My second brother was about eight years older than me, in between we had three sisters and another brother. I did not see much of my second brother because he was not living at home. He did not like school and surely he skipped a lot of classes. Somehow he survived alone outside of the family nest, he worked here and there, each job did not last too long as he was never a serious and responsible employee, he was then fifteen or sixteen years old. Outwardly he was a “vagabond” to my mother but inwardly he was still a son, a beloved son. The Chinese has a saying: “All fingers are not the same length” and yet each finger is as important and lovable as the next. In a traditional Chinese family this brother would be considered the black sheep of the family, yet I knew and felt that he was loved by all of us, my mother, my father and all the siblings.
He smoked at an early age and drank liberally, not to mention that gambling was deeply entrenched in his vocabulary. Sometimes he came home for a couple of hours, took a cold shower which entailed standing in his short and scooping water from the drum sitting in the courtyard and pouring the water over his head down to his body. I remember one time he asked me to get him a couple of rupees, he must have been really desperate. He could not have gone near the till of our shop lest he triggered suspicion, but I could easily sneak in and I did steal two rupees and gave them to him.
Pellet gun I once hold and shoot in my childhood.
Group picnic arranged by schools was very popular. Mauritius has beautiful beaches such as Mont Choisy above
Occasionally he visited and brought us things. Once he brought us some fish. He just came back from fishing using speargun and dynamite. Naturally dynamite was and is dangerous but to the young it was cool. Around that time a younger brother of my brother-in-law, like other knowledge-thirsty teenagers, was trying his hand at new things. Once he brought over a pellet gun to our home and shot at empty cans laying in the street. He even let me hold the gun and shoot. I was seven or eight. He sometimes made his own pellet ammo to shoot at birds with a slingshot. Then one inauspicious morning he went on a group picnic to the beach, a very exciting activity for young people. Participants boarded the bus by the Chinese school’s gate, he had under his armpit a small package wrapped in newspaper. Several nights before he had been assembling a home-made dynamite which he had intended to use to blow up the fish. Unfortunately the dynamite exploded under his armpit in the bus, when the wires got in contact accidentally. He did not make it that day.
Speargun fishing reminiscence of James Bond movies. It is still a popular activity in many countries.
Dynamite fishing, though widely banned, still active in many parts of the world.
Slingshot a popular gadget
kids used to shoot at birds.
Pellet gun ammo made of lead sometime used with a slingshot to shoot at birds
I also remember vividly when one hot afternoon my brother brought home some ice cream bars. He had just taken a job with “Happy World” a popular manufacturer of ice cream. It was the first time for all of us at home to experience this treat, something we had never seen before, chocolate wrapped over ice cream. Amazingly Happy World Company seems to be still in operation today.
This brother was always full of drama. I wrote earlier when he whacked a bottle over the head of a drunkard who was causing disturbance in our boutique. One day he came home in a panic with his sweet heart to run away from the girl’s family. I think he was caught that Sunday when he secretly visited the girl at her family’s boutique in the country side. It was a tense moment and my mother, she always made the final decision, directed them to take refuge at an aunt’s home, knowing full well that the girl’s parents would come to put up a fight. The parents indeed arrived that evening with a group of relatives in two cars, angry, loud and threatening, and demanded that we delivered their daughter. I remember the parents vowed that if they did not get back their daughter by midnight, she was no longer theirs. But time cured all. Some years later somehow the event was accepted by all concerned.
My father, seeing no future for this brother in Mauritius, suggested that he should go to England. At that time Mauritius was a British Colony and its citizens were free to settle in England. It took two weeks by steamer to England round the Cape of Good Hope, and we were really elated when we received a post card from him mailed from Cape Town. England changed my brother’s life. He turned over a new leaf and through hard work worked his way up to a managerial position in a garment import company in London. Some years later my sister-in-law and nephew joined him.
From Mauritius steamers went round the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, to England.
But one thing did not change. He just could not stop drinking and smoking, a bottle of whisky a day was not a hard thing for him. He knew that his liver was beyond cure and he would not want to go through medical treatment. He chose to continue enjoying life as is though short it would be. He left us in his sixties.