by Shenaz Patel
Leaving, straddling the water, crossing the horizon, dismantling this cruelly erected barrier to uncover what it hid, what had been hidden from him, what had been taken away from him, which is to say, what belonged to him, what he had dreamed of while awake and while asleep, ever since his mother had described it to him. He didn’t doubt that he would have had work back there, rather than being unemployed and penniless as he was here. Everywhere he went, doors slammed shut the minute they realized who he was. Where he was from.
He was from the Chagos, which meant he was a “Zilwa.” Two syllables they spat out, zil-wa, with mistrust, contempt, disdain. His mother had warned him. Don’t ever say where you’re from. We’re not welcome here.
But did he actually know where he’d come from? The other Chagossians talked about it as if it were a paradise. A simple, tranquil life that followed the rhythms of the sea, of early wake-ups, of half-days busily working in the coconut groves or in the convectors to make copra, of afternoons spent reeling in fish in abundance, watching the tortoises laying eggs on the beach, sharing everything they made or harvested, dancing to the segas on Saturday nights at one house or another until Sunday morning. All this made him dream. But had life back there really been so simple and agreeable? Or had it merely been an existence that exile and regret had varnished in their memory?
The only way to find out was to go there.
Mauritian men were sometimes hired to carry out construction or maintenance work on Diego, at the military base the Americans had established there. But the Chagossians were blocked outright by the staffing firms. He had trouble understanding why. It was unfair; in fact, they should have been giving Chagossians priority.
Someone explained to him that maybe it was because they were afraid that one of them might run off, take shelter somewhere, anywhere on the island, and refuse to return to Mauritius. They would have much more difficulty expelling someone who was on their own country’s soil. But he had trouble believing such an argument. They hadn’t hesitated the first time around to deport them en masse, so what could hold them back this time when dealing with just one person? Who could possibly find out what had really happened at this place now shrouded in secrecy?
At the marina by the harbor, British and American navigators, huge tanned men looking laid-back in flip-flops and fringe shorts, their eyes lively beneath their sun-bleached hair, were trading stories about how their paths through the ocean had led them to the Chagos. They rhapsodized about the few weeks they had happily spent as real-life Robinson Crusoes before pushing onward to Mauritius and beyond. Désiré had tried to convince one or two of them to make the trip in the other direction, with him onboard. Their warm camaraderie vanished as soon as they learned that he was Chagossian. They suddenly had a friend or a job or an obligation they needed to take care of somewhere else. Nobody wanted any part of it. If he wanted to see the Chagos, he would have to make it happen himself and get there on his own.
But this sea… he needed to understand it. It had seen his birth. It was his cradle. Practically his mother. He needed to feel closer.
But it intimidated him. Was he afraid? He wasn’t sure. But he felt an odd unease as he watched it. Maybe he’d grown up too far from it in all this time he’d lived deep within the Vallée des Prêtres.
Perhaps it was angry at him for having lived so long without exploring it, experiencing it. Did he need to tame it? But he didn’t know how to begin. Did he need to wait for it to come to him, for it to seek him out? Was that what the tides were meant for? He’d never thought of it that way. He’d never really dreamed about the sea before. He’d never had any reason to think of it. He liked to swim in it every so often with his friends when it was too hot, they took their bikes, one on the seat and the other on the frame, and made their way down to Baie du Tombeau. They were fine with playing around in the shallows, splashing and shouting and trying not to swallow too much water. But he’d never been out on the water, the high seas, borne by the fast-moving currents far beyond the lagoon’s basin.
From a distance, Désiré watched the dirty fishing boats heavy with the water they’d taken on along their way here, which the men were bailing over the rust-streaked hulls. He looked more carefully at these vessels that had heretofore gone unnoticed. Started to wonder if maybe he wasn’t after all, in a way, part of their family.
Working aboard one of them would make it possible for him to earn some money. Ever since his father’s death, four years after they’d come to Mauritius, his mother had been working herself to the bone, taking on two or three domestic jobs each day. She had sacrificed everything to raise her children as a single mother. He barely remembered anything about his father. He had learned that many Chagossians had died shortly after coming here, of what exactly nobody was sure, and people simply said, with evident resignation, that chagrin had carried them away. Yes, that was what the Chagossians insisted, that one acquaintance or another had died of “lasagrin.” The same way you could die from too little food or love: one day your heart catches a cold, and you don’t have enough strength to bring it back to life. It slowly, steadily dies out.
His father had found work at a construction site where he transported iron to be used for buildings. The work was painful and dangerous, he’d suffered a burn on his shoulder, but the money he’d earned had made it possible to improve their lives somewhat, to buy the materials necessary for building furniture on Sundays. One day he’d had a bout of dizziness on the site. That was all his mother said: dizziness. At that point, he was thirty-five years old.
His mother had wavered when he had told her that he’d gotten work with an offshore fishing company. Something in her gaze had trembled. She herself had never been back at sea, hadn’t even gotten close to it.
But she knew he needed to work. It was getting harder and harder to make ends meet, everything kept getting more and more expensive, and the corner store didn’t let them pay on credit anymore. Besides, Désiré would hardly be able to plan for the future if he didn’t have steady work.
