connections
Its pale body is already bloated with water. An animal I have always loved, whose chirp sounded like a welcome back to the tropics. I can’t help but see this as an omen.
This is another installment in a long narrative. I must write with the assumption that the reader has been following from the beginning, though I know this may well not be the case. To some extent, some of these pieces may stand on their own without introduction, but this installment in particular will make little sense if you have not read the previous one, frying pans. Please at least read that one first if you have not been following from the beginning.
I’m going to have to find a new hotel today and try not to pay heaps of money. I can’t believe that I reserved more than two weeks here. I hope Hanuman doesn’t give me a hard time about giving me a refund. I don’t know how much time I’ll need to find a place, how long my appointment with Gavin this morning is going to take, or what time Hanuman would consider check-out. But given how casual everything about this place seems to be, that last part worries me the least.
But before I can think about any of this, or about anything at all, I must have coffee. How I’m going to make some is problem number one. Anoushka’s place at least had a coffee machine. I have not found where on this island one can buy a French press. I guess I’ll just boil it in a pot downstairs.
I am surprised how many ants and other insects drowned in my trap last night trying to steal my sugar and honey. At first I take a bit of satisfaction in how effective the trap is. But then I lift the sugar up and see that a gecko, too, drowned there, chasing its prey. Its pale body is already bloated with water. An animal I have always loved, whose chirp sounded like a welcome back to the tropics. I can’t help but see this as an omen.
The propane is disconnected, and though I’ve lived with a propane-powered kitchen before, I can’t get the gas to flow. I text Hanuman. He comes out and fires up the single burner, chattering about how one night the transwoman, in one of her drunken reveries, left the gas running all night, and that he has been disconnecting it every night ever since.
I tell him about my night and say I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut short my stay at his hotel. No, he insists, he’ll move me to a more comfortable room. But, I object, before settling on the couch I did visit every vacant room and test the mattresses with one hand.
“Ah,” he says, “but you didn’t try Room 6; I have it locked; I was saving it for a friend who is coming later today. It has the best mattress in the hotel. I know the mattresses are old, I’m sorry. I’ve been meaning to replace all the mattresses, but money is slow, you understand, I can not afford to replace them all. So many empty rooms, and I have bills to pay. When I have a few hundred rupees, I go to Port Louis and buy one mattress. Please take Number 6, I want you to be happy here. My friend will take your room. He will understand.”
I relent. I’m skeptical, but why not give it a try? This venture with Gavin is probably going to take all morning, anyway; I don’t have time to find a new hotel right now.
Prices and tips for friends and brothers
Down the hill to the coast battered by gray waves. Past the mysterious Hindu shrine extending into the water and past the Catholic one a few yards down. A bit further is a particularly recognizable bus stop; it has a bench. I’m relieved to be able to sit.
At first, remembering the Island Time Gavin kept last time, I’m not so worried about my own tardiness, and how long it took me to find the bus stop. But then more than half an hour passes without any bus arriving.
Fifteen minutes before our meeting time, a taxi pulls up and honks. It is the same driver who took me to the hotel yesterday. He greets me like an old friend, and offers to take me to Grand Baie. How much? 500 rupees? After having tipped him 100 rupees yesterday on top of the fare I had agreed to, this sounds far from friendly. “But Grand Baie is so far,” he protests, “and I probably won’t find another customer there.”
Not likely to find a fare in Grand Baie indeed, you transparent liar, I think silently, do you really think there is no end to a foreigner’s naiveté, and is there no end to your willingness to take advantage of it? Having lived in Egypt, I offer him 200 and await him to offer 400 or 450, so that I can offer 250 or 300, and we can agree on 300 or 350.
But he just shakes his head. I tell him I’ll just wait for the bus. He wishes me good luck and drives off.
Twenty minutes more go by, and another taxi pulls up and asks where I’m going. His offer is exactly the same. I haggle 100 rupees off the price and off we go. Lovisa warned me, if you’re not careful, this island will suck the money out of you.
The cabbie has a pendant hanging from his rearview mirror with a very familiar design: “Allah” in Arabic script on one side, “Muhammad” on the other. So we do the superficial bonding over shared religion, and he chases that shot with the line that every Mauritian has at the ready: here, everyone of all religions gets along beautifully. All religions represented here, I think, remembering again the local Ansari Sufi Order’s profession of “unity across the Sunni.”
“Are there any Shiites here?” I ask him. No, he says, and rattles off three categories of Sunnis that I do not recognize. I don’t ask him for clarification and he changes the subject.
“I want to show you a place. We won’t go there today, we will pass it. But I will point it to you. There.” he points to a building.
“What’s that place?”
