Silent Winds, Dry Seas

I

A Haircut on the Beach

“Before I married your father, I was engaged to his younger brother Amar,” my mother said.

I had heard rumors about Mama’s engagement. It was a family secret that the adults acknowledged but didn’t want to talk about. All these years, I had somehow been made to understand by the Bhushan clan that it is not a subject to be brought up. Papa certainly never talked about it. This time, however, I sensed that Mama wanted to tell me more about Amar.

We were in my parents’ house in Mahébourg, on the southeast coast of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. The first Bhushan, who arrived from India in 1853, moved to this predominantly Creole town after completing his five years of indentured labor on Ferney Sugar Estate. I had flown over to the island from the United States, two oceans and nine time zones away, after hearing of my father’s deteriorating condition. He was asleep in the bedroom next door, a week after the surgeons had cut open his chest to insert a pacemaker. They had advised sedation, given his feisty behavior at the hospital. The doctors and nurses had humored him, since the hospital superintendent had been his student in primary school and held him in high regard.

In the three decades I’d been away, the beat and rhythm of the Mauritian countryside had changed. The friendly cadence of bicycles, interrupted every now and then by lorries carrying sugar, had given way to the rattle of smoke-spewing buses and cars. The hospital where my father was operated on had also undergone transformation: fresh paint on the buildings, pruned shrubbery and flower beds adorned with gladiolus, chrysanthemum, and bird-of-paradise, and a well-equipped ICU, a far cry from the hospital of my childhood where Grandma died—untended garden, rusty corrugated iron buildings, with verandas where dogs lay panting in the heat. After the doctors’ reassurances, the anxiety I had felt during my stopover in Paris had given way to optimism about my father’s prospects. I felt tranquil and listened eagerly to my mother.

“Six months after our engagement, Amar enrolled in the British colonial army. Soon after, they shipped him to Palestine. A famous hotel had been blown up in Jerusalem and many British officials had died.”

I realized she was referring to the King David Hotel.

“Why did he sign up? Didn’t he ask for your opinion?” I said.

“Service in the colonial army offered him the promised land. It was not only the money. He was fed up having to obey his elder brothers. First it was Kapil. When Kapil died, it was Ram. If you live under their roof, you have to listen to them. The situation was much better when Devnarain, the eldest brother, was still alive and head of the Bhushans.”

“He could have rented a house on his own,” I said.

“He was jobless. When the Bhushans got together to discuss the wedding expenses, Uncle Ram and your father refused to contribute any money. So Amar signed up for the army, thinking he wouldn’t be called, that he would stay in the barracks in Mauritius and draw a salary.”

“Didn’t you dissuade him?”

“How could I when Grandma, too, became unreasonable? She insisted on the Bhushans’ buying me gold jewelry; for her, gold was protection against poverty.”

My mother got up and retrieved a document from her armoire. She handed it to me, and a postcard. The document, bearing the letterhead on his majesty’s service, stated: “We regret to inform you that No. MAUR/18023627 Private Amar Bhushan of the Royal Pioneer Corps, 2051 Company, Nathania Camp, died of wounds on April 24th, 1947 at the Bir Ya’Acov British Military Hospital.”

Mama lingered on the postcard, black-and-white, now yellowish. It depicted an orange grove in Jaffa. “He wrote in simple French because he knew I had only three years of primary school and didn’t understand English. He kept sending me postcards and romantic letters. I can’t find them now. I must have mislaid them in the upheaval following his death.”

I held Mama’s hands, wondering if Papa or Uncle Ram had anything to do with their disappearance, until I recalled finding, in the debris left by Cyclone Carol in 1960, a few ruined black-and-white postcards—Port Said, Haifa, the Church of the Nativity—and throwing them away. I blushed.

It was hard for me to understand how my mother could so easily accept whatever her mother and future in-laws decided for her. I wanted to tell her my thoughts, then I realized that she was only sixteen when she got engaged, and decided to keep quiet.

“I think Amar had a breakdown around the time he enlisted. So l’esprit tine fatigué. We both knew the Bhushan family was in bad shape. The older generation had wasted all their savings on rum. The younger Bhushans had just sold the ancestral home in Mahébourg to pay off creditors and they borrowed money to buy sugarcane land from which to earn a living,” she said. “When the news that Amar was leaving Mauritius was out, Uncle Ram pressured him into selling his share of the land to him.”