In the days before he left, insomnia gnawed at him. The clock on the living-room wall tolled the hours with a regularity he had never noticed before. He told himself that all would be well, that hundreds of men before him had begun jobs like this one with just as little experience and they had not suffered for it. But it was in vain: he had trouble completely convincing himself. Something deep within kept telling him that, in the end, he wasn’t at all like all those other men.
The morning of his first shift, he got up at dawn, stuffed a few things in a bag, gulped down the cup of tea his mother had made him, ignored the warm slice of bread she had slathered with melting butter just the way he liked it. He kissed her, she told him to take good care of himself.
It was too early for the first bus, so he walked to the city center. The garbage truck’s revolving light swept an orange gleam across the asphalt of the deserted capital. Before long, Port Louis would be a bustling crossroads, overrun by a welter of cars and trucks racing furiously, recklessly. For now, though, the road belonged to him, and he took the opportunity to linger for a few final moments, taking in the familiar solidity of the ground beneath his soles, rolling around a pebble with the tip of his canvas shoe.
At the harbor, loading had begun. He gave his last name, Désir, waited for the official to find it on the list, took the package of blankets held out to him, and tried to remember the number they’d barked out at him. In the boat, there was a great commotion and nobody paid him any attention.
He tried his best to get his bearings as he was knocked every which way by surly, impatient men. He hadn’t imagined the corridors would be so narrow. He had only ever dreamed of the sea in terms of grandeur, space, and light. He found himself boxed into a dimly lit, low-ceilinged space where two men wouldn’t be able to get past each other. The cabin was worse, four bunks piled up in an unventilated cubbyhole.
He contemplated disembarking. Then he remembered his mother. His father. He set his bag on t
he lower bunk. Under his feet, the boat had started moving.
By the time he was back on the deck, Port Louis had been reduced to a few matchsticks in a mountainous bay peering up at the clouds. He didn’t have time to linger and contemplate this sight he had never beheld before, because the orders had already come. He followed the boat’s movement past the small boats lashed to the deck, fiberglass hulls that hadn’t seen a coat of paint in eons. They were tiny, and it was in one of them that he was supposed to confront the wide sea. The mountains had sunk behind the horizon on the other side, the water had swallowed them up. If it could make these massive basalt structures disappear, what could it do to him? He was smaller than an ant on the deck of this tiny boat, where he was being asked to get into one of these skiffs no bigger than a pistachio shell. This was madness.
But he didn’t have any choice. He couldn’t go back, he had to go all the way, he hadn’t been born for nothing, he had been promised a specific, special future, and these were the circumstances that would make it possible.
Désiré was standing on the deck in the heat of a fiery noon where the sea reflected back the sun’s sharp glare. He talked to himself endlessly. He was going to set out with other men in one of these skiffs and bring in a miraculous catch. Something spurred him onward, steeled him to leave this skiff and fulfill his dream. He looked at the ocean and its distant limits, with no place for him to dock. What if they got lost? What if a current caught hold of their boat and dragged it out of the ship’s sight?
He thought back to the fisher who had drifted for days and nights in his old vessel. He had made the newspaper headlines and the evening news when they found him after weeks on the open sea. He remembered the old man’s lived-in look, his sunken face, and, amid the excitement of the crowd that had turned out to welcome him at the harbor, this small figure, which each set of arms passed along to the next with lots of hugs and kisses, laughter and tears. He, too, had seemed to be crying, but not with any tears, his dry eyes gleamed with a strange feverishness. Faraway eyes that reflected an elsewhere tinged with unfathomable anguish.
What had he seen, back there?
And these two other men who had headed out together to fish off the coast of Saint Brandon, a bit further north in the Indian Ocean. It had taken ten long days, and all the national relief operations’ resources to find them. Albatros, Frégate, Perle, Sirène: the papers had published maps of the archipelago filled with evocative names. Each successive day meant ever-slimmer chances of finding these men. As they recounted their harrowing journey, they had said that they would eventually go back to fishing. Because they didn’t know how to stay ashore. Because, in the slum where they lived, the homes were too small, the noises too overwhelming. Money was too far out of reach. As was the horizon.
A feeling of suffocation tightened his ribcage and his throat as he considered the expanse before him. A vague unease, an indistinct narrowing of his respiratory tracts as he tried to take in gulps of this immense space in front of him. Désiré looked away, went back below deck. He would feel better soon, he shouldn’t push himself too far.
The sea, he knew, wasn’t some sort of swimming pool where anyone could jump in and splash a bit. Here, the sea was imperious, it held the power, it shaped space and slowed time, amplifying this experience of the infinitesimal, the better to command respect for its sheer size. It lazily numbed the senses in order to overwhelm them with its essence, its mineral components which would eventually explode in an ecstasy that the earth scarcely hinted at.
Désiré told himself all this. He had to resist this insidious fear closing in on his stomach, nothing could ruin his reunion, he just had to be patient and calm, yes, that was what the sea taught, humility and patience, it was worth that, he knew it, he would do what it took. He would wait for night to fall. The hubbub of men around him would subside, would quiet down, he could finally experience this long-awaited communion with the sea.