He smiles. “If you ever want to…” and with his fingers makes a gesture indicating fucking.
The Captain leads the way
I’m 34 minutes late for our appointment, but only have to wait another 10 for Gavin.
“Hello, Captain.”
“Have you been waiting long?”
“No, actually, I had to wait a very long time for the bus and it never came. I took a taxi.”
He apologizes for not suggesting more convenient spot to meet. Yes, he thought I had mentioned I’d moved to Pointe Aux Piments, but he was not sure he understood. Now we take a bus to Troux Aux Biches, going back most of the way I came.
I was hoping that he had a specific apartment in mind, but actually we are off on a tour of his old neighborhood, visiting former neighbors and asking them if they know of anything. No, one after the other, no, they don’t know of any. We see one place with a for-rent sign up, but it is a two-bedroom. The price they quote Gavin is indeed lower than for any two-bedroom I’ve found online, but I am on my own.
Gavin shows me the house he used to live in. It looks nice, as does the neighborhood in general. The construction here is high quality, and the breezes smell of the sea. Neighbors invite us in. He is clearly loved and missed by these people. The conversations are all in Creole and no one translates for me, but it is nice to see him so animated, laughing, his language flowing as freely as mine does with Leo. So I smile, wait and try not to let my fatigue show.
“This is prospecting,” Gavin tells me, and encourages me to repeat this search without him tomorrow, in Triolet, where he thinks I’m likely to find something affordable. Just wander the streets, talk to people, look for signs advertising places to rent. Silently I think that I’m not going to get the same reception, being a foreigner ignorant of Creole. I doubt I will do any better than when I tried the same on my own in Goodlands.
Back on the street, Gavin yields the right-of-way and says “bon jour” to a young French woman. She passes silently with eyes averted. We get the same treatment from all the other White people we pass. Neither French nor local, I belong to no group here. How will I find a place to land?
We are almost back at the bus stop where we got off. I’m craving coffee very badly and suggest we stop at the shop that had immediately caught my eye. Again it is just instant coffee, but it scratches the itch and keeps me awake. Gavin has his own jones to scratch, and has me buy him a cigarette. He apologizes for being flat broke, repeats that his pension money will come soon and that he hasn’t forgotten the 200 rupees he borrowed from me.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I say. He says I must have forgotten that he had had one the last time we met. He’s cutting down, though, never buys more than one at a time and usually doesn’t finish them. Hopefully he can quit before this habit will give him a heart attack. That fear is another reason he would prefer to live with a friend.
I’m still thinking about your suggestion, I say, but cigarette smoke bothers me. Don’t worry, he says, I never smoke inside the house. Anyway, he adds, it will be at least til November when he can be free of his roommate, and I should not wait so long to find a new place. Twenty US dollars a night, ridiculous.
Darkness
Only after I have waved good-bye to Gavin do I look at my phone and see a black screen. Trying to restart it doesn’t help; after the startup animation the screen goes black again. Good God, I’m fucked now. I know which bus to take back, but with my horrible visual memory will I recognize where to get off? Did I remember to take a photo facing the way I came? Even if I did, what use when my phone has stopped working?
The sights out the bus window become unfamiliar. I fear I’ve missed my stop, get off, and walk a ways back. I wander this way and that, cursing my disabilities. How useless, a fool like me trying to find a home here. Stray dogs bark at me. There are few people out, and it seems they all are looking at me suspiciously. I feel afraid to talk to them.
Finally I stop in a shop to ask if they would plug my phone in long enough for me to use the Maps app and find my way. Only then, out of the sunlight, can I see the its screen properly, and make out the brightness level. Apparently I had turned it all the way down with some unseeing swipe. I turn it back up and see it’s actually working fine. I’ve been fucking myself. Google Maps Timeline tells the true story: I actually got off the bus too soon, and since I did that, I have been walking in circles.
40 minutes have passed from I got off the bus when I trudge back onto the hotel grounds, parched and completely spent.
The Way Home
Hanuman is glad to tell me that my new room is ready and I should move my things over to it, and give him the key when as I can, because his friend will be arriving later today. It should be quieter since it doesn’t face the main road, he says. His friend will have to take mine, but so it goes, my sleep is important… and on he chatters, embroidering the same points, sewing me fast in place.
Leo agrees with me that I’m unlikely to find any deals without a local friend introducing me. I think I’m going to have to lower my bar about what a good deal is; at this point the very need to sleep has made the housing quest all the more urgent.
Tomorrow I have a place lined up to view that I found on Facebook. I very much doubt that I want it, and have only been regarding it as a fallback. A shared home for 8500 rupees a month, about what I’ve been hoping to pay for a place of my own.