Little did Uncle Ram know that his action would, more than twenty years later, shortly after his death, set in motion a court case that would consume the Bhushan clan, tear it apart and drain it of thousands of rupees. Papa would sue for annulment of the land sale and distribution of the land to Amar’s “rightful heirs.”

Hanging on the wall was a photo of the Bhushan brothers and sisters: Papa, Uncles Ram, Mohan, and Neeraj, and their two sisters; at the center, Amar in his British army uniform. Everyone smiled and beamed with pride. In addition to Papa, only Uncles Mohan and Neeraj were still alive. Mama looked at it and turned to me. “I’m not sure if Amar was given the proper rites by the Bhushans when he died.”

“You could have done that,” I said.

“Not when he had brothers who were still alive to perform the ritual. Everyone in the community would blame me and Grandma if I did something.”

My mother walked back to the armoire and opened the window, letting in the sea breeze.

“After your uncle died—I don’t remember whether it was six months later, or a year—the neighbors told us what they heard on the radio: the British were leaving Palestine and a new country was being created. Israel.”

She wrapped the document and postcard in white linen, and paused.

“That was a different era. I was considered a widow, a poor widow. No young Hindu man would think of marrying me.

“Grandma asked relatives and close friends if they knew anyone who would be interested in marrying me. Two widowers came—a policeman and a laborer. Each had children. Each looked at our hut, asked Grandma what jewelry and furniture she was going to provide, and was never heard from again.”

“I bet you that laborer lived in a thatched hut,” I said.

“Everyone has the right to advance in life. Laborers, too. I don’t blame him,” Mama said.

She patted me on the shoulder. “The reputation of my family was at stake. Your father realized that the reputation of the Bhushan clan would also be tarnished. To save our honor, your father married me. He felt it was his responsibility.”

“Did you love him?” I said.

“I couldn’t afford to think that way, Vishnu. I said to myself that love can always come later. It grows.”

“Did Papa tell you if he felt anything for you?”

“He must have thought the same way I did—love comes later.”

I shook my head as I thought of the romantic entanglements in my life, the pleasure and the heartache that love had brought, and that led me sometimes to wonder if romantic love was overrated.

“We married in a religious ceremony on December 15, 1948.”

Mama reminded me that in those days, most Hindu and Muslim couples didn’t have a civil marriage—the one recognized by law—until a year after the religious wedding.

“I moved to Mapou, where your father and other Bhushans lived with Uncle Ram. I cooked for the whole clan—Uncle Ram, Uncle Mohan, and young Uncle Neeraj—washed their clothes, and cleaned the house. On top of that, I was expected to teach your father’s two sisters embroidery, to enhance their marriage prospects.”

“Didn’t the sisters help you with the chores?” I said.

“They were young. Their parents had died while they were infants. Here I was, eighteen years old, in a huge house, being a maid for everyone, and a mother to two girls close to puberty and left idle by their elder brothers. After three months, I wanted to leave.”

She paused.

“But I couldn’t.”

Though my mother was now in her seventies and her worried look and wrinkles were familiar, her face betrayed the dilemma confronting her so soon after her wedding. Her mother, who visited every Sunday, advised her to stay with her husband and his extended family and “sweat it out.”

No. Grandma admonished her: it was her duty to stay.

Grandma had problems of her own. Grandpa had owned and operated a bus, a sign of some wealth, especially in the countryside. Afflicted by a mysterious illness when Mama was thirteen, he sold it to pay mounting medical bills. When he died, Grandma borrowed money from her brothers-in-law to buy a few acres of land and move to the thatched house. Looking back at the situation, my mother asked aloud, “God! What were they thinking when they married me to a Bhushan? An alliance of two bankrupt families, the Bhushans and the Gopals?”

Six more months went by and my mother toiled without protest. “Papa liked being taken care of,” she said. He took her side loudly and publicly when Uncle Mohan grouched about the sticky rice dish he was served. “ ‘She made a very good biryani. Cook it yourself next time.’ ”

One day, Mama asked the two sisters to help rake the piles of leaves blown into the yard by a particularly windy anticyclone. That evening at the dinner table, both Uncles Ram and Mohan lectured her.

