When I went back to visit Mauritius in 2014, after 48 years of absence, I made it a point to visit Deep River, a small village stuck within lush sugar cane plantation, a couple of miles from Bel Air in the district of Flacq.
We had to walk a mile on this road from the main road to my aunt’s home.
Deep River was a big part of my childhood as it was there that I spent several happy summer vacations somewhere between the age of seven and ten. An aunt on my maternal side had a shop in Deep River. She had two daughters and one son. The son was a sort of a castaway and I rarely saw him at the shop. He worked and lived in a different town. The elder daughter helped my aunt run the shop and the younger sister, four or five years my senior, attended a Catholic nun-run school in Port Louis. Every end of school year around mid November to end December, as school closed for vacation, my cousin would come to fetch me and we took a bus to Deep River. It took us a good half day to reach Deep River, though the distance was a mere 45 kilometres. To a young eye, the trip was always exciting as the bus puffed its way through the country side, the road lined with mango trees or sugar cane fields and thatched homes. As we reached Bel Air the air became cooler and fresher, the scenery greener, more open, quieter, very different from the City. We had to get off the bus at an intersection and walked a mile or so of beaten road to my aunt’s shop, in between fields of sugar cane, over an old bridge, under mango and flamboyant or flame trees.
A recent country scene in Mauritius, not much difference from 50 years ago, except the modern road.
The flamboyant or flame tree still stands tall and pretty as it did during my childhood.
My aunt’s shop compared to my parent’s was much bigger. It was a stand alone structure, red tin roof, perched on a small mount, with a veranda on the front. Inside the shop an L shape counter separated us from the customers, with a separate room for serving liquor. At the back of the shop there were two bedrooms, an eating area and a storage room. Detached from the house were the kitchen and the bathroom, with a large stone water basin. Further away was the backyard where we had the latrine which simply was a concrete slab with a rectangular opening placed over a large deep hole. As a kid I was always scared of falling into the pit full of excrement and hovering noisy flies. On the other side of the courtyard were two filthy pens holding several pigs. I found great pleasure in helping to feed the pigs every evening, their diet consisted of raw papaya picked up from the papaya trees in the yard and cooked in a large metal pot. There was one occasion when my aunt decided to slaughter a pig. Several local men came to help, first dragging the pig from the pen, then tied its two front legs and two hind legs together. The pig did not make it easy for the men, wriggling ferociously, whining loud and desperate, before a knife was put through its throat.
I found a picture of a latrine which was similar to the one I was scared of when I was at Deep River as a kid.
The pig pen at my aunt’s house looked just like this.
Me and my son recent visit to my aunt’s shop, once a thriving and busy place of gathering.
The inside of my aunt’s house, once a lively and warm place
I saw very little of my uncle at the shop. In fact he was not the best head of family as I understood he spent most of the time living in Port Louis, leaving the running of the shop solely on the shoulders of my aunt and the elder daughter. He gambled a lot to the extent that most of the income from the shop, which was intended to acquire new stock of merchandises, was lost at the mahjong table. My aunt struggled, without the least complaint, to keep the shop running, and she would replenish some stock supply by buying locally from a Bel Air acquaintance. One time my aunt said to me. “I need you to go to Bel Air to replenish some stock.” She specifically mentioned cigarettes. Innocent and naïve that I was, I replied after having noticed a row of cigarette packages on the upper shelves: “but auntie there are still a lot of cigarettes on the shelves”. It turned out that the neat packages were empty inside and they were just there for show.
Often I would ride solo the only adult bike in the shop, oversize for an eight year old, to Bel Air to purchase the much needed merchandises. The distance was three or four miles but for a young boy it was a long distance. My aunt was very considerate and kind and always ensured that I had a full stomach before I went on the errand. In particular she would fry two eggs, sunny side up, and I silently forced myself to eat them though I detested the raw part of the eggs. We kids were trained to obey the elders with no contest.
Me and my son biked through Bel Air in 2014 and rested at this magnificent church.
Bel Air today with bicycle and motorcycle still common modes of transportation, the magnificent church hidden behind the trees
I spent a lot of time helping in the shop serving customers as the two daughters were not always on duty and my aunt appreciated very much my assistance. Business was steady as we were the only shop in the area. Our clients were the villagers who were mainly of Indian and African descent, most worked in the sugar cane fields that formed part of the Deep River Sugar Estate, owned by a prominent French family carrying the name of “Fleurie”. My aunt was fluent in Hindu and Creole which deeply impressed me.
During weekend, the shop became very busy as the sugar cane workers had the days off. In particular the “liquor room” got crowded and rowdy as the alcohol started to take effect on the jovial drinkers. We also served squid curry, a speciality created by my aunt, which went very well with the wine. Fights often broke out. Fortunately there were always enough sober macho men around to keep the situation under control. One day Mr. Fleurie, the Landlord of the Deep River Sugar Estate, came to reinstate order after a brawl at the shop, that day he had, by some long standing decree, all the powers of a policeman.
One of the highlights of the vacation was to be able to eat sugar cane to our heart content. Running alongside the shop was a railway line. Everyday wagon loads of sugar cane passed by and we run with the train to pull the best looking cane from the wagon. We sat and ate for hours. We used our teeth to peel the skin and we would only stop chewing when our jaws were so sore and tired that they became numb. Also mangoes were in abundance, falling off the trees at their leisure and free for the picking. In the evening after dinner we always had freshly brewed Ceylon tea, a traditional beverage brought to Mauritius by the early Indian settlers, served with sugar and creamy fresh cow milk brought to us daily from the local farmer.
This could have been one of the trains, no longer in service, that we run with sixty years ago to get our hands on the best sugar cane.
Wagon load of freshly cut sugar cane passed by my aunt’s home, free for our picking.
For the sake of security and family continuity, my aunt adopted a young boy my age from China. Unfortunately he turned out to be a little bit cuckoo, he was sometime violent and irrational. One day he tried to poke my eyes with a stick when I was looking through the crack of the door. I stopped the yearly visit to my aunt at around age ten, and I did not keep up with how the boy was doing.
The absence of a male body in the house presented a security risk for my aunt and daughters. Fortunately my aunt had a good relationship with a local indigenous family whose son would from time to time visit the shop and so boosted a sense of security. His name was Robert and I liked him a lot. He would often give me a ride on his motorcycle and he would take me and other kids on adventures down the river, one time at midnight, to catch prawns. The prawns, pricked with a stick, were roasted over an open stone stove in the backyard, my gaze turned in awe when the grayish shrimp turned into bright pink. In one adventure, I jumped into the calm water of the river not realizing that it was very deep. Fortunately Robert pulled me up to safety. Robert also took us to catch rabbit at night. The night was always dark and eerie as there were no street lights and we only used flash light or torch as it was called then. One day there was a big commotion down the street, a mongoose was fighting a snake. The scene was too frightful for me to go and watch. Telling ghost stories when the sun had gone down was a national past time. We often went to Robert’s home which had no electricity. Only candles or oil lamps dimly lit the rooms, a perfect setting to hear ghost stories, we all sitting on the cool cow manure compact floor, scared stiff.
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