frying pans and the fire
It has been a theme of my life. I do not plan. I chase inspiration until it abandons me, and then I dally blindly in the doldrums. I let things happen to me, for better or worse.
Farewell, Péreybère
The taxi driver wanted me to meet him at the beach, but I was not about to drag my luggage over there. From Google Maps I sent him geo-coordinates and a screen cap I added a circle to, along with pictures of the entrance,emphasizing that there was parking inside. He has arrived late but not later than I had promised Anoushka I would be gone; I expected nothing more. He wants to pack all my things in his car without my help, but needs to be shown how to retract the handle on a wheeled suitcase.
I call Anoushka, no response. From the road I text her that I left the key to my room in the door, and thank her for the stay. She returns the text with thanks in turn. In the months to come, I will try to catch sight of this place from the windows of busses, but it will prove invisible, so small and inconspicuous is its entrance. The first place I stayed on this island, vanished like a poorly remembered dream.
The cabbie is all smiles and quick laughter, quick to say encouraging things without taking care that he has understood what I have said. He asks the usual questions and as always I try to enlist him in my search for a home. He promises to help, but asks that I not let Hanuman, the hotelier, know about this conversation because “he is a businessman like any other.”
Already I recognize sights I have seen through bus windows, though my mind can not connect the dots, ever challenged as it is to draw maps. It was like this for me in Philadelphia, even after 8 years there; I became familiar with many places but was continually surprised to come across them if I did not travel to them directly from my home.
We drive through Triolet, and the cabbie opines that this would be a good place for me to live. He points out shops and restaurants along the way -- every bit as cheap as Port Louis, he says, you don’t have to be close to PL if you live here. I do my best to take mental pictures.
On the other side of the city limits the character of the streets changes. The people are moving about less, lingering more, and they gaze at us with unsmiling faces and hungry eyes.
“This is what we call a hot neighborhood,” says the cabbie. “Do you know what hot means?” I can guess, but he does not wait for me. “You need to be careful here. Lots of drugs. Lots of prostitutes.”
Then he asks, “Are you hungry?”
“No, I just ate breakfast.”
“I know a good place to eat.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
“It’s right on the way.”
I relent. Of course, he knows the owner and introduces me, but their conversation remains untranslated for me. We have a good meal, and to my surprise, he pays for mine. Then the hotel turns out to be just around the bend from the restaurant. I’m not sure how I feel about this cabbie, but I want to keep him on my house hunting team, so I tip him 100 rupees.
So this is what I chose
The hotel is far more rustic than Anoushka’s, and my first impression is that I have succeeded in taking a step out of the tourist zone. It stands on the edge of a field with fruit trees that happily remind me of Hawaii: papayas, tamarinds, bananas.
Just past the gate is a table at which sit Hanuman and two guests. I shake everyone’s hand in turn. Hanuman rises to greet me. A thin man with light skin, apparently of uniquely Indian descent, rapid and nervous in his speech, gestures and facial expressions. He is effusive, glances about while speaking and punctuates his sentences with toothy smiles.
One guest is a loud, extroverted and rather strange looking woman who ignores my apology for only speaking English, but continues her rave in Creole; I realize that she is drunk.
The other is an older man who turns out to be English-Mauritian. Heavy in build, slow in his motions, articulate but economical in his speech. Leo grew up in England and has not been on the island since his youth. He is well-traveled, witty and makes bad puns compulsively. He accompanies me upstairs as Hanuman shows me my room, one of half a dozen surrounding an area with a couch, television and kitchenette.
My enthusiasm wanes as I take in the accommodations. The room is small, the lighting is as much of an eyesore as where I last stayed. The bedding looks exactly the same. The wall is perversely decorated with pictures of posh hotel rooms apparently clipped from magazines.
There are few signs of use of the kitchenette, but a legion of ants is diligently searching for any. Here, in the rooms, and downstairs are signs listing house rules.
No food trash in the kitchen.
Don’t leave dishes in the sink.
Lend your room key to no one.
Hotel not responsible for lost valuables.
There is only one refrigerator for all the guests, an electric kettle and a microwave. “Is this all there is to cook on?”
“Oh no, there is a kitchen downstairs, I will show you!”
Half the rooms are unoccupied, and there is room in the fridge for what food of mine might spoil. The dry things I leave in the box from the supermarket and leave it on the table. Even now, my intuition is bringing forth the image of a store with empty shelves, whose real wares are sold under the counter.
