Paradise Club et autres histoires

Below is an extract from my brother's book "Paradise Club et autres histoires"

Back in those days, there was a faint element of ethnicity about beaches. It was not just that Choisy was a ‘Chinese’ beach, I remember feeling that Belle Mare was a hindu beach. Of course, you felt that more strongly on the day of Ganga Snan. The families would wrap a sari around filao trees to get some privacy. Bollywood music and bhajans would play loudly from audiotape players. Rural girls would  get in the water, dressed in their pink frilly dresses. Mauritian Indians come from Bihar, and had not much acquaintance or fondness with the sea. Ganga Snan was about making a ritual bath in the holy Ganges, and somehow, by the magic of migration, it had become, in Mauritius, a holiday which hesitated between a purification ritual and a picnic on the beach.  And us Indians, back in the seventies, entered the water a bit hesitantly, some in their pink dresses, others in fashionable swimming suits. Some good swimmers would show off, venture far towards the reef line, others just stood in the water and chatted with others, as if they were in a steam bath.  

And of course, Blue Bay had a reputation of being a creole beach, especially on Easter Monday, or on Assumption Day. In the course of the eighties, Flic-en-Flac unofficially became, among other things, an annex of Sodnac - the place where Sodnac people would drive to, on a Sunday afternoon, just to say that they did go out a bit in the week end, and ended up meeting the one colleagues they did not like at work. Back in those days, Flic-en-Flac was a sleepy village with only one or two restaurants , such as the Sea Breeze Chinese restaurant, where, as a child, I remember glimpsing at with sinful curiosity - as I mentioned above, my parents did not approve too much of Chinese restaurants, with their pork and other strange meats - as we passed by it, one night. 

It was dimly lit, almost empty except for one couple sitting close together, two hazy figures with faces looking congealed in yellowish light and shadows which seemed to me to represent the atmosphere of adult love, where a man’s hand crawled slowly across a table to grasp the fingers of a woman, on whose cheek a tear quickly ran, while a waiter with perfectly Brylcreamed hair brought a tray laden with forbidden meats, for those indulging in the tense, secretive affairs like those one saw in those late night movies which I was not supposed to watch. One sin brought the others with it, like the string of sausage which hung on the balcony of Cafe Shanghai, in Quatre Bornes. 

It was not just the beaches which had a faint ethnic atmosphere to them. I remember moments of my childhood in which it felt, intensely, like being in another country. And sometimes these changes from country to country happened within the same day. I remember: my father has taken me with him to Bonne Terre, to buy some flowers for the garden. We are in one of those flower fields that you used to see on the left side of the road, when climbing from La Louise to La Caverne, and my father is talking to the owner of the field. It is dusk, and the sun has gone down to the tip of Corps de Garde, shadows are creeping in, and I am standing near the tin shed in which one of the field hands lives and works. He is a rough, plump boy of about twenty , with dishevelled hair, wearing torn pants and a soiled shirt in those twenty shades of brown which men from India are fond of, and he is watering the flowers with the sullen efficiency of the worker who knows his boss is watching him. Peering into the shed, I see a bed, and a roughly cut photo of Dharmendra from an Indian magazine. Looking at the photo and the room, I am not exactly thinking anything, but transferring myself in him, feeling , or imagining that I am feeling, what it is like to be him, a boy from somewhere in Chemin Bassin, who likes to watch movies with Dharmendra.

Another time, I remember standing on the varangue of the Curepipe town hall, with my family, and inside the town hall there is dancing going on, a waltz maybe, white and mulatto people. I don’t know why we were there, but I think my father had to discuss something with one of the men inside, or give him some document - it must have been something urgent, because we were definitely not supposed to be there. It was dusk again, but a Curepipe winter kind of dusk, and I saw the spire of Sainte Helene sharply delineated against the sunset. The sharp spire silhouetted against the sky, and that waltz music from inside the hall - it felt European in a forbidding way, like London in those grainy news footages of the Blitz. 

And another time, my father has taken me to see Mr Nice. My father would say: ‘Viens avec moi, je vais voir un monsieur’ and, maybe because he was speaking French to me, that ‘monsieur’, brought in my mind the mental image of a fat white man wearing a suit, a trench coat and a fedora, with a cigarette hanging loosely on his lips, like in the French movies. But Mr Nice was nothing like that - he was the printer who did my father’s text books, and he was a thin, nervous, horsy faced Chinese man, probably from China, because once inside his flat I felt exactly the same atmosphere which I was later to rediscover in China - the same heavy  smell of dust and eucalyptus oil which I associate with Chinese medicine, the furniture from Hong Kong - while my father and Mr Nice talked business, me and Mr Nice’s son crept under tables and ran around sofas made of aluminium and plastic, which felt nothing like what I saw in other people’s houses. Of course, Mr Nice was not his real name, but every year he sent us a calendar with “Nice Printing” on it, and he was always smiling and jovial in his tough-but-warmed hearted Chinese way, and so we always called him Mr Nice.