I also was put off by the conversation I’d had with the landlady. She seemed to think it odd that I had inquired about my housemates, and needed me to explain that the wrong people could make a shared home a disaster. She said meeting my fellow housemates would be too hard to arrange, given their work schedules. All signs are bad, but I have no other options. The only places that sounded remotely good have all been taken, or are taking so long to get back to me that I must assume the same.
It’s in Quatre Bornes; new turf for me, and likely to be a very long bus ride. But Leo is driving in that direction to see a cousin tomorrow, and he’ll give me a ride.
Hanuman is full of advice for me. I should look in Port Louis, in one of the Muslim majority neighborhoods -- the Christian ones are crime-ridden. He has friends who can help me, not only with housing, but with getting my visa. They know the right people in the government, and that is what matters here. All good Muslims! He hastens to call up one Anwar and hands the phone to me.
Anwar is brief, takes my number, and after our call sends a text wishing me SALAAM in capital letters.
Strange squabble
The transwoman comes out and speaks angrily to Hanuman. He rolls his eyes at us, Leo fidgets. She retrieves laundry from the clothesline and retreats behind a wall of blasting dance music in her room.
“She is harassing me,” Hanuman tells us. “She wants to make my life miserable.” It sounds like there is a vendetta between them, with every complaint he raises against her leading to more obnoxious behavior. She has taken chairs from the hotel and left them outside the gate where they have been stolen. She has broken dishes and plates. She has sexually harassed neighbors. Her behavior has led him to buy security cameras.
“Why don’t you tell her to leave?” I ask. “if she’s bothering you and the other guests so much…?”
“I have asked her to leave a thousand times and she refuses!” Hanuman’s agitation worsens. Like the rest of us, she used booking.com to rent her room. She reserved 3 weeks, and Hanuman seems to think he needs the corporation’s approval to boot her from his hotel. He reiterates his exchanges with them at a pace faster than I can follow, and which tires me trying to.
Leo and I again go out for dinner. We’re both feeling the need to get away from the hotel. I suggest we try Triolet, and find several possibilities on Google Maps, but he drives past one after the other for not seeing where to park.
He tells me that he had asked Hanuman to call the police about the theft, but that Hanuman had refused, saying that nothing could be proven, it would be a useless case of his word against hers. He finds it odd that he lets her stay.
I’m proud to spot an Indian restaurant with a place to park, and to help Leo order when the clerk can not, or will not, explain the differences between the different types of curry.
New guests have arrived at the hotel, two young men from Madagascar. They are in the kitchen making moringa soup. They smile at me, and in their eyes, I see the very thing that has drawn me back to Africa. It is something I have felt with so many Africans, but seldom amongst Americans or European, children aside. Around the world, all children but the abused possess it, but in the Global North, it seems to disappear with adolescence. It welcomes you unreservedly, without judgment, prejudice or suspicion. You sense that as long as you do these people no wrong, you will be accepted for whomever you are; they demand no impression, no performance of personality.
I greet them and we chat as best as the language barrier allows, supplementing words with gestures. The transwoman is drunk and attempts to insert herself into the conversation. They roll their eyes and gesture with fingers rolling around the temple.
“Watch your things,” I say, clinging to my wallet. “Keep your room locked,” and mime turning a key. They nod; they have been warned.
The hounds of Hell
As I feared, the mattress in the new room is little better than the first. The sound of street traffic had never been an issue in the previous room. Now, from the cane fields outside comes an endless, senseless back and forth barking of stray dogs. I fall asleep with great difficulty, then suddenly awake again at 3am.
I feel like I’m in a waking nightmare. I know it would be therapeutic to catch up on my journal, but I’m so tired I can barely think. All I want is sleep. I take more melatonin, to no avail.
After another hour I use the electric kettle and stew my last bag of black tea while I Google up other hotels. Nothing is within walking distance. I’ll have to find my way by bus. Everything is so complicated. It would really be tempting fate to book another without inspecting it in person.
As the dawn breaks, I receive a text message from Hanuman’s friend Anwar. It’s a meme of a Hadith, a saying of Prophet Muhammad’s. It warns to never to ignore the kind word of a friend. “Nice to hear from you, Anwar,” I respond. “How are you doing?” He does not reply.
I’m smelling spam. Is this a feature of WhatsApp? Can you spam your Muslim friends hadiths at fajr? Receive good deed points automatically? Easy to imagine in this day and age. Hard to imagine the Prophet approving.
Who is this Anwar? Is he even awake right now, actually? Along with most of my things, my prayer rug remains packed in this cramped place.
What do you think? I appreciate your feedback!