The kitchen downstairs is a tiny room with windows and door facing the yard and a few old bits of random cookware on oily shelves that moths and other insects have made their graveyard. The stove is a single burner fed by a propane tank.
Hanuman shows me it all with cheerful chatter, and offers us a snack of bread and margarine with instant Nescafe, scraping it and sugar out of jars caked with moisture as I shoot Leo a glance of disbelief.
We sit together at the table. Conversation flows easily. I must admit, though I chose a country I knew was unpopular with my countrymen, Leo’s native fluency is a breath of fresh air; It is a joy to be again use the full vocabulary of my native tongue and even banter. Hanuman is cheered by how well we get along. He emphasizes how much Leo and I are his kind of people, and seems to want to know everything about me. He seems to have nothing more important to do but chat with us. Quite the opposite of Anoushka, whom I rarely even saw.
I’m warming up to the situation. I may be paying the same for much less space and comfort, but perhaps this is just one side of the coin, and the other is that here I will meet other people, between my fellow travelers and Hanuman. Is this not why I moved from Anoushka’s place?
Faith and authenticity
I loved Egypt, but it turned me off from my own religion. In a country like the USA, no one cares whether you fast for Ramadan or not, society cuts you no slack to accommodate your fast, and no one has sympathy for your struggle. Where Islam is the majority religion, violating the fast stands to diminish one’s social status, and complaining about hunger and thirst becomes a topic akin to the weather. The fast thus ceases to be between the believer and Allah, but a social ritual, and thus loses all integrity.
I’m reminding myself of a digital nomad I once met in Egypt, who told me “I just hate the majority religion of whatever nation I’m in at the moment” and that I would rather hate a different religion for a change, but to avoid offending Hanuman, I keep this thought to myself. But I note that Leo is becoming quiet, so I make space for him by admitting that in recent years I have become sick of religion in general and have lost my piety. Encouraged, he makes a few remarks about religious hypocrites, confining his examples to Christians in England.
Leo’s homecoming
He has cousins around the island and is here visiting them. He has just come from visiting one for the first time since their childhood. When he hugged Leo, he did not want to let go, as if Leo might fly away again once released.
Why stay at the hotel, then? He wants to be avoid being a burden on his family. I tell him I think he’s suffering from Western awkwardness in accepting hospitality. Perhaps so, he laughs. It’s going to take a while for the ocean waters to wash all the English off him. We are on the same page with feeling sick of Western culture, with its isolating overemphasis on individuality and independence, and in wanting to live in a more human society.
“I feel I’m getting healthier every day I’m here. The moringa tea is helping me.” Hanuman chimes in, and Google confirms what they are telling me about its multiple health benefits. It grows like a weed on the island, and now that they have identified the plant for me, I start to notice it everywhere.
Leo wants to get citizenship and relocate here, but the government is giving him an awful time with it. Because he left the island at an early age and has been away for so long, his citizenship has been revoked, and even getting residency is a paper labyrinth. He must produce marriage certificates, birth and death certificates of his parents, and so on. I’ve already had a taste of Mauritian bureaucracy with the hoops I’m to jump through to get a local bank account, now I worry again how difficult getting a visa will be, a project that I’ve let slip to the back burner.
Leo testifies to the prejudice here, which, like Egypt, can make a native feel like a second-class citizen in their own country. He went to a touristy restaurant with a cousin and was ignored by the waiters, who waited hand and foot on the White foreigners. When they finally were served their food, they were not given silverware, and the help continued to ignore them as their food got cold.
At the same time, though he can speak Creole, he isn’t fluent and his British accent gives him away. He is taken as local until he speaks, and then he fears he gets inflated prices like a wealthy tourist. Like me, he falls through the cracks of society’s divisions and belongs to no group in particular.
The trouble guest
He and Hanuman warn me about the other guest I met when I first arrived, and who has retreated to her room just behind the table at which we sit. As I suspected, she is a transwoman. What a pity that the first visibly queer person I have met here turns out to be a total embarrassment and someone to avoid. Loud, usually drunk out of her mind, and constantly imposing herself on everyone else’s conversation. She is the only guest on the first floor; Hanuman tells me that he moved her from the second floor to make her less of an annoyance to the other guests.
