Notes from my father's diary

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.