Silence of the Chagos Read online

  Contents

  Silence of the Chagos

  Mauritius, 1968

  Diego Garcia, 1963

  Diego Garcia, 1967

  Mauritius, 1973

  Afterword – Chagos: Fifty Years of Fighting by Shenaz Patel

  To Charlesia, Raymonde, and Désiré,

  who entrusted me with their stories.

  To all the Chagossians, uprooted and displaced

  from their island, to keep the “free world” safe…

  ‌Silence of the Chagos

  A string of islands strewn across the sea. Milky droplets traced in white sand, as if fallen from the languid teat of the Indian peninsula, floating beyond the Maldives.

  Chagos. Ensconced within the Indian Ocean, an archipelago balanced precariously along the arched curve of the Mid-Indian Ridge. Rising from the Chagos-Laccadive Plateau are some sixty islets across four atolls. Peros Banhos, Salomon, Egmont, Diego. Diego Garcia.

  Evidence of old faults, oceanic upheaval, brutal volcanic eruptions, telluric convulsions that wrenched apart Gondwana, the massive, primitive continent that once had sundered the Indian Ocean from the Pacific, bringing forth the mythical land of Lemuria, which in turn was dismembered, shattered, submerged until all that remained were a few sparse traces, a few islands breaching the sea.

  Were the Chagos part of this myth? Do they keep, buried in their bedrock, beneath their coral crowns, the old memory of these tectonic convulsions, of this primordial rift?

  The Chagos. An archipelago with a name silken as a caress, fervid as regret, brutal as death…

  Miles away, nearly straight to the north, another land juts upward. Mountainous, crude, its name a hiss. Afghanistan. A child looks up. A gust of hot air singes the skin of his face. There is nothing up above anymore. Nothing but an incandescent vault that spits out sparks and burning wisps. Beside him, his mother is outstretched, her terrified eyes looking at her legs and feet cast far off, two yards from her body. High above, two dark shapes linger in the sky. One last loop above the heap of blazing rubble, then the B-52s set off again, freed of their bombs, toward the Indian Ocean they would see in just a few minutes, toward their base deep therein, their target Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands.

  Further to the southwest, another child clings to his mother’s hand against the railing surrounding the port’s captive waters. Behind them, tourists in multicolored hibiscus-print Bermuda shorts pause to decipher a signboard declaring in red letters: Port Louis welcomes you, Bienvenue à île Maurice.

  The child smells the warm pizza from a cardboard box one of them is carrying, its lid showing a pirate brandishing a knife and a fork. He’s hungry, too. He tugs at his mother’s skirt. She doesn’t look at him. Her eyes are lost in the distance, toward the barely visible line back there, where the blue sky slips into the blue sea.

  He knows that, tonight, when she talks to him, she’ll just say the same words: Chagos. Diego. Deported. Forced exile. Military base. Words that whistle as they strike him, words that he hears without understanding, because they drive her away, because they tear her apart and drown her eyes under so many silent tears sliding down her face toward the bitter creases around her mouth.

  He’s hungry, and he’s tired. They’ve been there for hours, and there’s nothing to see, nothing but this flat, thick water, bereft of the boats that harbor development had pushed farther off, too far to see. The child tugs at his mother’s skirt more insistently. She finally tilts her head down at him. A strange fog has blurred her gaze. Little by little, he makes out a shape that stumbles forward at first, draws near, a child’s shape, more and more defined, wearing the same shorts as him, bearing his own head, it’s him, he’s there, in his mother’s eyes, but not here, not on this gray quay surrounded by buildings thrust toward the sky. He walks straight ahead, and under his feet is sand, white sand scarcely indented by his toes, and behind him, green palms swaying lazily. He walks straight ahead, he holds out his hand, he knows he’ll smile. A sheet of rain erases him. His mother shuts her eyes. And he doesn’t know the source of this chasm within her body, it runs from his belly to his guts, and it is filled by an echo from far away. From the depths of the Indian Ocean.

  Letan mo ti viv dan Diego

  Mo ti kouma payanke dan lezer

  Depi mo ape viv dan Moris

  Mo amenn lavi kotomidor

  When I lived in Diego

  I was like a tropicbird in the light

  Now I am in Mauritius

  I am like a restless bird in the night

  —Excerpt from “Pays natal” [HomeLand], a song composed and sung by the Chagossians in exile on Mauritius

  translated by Laura Jeffery & Saradha Soobrayen

  ‌Mauritius, 1968

  The sky shook that day. A drum skin struck from within by a powerful, invisible hand. The air was clear, though, just a few clouds tattooed on the infinitely blue canvas. But Charlesia was ready to believe in thunder. Nothing made any sense here. Everything was so different from over there. Even the sun seemed out of place. It always appeared late, just above the line of roofs, and disappeared behind the mountain early in the afternoon, drawing a shadow over the land, like a distant rumble that swallowed up the light. It was forgotten long before it had actually set. Ever since her arrival, she’d always had the distinct impression that it was sunset at noon. Only the suffocating heat reminded her that it was day.

