, are you okay? Are you seasick?”

  Aunt Marlène’s question almost immediately set the other women chattering. An explosion of roguish laughter. Pointed sniggers that still carried a trace of tenderness.

  Leaning against the mango trees weighed down with too much fruit, Désiré shot them a furious glance. As if to say: not now. As if this heaviness in his stomach wasn’t already enough for him to contend with.

  They had warned him, after all. Cousin Marjorie might have just had her first communion, but that was no excuse to stuff his face with pastries. Not when they had to share with so many friends and family.

  He looked at his cousin in a puffy white dress swinging her basket decorated with gold and white ribbons. It was just too much. She was giving out huge brioches wrapped in beautiful embroidered packets, and she was filling her small purse with envelopes and fluttering red and green bills that the others placed in her hand, looking solemn as they closed her fingers over their gifts. He couldn’t count on her sharing. Her habit of taking his things annoyed him, but he wasn’t allowed to complain. And he would get in trouble if he did the same in return. One day, when he was big enough, he would show her.

  In the meantime, he had grabbed enough brioches already. He could almost taste her absolute unwillingness to share. Usually, he liked the sweet smell of the bergamot they added to the dough. Those were real brioches, he thought, the only ones worthy of the name, a fine crumb with a white cross cut into its top, and none of those grains of sugar that they sprinkled on the imitations they sold in patisseries. Those always made his stomach turn. The mango tree’s solidity had no effect on the dizzying sensation, like a merry-go-round, deep within his gut and slowly making its way up to his head.

  “Nord! You all right over there, Nordver? Choppy waters ahead?”

  Aunt Marlène was unrelenting, everyone’s laughter echoing heavily.

  He wanted to get up and go, far away from all their jeering, get away from the nauseatingly sweet smell of their glasses full of rum. But he wasn’t steady on his legs.

  Tania looked at him in bewilderment. She was beautiful in her too-short pink dress, probably a hand-me-down from her big sister. He could see her bony knees covered in scars. She was a total daredevil and as ornery as a mongoose.

  “Why do they call you that?”

  He could hear her voice as if at a great distance.

  “Isn’t your name Désiré? Why are they calling you Nord now?”

  He met her gaze. She had a brown splotch in the white of her left eye. He’d never seen it this close up. But suddenly it was less distinct, squiggles of light shimmered in front of his eyes. And the merry-go-round seemed to be speeding up. In the whirlwind, her voice still came through:

  “Well, are you going to answer me? What’s this Nord Vert all about? You always told me it was Désiré. Where did this come from? Talk!”

  He had just enough time to get up and run to the end of the yard. He threw up, the spasms painfully long, the smell of bergamot overpowering, on the dry earth.

  Maybe it happened like that. Or in another way. When people asked, Désiré simply mentioned a hazy past he scarcely remembered. He brought up this recurrent detail of his childhood. His aunts who, every so often, had called him Nordver, or Nord for short.

  But not his mother. He didn’t have the impression that she’d used this name. He rummaged through his memories. No, he hadn’t heard it.

  At one point he’d thought it might have been Norbert.

  They all had several Christian names to please their parents, step-paren
ts, grandparents, everyone who had had their say when it was time to record the baby’s name. Maybe that had been his second name on the certificate. And his family had a tendency to alter pronunciations. But his mother never uttered this name which seemed to upset her whenever others said it. There was nothing definite, just a vague reticence, something that seemed to close her off, distance her a bit.

  The first time he’d asked her about this Norbert, the pressure cooker whistling on the fire had called his mother into the kitchen. And his friends had been outside, shouting for him to come fly kites with them. It had been windy that day, and the air currents coming off the mountain promised a beautiful scene. They’d already made the frame with bendy branches and sheets of multicolored tissue paper. He had to get his revenge on the little boy down the street who had cut the string of his Roi des Airs the last time.

  He had wavered momentarily. Then he ran out to meet his friends waiting for him, shouting out jeers as they tried to catch the sticks they’d sent flying.

  Raymonde had watched them racing off, her eyes somewhat lost. The children’s happy chirps. A little girl chasing after them. She yelled for them to wait. She wanted to join them in a game of gouli. She’d already found a few thin but sturdy twigs, they’d help her to break them and place them over the hole they’d dug, then she’d take the longest branch, position it at the far end of the hole, one-two-three, a quick yank of the wrist would pull up the branches and scatter them all over, and whoever was last to put them back was dead, ti-rez-vous de-hors.

  A whistle.

  Raymonde jolted. The pot let out a long hiss of steam, the smell of dry beans filled the room. The little girl had disappeared and Désiré was nothing more than a small red T-shirt in the corner of the alley. She’ll have to teach him this game, the one they’d lost here like so many others.