“How will they find suitable husbands if they turn dark laboring in the sun?” said one of them, Mama wasn’t sure who.

“You know what your father did? He banged on the table and told them, ‘What’s wrong in being dark? I’m not fair or brown like you; my skin is black. Black as chicken shit.’ ”

“Your uncles were shocked,” Mama continued. “They couldn’t believe a primary school teacher would use such language.”

“Then, after a moment of reflection, your father told them, ‘My wife toils in the sun for you all, and she’s still fair.’ ”

When Mama learnt that Uncle Mohan was getting married, she was elated. Another woman would join the household and, as her junior, she would surely be assigned her share of household chores. My mother was soon to be disappointed. Uncle Ram asked Mohan and his bride to move out, as the government-owned house was getting overcrowded. He told them he was concerned that the authorities would investigate.

“No one believed that,” my mother said. “Uncle Ram was concerned about additional mouths to feed. Mohan had just been fired from the police force for insulting his English boss while drunk.”

“One morning, not long after Uncle Mohan and his wife had left, I was in the kitchen boiling tea when your father came in, glum, holding a shirt. ‘You expect me to wear this?’ he said. He shoved the collar to my face. I told him I could do a much better job ironing his clothes if I didn’t have to slave for his brothers and sisters. His eyes turned wild. ‘We help each other here. Don’t you see, we survived bankruptcy because of our joint family.’

“ ‘No one helped Amar when he was in need,’ I told him.

“To this day, I don’t understand how I let these words escape from my mouth!” she said to me.

“He looked around, picked up a frying pan, and flung it at me. I ducked. It missed and crashed on the floor. By the time Uncle Ram and young Uncle Neeraj arrived, I had run to the bedroom and locked it. I asked to be taken home, back to Mon Désert.”

Listening to my mother, I could not fathom my father’s behavior. He had taken my mother’s side against the clan and then, for a stupid shirt, got physically abusive with her! I was disappointed, torn between anger and sadness.

“She better go!” Uncle Ram, as the eldest brother, decided. “We can’t tolerate this kind of behavior.”

“After I packed—I made sure to take my gold jewelry—Uncle Ram instructed Uncle Neeraj to take me to the bus stop. As I stood on the threshold, Uncle Neeraj spoke. His voice was soft: ‘Why not say you’re sorry, and stay?’ ”

Mama got up, caressed my hair for a few seconds, and proceeded with her story. “The first time I felt you move was in that bus, as we left Port Louis. I pressed my hand on my belly. I looked at the noisy secondary school boys and girls around me, and I wanted my child to be like them when it grows up—healthy and educated. By the time I reached Mon Désert, I had taken a decision—to buy a sewing machine. Uncle Neeraj had given me fashion magazines, and I was determined to earn my living as a modiste.”

My mother’s hand embroidery was already well known throughout the Grand Port District, beyond the confines of the village. The sewing machine would consolidate her reputation as a seamstress. Soon she was doing well financially. She sewed women’s dresses, blouses, and skirts, and men’s shirts, and that provided for the basic necessities. The embroidery was for a higher-end clientele who paid enough for her to afford little luxuries like Yardley soap from England and georgette saris.

Mama’s narration stirred my memory. I must have been three or four when a young mulatto woman came to get her dress fitted. It was the first time I saw a woman wearing a hat, the kind the wealthy sport at the horse races. “She wasn’t rich,” Mama said when I asked about her. “She was the concubine of a kolom in the sugar estate—you know, the ti blanc who supervises the laborers in the cane fields.” I had forgotten that expression, ti blanc, the white at the lower echelon of white society, comfortable but not wealthy or blue-blooded enough to belong to the Dodo Club. Other recollections followed: girls from the neighborhood or poorer relatives coming to learn to sew and embroider from Mama. “Like your father’s sisters, they needed a métier that would make it easier for them to get a good husband.”

She continued, “Let me get back to your birth, Vishnu. One day I was nauseous and I vomited over the dress I was working on. I hadn’t foreseen such complications from my pregnancy. Grandma pleaded with Dr. Maurice Curé to help.”

“Dr. Curé, the founder of the Labour Party?” I said, with more than a tinge of pride that my birth was helped along by such a famous person.