But the evening came and the sun cast a dark sheen on the sky as it descended into the water, without taming the tempest on board. Where could he find any quiet on this boat that kept on twitching and jolting like a bumblebee in a bowl?
Désiré didn’t feel well. An unpleasant smell of thawing fish followed him into every nook. The sea had changed. It set the boat swaying and pounded deep within his body. It loosened the planks beneath his feet.
Four strong hands pulled him back up, dragged him to his cabin, and left him there amid sneering laughter.
Curled up in the narrow berth, he tried to push away the nausea deep within his guts. Maybe he would feel better if he lay on his stomach. No, that was actually worse, the mattress pressing on his belly made him feel even more nauseous. He turned on his side, a heavy stupor slowly came over him. Maybe he would be able to sleep at last. He clung to this thought like a life preserver. This sluggishness inflating and deflating his stomach in rubbery waves would keep him above water. As he kept his cheek pressed against the flat pillow, a stifling feeling rose in his throat. No, he needed to stop this movement. Maybe it’d be better on his back, maybe that might relieve the pressure on his belly. But shifting would take such effort. He had to convince himself first. Yes, he needed to turn over, it was better to try something, anything, to stop this sluggish turbulence in his guts.
He pushed with his lower back, shifted his body slowly, his right leg bent, his foot flat, his hip, a moment to reach for his shoulder, a twist, and all the rest followed. He breathed deeply now that his belly was freed, sighed, tried to slow his breathing. He wanted to believe in this little bit of relief.
But his shut eyes only made it easier for his thoughts to circle around this cyclone gaining steam within his gut. He had to open his eyes, quickly, and fix them on something that could steady him. Above him, the narrow wooden planks of the upper bunk began to sway. It was lowering, it was coming closer, it was going to crush him. His fear gave him enough strength to stumble off the mattress, his body falling with a heavy thud. A bomb was pulverizing the sides of his skull.
The bed was going to fall on him, the bed was going to fall on him, that was all he had the energy to whimper to the sailor who was picking him up. Higher, he wanted to be higher up, on the upper bunk. That way he wouldn’t have a bed above him. That would be better. That ought to be better. He just needed to summon his strength one last time. Help me. His two elbows dug into the thin mattress, his leg muscles refused to move, just one push, they were there, they couldn’t have given out so quickly, it was just his willpower that had gone, he couldn’t be that lazy, he had to pull himself together, get himself up, just one push, yes, there, his thigh was tensing, yes, he needed to hold onto that, make that tension move to his calf, lower down, to his feet, where were they, they ought to have been right there even though he couldn’t feel them anymore, he couldn’t have lost them, they absolutely had to be there, an extension of this long, inchoate pain that he knew to be his legs.
The sailor was losing patience. Another attempt. Désiré could feel the faint pins and needles that indicated blood was moving through his body. Another grunt and thrust and then he was on the upper bunk. At last. A little distance between him and this sea that felt too close to his body. This sea that thundered through him even as its surface was barely disturbed by a few eddies. The fact that it had brought him into the world must have been why he felt its motion so keenly within himself. Maybe this was its way of welcoming him and telling him that it knew him, its way of taking him into its arms and cradling him.
If only it could have stilled his intestines’ slow upheaval, just for a moment, a long moment, until the ship was safely in the harbor and he could climb back onto the deck to see it again, scrutinize it in the gauzy light of sunrise and in the blazing fire of sunset, so he could see how beautiful it was and love it, so he could feel like he was one with the sea, so he could reap its fluidity and its strength, tell it what had become of him since they first met. So that he would have time to tell it about his mother, maybe it remembe
red her. His mother back there, all alone, her face came to him, imprinted with deep sadness. Would he really see her again?
The whole sea flowed through his veins. It welled up in his eyes and fell in salty droplets. He needed to get a hold on himself, he knew it, his path couldn’t end here, that made no sense at all.
With his eyes shut, he tried to regain control of his breathing. To soothe the pounding of his blood in his temples, to slow the thudding of the wild animal in his torso. To stop this interminable swaying in his head.
This boat was going to sink.
Maybe that was his fate. To reach the bottom of the ocean where he was born, to die there. A boat, his cradle, his grave.
But it was land he was looking for. His land. This sea could not be his home, it didn’t want him, a motherland never turns its back on its children. They must have been making things up, he wasn’t born on the sea, its smell did not awaken any of his senses, he didn’t know its rhythms, he feared falling with every step. He could lick his lips and that taste would not remind him of anything. Just a vague memory of his mother’s kitchen, when she was breading and frying the salted fish he always thought was so bitter that he pushed it to the edge of his plate or hid it beneath a bit of rice so she wouldn’t see.
He didn’t know this sea. It didn’t acknowledge him. It didn’t accept him.
And so it was unleashing its ill will against him today, it wanted his flesh, he had to push back, it couldn’t just have whatever it wanted, he had to escape it, he understood now why his mother lived so far away from it, she knew all too well its treachery, its false camaraderie which masked the dark waves relentlessly pummeling him and sometimes dragging him under, rising up in tidal waves and furious tempests.
