I found my father's
diary in the garage a few months ago. He wrote about my grandfather whom I have
not known. My dad, to say the least, hated his father although he had great
admiration for the man. Below is a short account of my grand father's life and a
description of his character as per my dad's notes:
I have rarely met a
person who has done so many jobs as my father. I have heard that, before I was
born, my father used to be a laborer. Later on, he became a tailor. My
mother always addressed him as 'taillair'. No doubt, because, at the time of his
marriage, he was a tailor. Then he became a biscuit maker and biscuit seller.
He had bought a small pastry-making 'bakery' from a gentleman called Mr. Baya
and had started manufacturing and selling biscuits. One of my earliest memories
is that of a beautiful wicker-basket. I remember my mother telling me that my
father used that basket for carrying and selling biscuits. I think they were
biscuit manioc (cassava biscuits).
After sometime, my
father became a 'sirdar', i.e a gang-man in charge of sugar-cane laborers. In
those days he used to wear a khaki shirt and khaki trousers, the standard
uniform of gang-men at that time.The happiest memory of those days was that
once, or twice, my father had brought home a 'garde-manger' (aluminium
container with lid) full of huge blue-black shrimps. Such shrimps have almost
disappeared from our rivers and are memories of days gone by.
My father was very
intelligent. Hence, he was always using his brains for finding a job which
would liberate him and his growing family from the grips of poverty. In those
days, we were still living in a mud-hut erected on a piece of land belonging to
my great-uncle, Aunauth Beejadhur. At that time, the houses of rich people were
wholly built of timber. Building in concrete had hardly started. White ants
were a great nuisance. They played havoc with wooden buildings. The active
brain of my father saw a golden opportunity there. He became an exterminator of
white ants. I don't know from where he learnt the skill. He used to prepare the
poison himself. It looked liked cocoa powder and a particular smell. The poison
was placed in a ball-shaped rubber'horn' fitted with a steel tube. When the
rubber ball pressed, the powder would come out of the tube in the form of a
spray. There was also a yard-long pointed iron-rod for making holes in the
'houses' of the white ants where the powder was going to be pumped.
The wooden mansions of
the Franco-Mauritians were spread throughout the island, especially on sugar
estates. My father had secured a contract with some White sugar barons,
especially in the district of Flacq. As he had to move about in the island and
public transport was still rudimentary, he bought himself a second-hand
motor-cycle which often broke down. It made a frightful amount of noise when the
engine was being tried after its frequent repairs. I can't say whether it was a
Norton or a Triumph because I was about three or four years old at that time
and I had not yet learnt reading. Hence, I could not read the name written on
the motor-cycle.
Most of the roads of
Mauritius were mud tracks, full of potholes. The constant jolts and bumps made
my father suffer from abscesses in the hind parts. About forty years later,
when my father died of cancer in the anus, I asked myself whether the cause of the
cancer was not retarded consequences of those abscesses. When my father started
his job as white-ant exterminator, he became known as 'doktair caria'
(white-ant doctor) and the nick-name stuck to him for the rest of his lifetime.
When people saw me, they often said " To piti doktair caria, toi!"
(You are the son of the white-ant doctor)
Then came World War II.
Due to the activity of enemy submarines in the Indian Ocean, ships could not
bring rice and other essential foods to Mauritius. My father saw a golden
opportunity there. He took to planting paddy. For this purpose, he bought a few
acres of marshy land at a place called "carreau l'acacia" (acacia
field) near Schoenfield. The plantation and sale of paddy brought sudden
prosperity to my father. He was able to buy a piece of land and to build a
house on it. At one time, our two-roomed hut was full of bulging paddy bags
from the floor to the ceiling. Sudden prosperity caused my father's ruin. He
was so much dazzled by his sudden wealth that he bought a brand-new car. It was
locally called "Morris-Béf" (Morris Ox) because it was a Morris and
had an ox as its symbol. That Morris- Béf caused the downfall of my father. He
used to take the new car to Port-Louis, the capital, everyday and thus started
neglecting his work in the fields. At the end of the war, when the import of
rice was resumed, our paddy fields were converted to sugar-cane fields. But
every year, during the crop season, our sugar-cane fields caught fire. It
was rumored that my father had cheated the gentleman from whom he had
bought his land for planting paddy and, later, sugar-cane. Was the cheated
gentleman the originator of those fires?
My hatred for cars was
born when I saw my father going to the capital in his new car everyday. What
business he had in the capital, I don't know. Why must a planter go down to
town everyday? The truth is that there was a Tamil lady who was a divorcee. My
father was enamoured with that lady. This was the origin of frequent
quarrels between my father and my mother. For the love of that Tamil lady, my
father neglected his plantations and his fortunes started going downhill. By
that time, he had eight children. When he had lost all his fortune, he turned
his private car into a taxi and became a taxi-driver. Due to his improvidence,
he had to sell his house and his land at Rivière-du-Rempart. My mother took the
bold step of moving to Port-Louis as four of her eight children had started
attending secondary school at Port Louis. My father had become a land and house
agent but he rarely slept at our house. He had rented a house near his beloved
and he lived there. By that time my elder brother had joined the government
service and my father had transferred the responsibility of bringing up his
family to the shoulders of my elder brother who was nineteen years old. To help
my elder brother in bringing up my younger brothers and sisters, I had joined
the Teachers Training College after sitting for the Cambridge Higher School
Certificate examination. I was eighteen.
