We lived in
Quatre Bornes, a small town to the south of the great city of Port Louis.
Nestled in the Plaines Wilhems, it sits alongside an area called Rose Hill at
the foot of Corps de Guarde Mountain, at the bottom of which stood our tiny
corrugated iron home.
Lakaz.
Lakaz Labelle was small yet adequate. Our
front door sat in the middle of the front wall and entered onto a white living
space large enough to contain a black plastic sofa, a laminated floral dining
table with four mismatching chairs, a sideboard with one door hanging from its
hinges and a homemade coffee table supporting a wooden radio. To the right of
this room was a dark blue kitchen with an un-tiled floor, an old laminated
table, a low firewood stove and an empty gas cylinder. My parents and my
sisters had their own bedrooms. Two coconut husk mattresses without bed frames
were propped up in a corner for Frank and me to drag into the living room in
the evening. At the back of the house, there was a hole in the ground shielded
from view by a sheet of bamboo. A nearby cold water tap supplied dilo to the houses twice a day and next
to that laid the old tin bath.
Our house was
neighboured by four others of equal size, each with a front door that faced
onto a makeshift square and each constructed from planks of wood and covered in
corrugated metal sheets that rattled when it rained. A tall palm separated the
boundaries of one house from the other, under which we tied our chien méchants with heavy duty rope.
Those children, banzanfan, not yet
old enough to go to school or clean, played in the dirt in the middle of the
square, while one or more of the mothers polished their tiled doorsteps with
coconut husks. When the floors finally gleamed, the women would go outside and
sit in the seats that their husbands and fathers would inhabit when they
returned home from work. They’d take advantage of the respite from their chores
to gossip about the goings on in the square alongside their own, where their
lives were mirrored as if in a parallel universe.
Moris.
The tropical climate fed a vibrant flora and
fauna that drenched the land in a rich green. Palm trees provided us with
dignity and majesty. Plump imperial princes squatted in the shade of their
slimmer female cousins, who in turn reached up to the heavens and danced in the
easterly breeze as the orange dust of the volcanic earth plumed in annoyance at
the trucks that awoke it from its chosen resting place.
The St Jean
Road split the town of Quatre Bornes in two. A bustling market and busy bus
station worked to keep the trading centre alive and vibrant. Men propped their
bicycles on the side of the road and sold guavas covered in disel pima from baskets resting on the
worn leather seats. Goyav de Chine.
Women with burnt fingers stood hunched over immense fat filled woks, serving
the masses with gato-piman, gato-brinzel,
gato-pomdéter – spicy fried treats filled with enough chilli to make grown
men weep. Tables lay ablaze with multicoloured mountains of pom damours, zak, papaya, pima, zallot,
sousou, ziromon, gros pois and succulent mang lakord.
Manz manzé.
The cry of ‘poisson salé’ rose above the perfume of
spices, as the salt fish vendor desperately waved the flies off his produce,
hands and clothes wreaking, eternally perfecting the art of the quick sale. The
mouth-watering aroma of vegetable kari mingled
in the thick air as the dal-pouri
salesman fought off the dusty workers clambering for a taste of his delicacies.
Buses as ever flooded the area with the progressive stench of
industrialisation, while taxi drivers opened the doors of their small rusting
chariots to allow the twenty five perspiring passengers crammed inside to
escape into the midday sun.
Kann.
And then
there was the sugar cane - so sewn into the fabric of Mauritius that it is
impossible to contemplate my home without them. A tall swathe of immortal
soldiers that covered the land, they told people where and how to live and
reminded them daily that their lives depended on the success of the crop. How
different would all of our lives have been if it were not for the sugar cane? A
double edged sword that could bless you with one blade and damn you with the
other.
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