Worse, Leo suspects that she stole 2,000 rupees out of his wallet. He had been sitting with her at this table, had taken it out of his pocket and left it on the table for a moment while he walked to his rental car. Later in his room, he discovered the money missing. I guess I’ll have to heed the signs, keep my room locked and mind my key scrupulously.
He can get out of England, but…
The public beach here is unsafe for swimming with its constantly tumultuous waves. I’m delighted when Leo offers to drive us to the beach at Troux Aux Biches, the next one up the coast. At this point, the suspected thief has reemerged from her room, so we move quickly.
Driving here takes getting used to. Leo is unnerved by the sudden moves of other drivers, the need to invent parking spaces, and the stray dogs’ zipping in and out of the street with their purest confidence that traffic will always defer to them. And so the drivers do; though I’ve seen one terrible accident and will see another within a few weeks, as of this writing have yet to see a single animal roadkill. They’re bloody aggressive, Leo says, walk around and they will bark at you and follow you as if to make sure you leave their territory.
Troux Aux Biches is a name that came up a lot in my Internet research before I came here, and people here have sung me the praises of this beach. Its proximity to this hotel was one of the things that influenced my decision. Indeed it is less crowded than the public beach at Pereybere, and the water seems more clear; pity I overlooked my goggles in my rushed prep earlier.
But the buoys separating swimmers from boats are also terribly close to the shore and the swimmers, again, are just bobbing in place and I fear crashing into them. I see a few fish but there is no sign of coral. To be able to snorkel was the center of my emigration dream. Again I’m questioning how well I really researched before I chose this country. But the dip is refreshing and I’m a bit tired for a serious swim, anyhow.
This beach, at least on a weekday such as this, has hardly any locals in attendance. Almost everyone here is French, and they are not friendly to us. The only conversation we have is with a couple of British women. Leo make a self-deprecating cultural bond with them, repeating that it will take some time for the island to wash away his Britishness.
Going to take all the longer if you never get in the water, I chide him. Look at you wearing socks and shoes to the beach!
Gavin calls. Apparently he may have leads on a home for me in this very village. Shall we go tomorrow? I gladly accept the invite, but can’t seem to convey that I have moved very close. I don’t want a repeat of the hassle we had meeting yesterday, and I agree to meet him at the same bench across the street from the casino.
The issue of how to cook at Hanuman’s hotel gets skirted. Leo suggest we dine out and I take him up on his invite. At a nearby Mauritius-Chinese restaurant we pay too much for bland food, a terraced view and a waiter pulling our chairs and grinding our pepper.
What comes out at night
Back at the hotel, I see ants are swarming over my box of food. They have found the honey and sugar. Drawing on Hawaiian wisdom, I place them in bowls and add enough water to make impassable moats.
At bedtime I fall quickly into a half-awake daze, but sleep evades me. I can feel every spring in the mattress. Something is making saliva flow incessantly. I drool on the pillow, which feels exactly like a sack of used and dried Kleenexes, and reeks of excessive detergent. I can’t help but wonder about the history of this bedding and whether the perfume serves to cover a worse odor of filth. This brings to mind Kafka’s description of the gag in “In The Penal Colony” and how the prisoner pukes upon the taste of the vomit of the previous torture victims.
And I begin to feel I am in a similar torture machine, as the thought of my actions and inactions that led me to this place run over and over in my mind, in loops that add up to nothing I can discern, but which seem to hint at some karmic doom.
The months I spent unable to wrap my mind around either relaunching my geek career or choosing a country to move to. I constantly distracted myself with drugs and projects I started but did not complete, allowing each to bog down in baroque complications until inspiration came up with another.
The years in New York living with my mother as Alzheimer’s unravelled her mind. She refused to acknowledge that I was taking care of her, and I despaired of escape. Suddenly the opportunity presented itself, and then on 11 days’ notice moved to Pennsylvania. I jumped from one frying pan to another, then another.
It has been a theme of my life. I do not plan. I chase inspiration until it abandons me, and then I dally blindly in the doldrums. I let things happen to me, for better or worse.
I move the mattress off the bed. Leaned against the wall, its age and filth become apparent. But there is no sleeping on the bare bedframe; it has bits of metal jutting through; I can only guess what the intention there is.
The unoccupied rooms are all unlocked; in turn I test their mattresses with one hand; they all feel the same.
Finally I move to the couch in the shared space. There is no turning off the light in there, but fortunately I have my sleep mask and get in a few hours of sleep before the roosters begin crowing.
