Hillsdale Train

On the train to Hillsdale, I read about Flamenco and Duende and kept
on day-dreaming. There are different tempos of this most skilful art,
and beautiful words like Bulerias, Alegrias, Falsetas, and Palos seem
to fall around me from the sky. Plow plang plouf. There must be better
worlds out there. May be (and I am still dreaming again), may be, i
should emigrate to Alicante, and set up shop. Find a flamenco teacher,
who I am sure will be a hard drinking gypsy who plays the guitar like
a god. Roam around town like a mad dog with one mission in my life.
One single life mission. To fall in love with flamenco.

I come back to 'real' life and it is Halloween. The stupidest
invention of capitalist America. I am bored and empty. Why work
anyway? I`d love to be under a sequoia and spend the rest of the day
dreaming of angels and demons. Then an old lady with a kind smile
walks in. She is dressed like an angel with two wings and is giving
away chocolates. Makes everyone burst out in the loudest laugh. This
is worth something this whole show. Allows all of us to be weird for a
day. I should have dressed up as a flamenco gypsy, with a large hat, a
cigar. It is so necessary that we stay weird o my dear people !

My new company motto: We like to prize our weird people.

me asome a la muralla
me respondio el viento
"para que dar esos suspiritos
si ya no hay remedio?"

I climbed up to the town walls
And the wind said:
"Why so may sighs
if you can`t change anything


Rogers House

When he saw me his eyes lit like the phare at Albion. Like he was in some dire need to empty his story, like the dockers throwing off the sugar sacks off the trucks in a not so distant past. His story is forgotten, one that not even a child will turn an eye to. He had stopped praying since god-knows-when, stopped even thinking of anything close to hope. Words like love, encouragement, hard work, recompense are now alien to him. He was human once, at least that`s what he likes to think. "Plix dilait ine monter missie, l`essence ine monter, tout fine monter, ki ou le mo faire". He has been a pion (messenger) in front of Rogers House for a very long time. I like to think he has been standing there as long as the angry salty frustrated waves have pounced deliriously on the shores at Caudan, Now he does not even notice who goes in, who comes out. Who is white and who is black. Rich, or poor.

In me, perhaps he saw this as a great surprise, someone actually took some notice of him, said a little hello. Not that I am Pere Laval, no truly, i`m the reverse of anything to do with sainthood. I am back home after a very long time, and like a fool, I am freely smiling at everyone, absorbing like a sponge, all passer-bys. I want to take in as many pictures as I can in the camera of my mind. Snap, snap, snap. When I am back in the cold north, these are the few things like personal artifacts, that I will cherish, places, spaces, that I will throw in as logs to the fire to bring some warmth to my life.

I stood and swallowed his talk. To me it was a raw expose of this place that one would be desperately unable to read anywhere. My salary is Rs 2500 missie (yes Rs 2500), my daughter`s at school, son is at IVTB, and we pay rent. Mo madame malade, we think it`s cancer. Dire moi ou meme a ki grand bon dieu mo bisin coummence prie. To which God does he direct his prayers.

I sometimes think of him, what must be doing at this very right moment in time. Does he remember me, the fool who listened to him for free? I picture him taking the bus from Rose Belle to Port Louis, the 7.00 a.m express, numbed by life, numbed to the extent that he will forcefully look outside the window to obliterate the world, and wish it was all a case of mistaken identity. A violent mistake by the universal soul distributor. He could possibly be telling himself, "may be I was made to land on the wrong planet like some cosmic fedex error, may be i am someone`s bad dream, ok I will now close my eyes, and when back, all this pain will disappear. This pain hurts, it hurts like an open wound".


Mega Short

I have had a strange week. May be it is the effect of reading
Coetzee`s diary of a bad year. This is as much radical as it can get.
He talks nasty all through the book, but nasty in an intelligent way,
criticizes Bush to Cricket. Talks about sex and anything else
associated with it. The first Coetzee effect took place at the shuttle
stop yesterday morning, when a 'New Age Christian' person carrying an
'awake christian magazine' approached me. "Sir do you have a min for
God'. My reply: "No never I do not have a minute and I will never have
a minute for you and your magazine, your ideas, your everything, and
by the way what God are you talking about". And on this note starts my
radical day.

I went on later during the day to write about anything that has been
bothering me. Like why is it that Mauritian writers are such darn
conservatives scared to throw burning arrows at the 'sacred'
government. At least with their words, they can make great fun of the
poverty of the mind in our parliament. Our great safari suit
politicians.

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