  “Listen up! Listen! The cannon blasts!”

  The slum around her began to buzz far more insistently than usual. Miselaine, with her hair still in blue and pink curlers and her bosom insistently threatening to pop the buttons off her faded dress, appeared on her doorstep.

  “Ou tande, ounn tande Charlesia? Kanon lindepandans…”

  Yes, Charlesia had heard the Independence Day cannon, so what?

  In the dry, dusty little courtyard, the other children chanted their shrill tune like boisterous martins:

  “L’île Maurice, in-dé-pen-dan-ce! L’île Maurice, in-dépen-dan-ce!”

  There was no way to escape this noise. Here, in any case, there was never any hope of quiet. Whose idea had it been to build a neighborhood up against a mountain? The compact mass of basalt amplified and reverberated everything: the raw sun on this torrid midday, the children’s nonstop screams, the deafening cannon blasts, threatening in the unmoving air.

  Charlesia sat on a flat stone in front of her doorway. Beneath her legs, which she stretched as she gathered her dress around her knees, the earth etched paths in an ever-changing brown. It had rained for a good part of the afternoon yesterday. The unfaltering rhythm of the water dripping through the gaps of the sheet metal roof, into all the dented pots and pans she’d hurriedly set out to keep all their belongings safe and dry, was still stuck in her head. The water had hurtled down from the mountain, slipped under the sheet metal, and infiltrated their shack. Huddled atop the table with her children, she had watched the pots dance. They had been positioned around the bed before coming under the table, ringing the cabinet, and finally bouncing beside the bed again. Their blackened rims clinked against the iron legs. Once the worst had passed, they’d swept most of the water out with the coconut-leaf brush, but it was still damp inside. A wet-dog smell lingered for several days, strong enough to leave the children snuffling as they slept.

  She looked around to find them in this swarm of thin-legged grasshoppers jumping in every direction and waving small red-blue-yellow-green flags. Marco and Kolo were there, shrieking like everyone else, maybe a bit louder than everyone else, and throwing pebbles against the rusted metal separating the last small homes from the muddy stream that flowed down from the mountain.

  Mimose was sitting a bit farther off, leaning against a wall. The me
tallic reverberations from the stones’ pounding ought to have been hammering her spine. But she didn’t move. Her head hung down and her arms propped up her forehead as she looked at them from below, a defiant, angry fire in her dark eyes. She’d been like that ever since they arrived. Nobody was ever able to make her smile.

  Maybe she was just wistful for her plane. She always went there right after school. She would shout her rallying cry of “Catalina! Catalina!” and they would hurtle toward the beach in a teeming, energetic horde to encircle the stranded plane on the shore. She was the liveliest one, giving the signal to go, telling everyone their roles and leading her friends with peals of laughter. As they said in Creole, she was a hammer leading an army of nails.

  But now she was as listless as a gas-lamp flame that had sputtered out with a quick twist of the knob. She stayed in her corner, huddled tight. Charlesia rubbed her back the way they used to with stubborn tortoises, but to no avail, nothing could make her raise the head she kept obstinately buried between her shoulders. She watched them from a distance, not so much with indifference as with an almost unbearable attentiveness that they could actually feel, a tendril that burrowed under their skin, unfurling a shame that made them even angrier at her, a shame that pushed them apart.

  Charlesia watched her. She could see, beneath her steely gaze, the memories whirling within her small skull. She needed to convince Mimose to eat something, she had gotten so thin, but what should she give her? Yesterday’s fricasseed butter beans in tomato sauce had gone bad in the heat, a yellowish puke stuck to the pan that even the dogs wouldn’t eat. She shouldn’t have had any herself. She was trying to get rid of the heartburn itching at her throat with loud burps. Back there, they’d had fresh food aplenty, they never ate the same thing two days in a row. They hadn’t lacked for options, and they hadn’t needed money to eat.

  She slipped her hand into her blouse, pulled out a crumpled blue packet, opened it carefully. Just two and a half cigarettes left. She’d have to make them last. The matches disintegrated against the rough strip of paper in the unbearable humidity. The fourth one finally caught. Charlesia brought it up to her half-cigarette. Her hand shook a bit. The first puff was hard to swallow, with that bitter taste of cold tobacco being lit again and resisting. Nothing like the pleasure of a fresh cigarette. She inhaled long and slow, the smoke opening her throat, entering her lungs, she held it there for a minute, not breathing, keeping it deep inside, then she exhaled a brief puff. Two more drags on the cigarette, then she broke off the gray end with a decisive pinch of two fingernails, put the remaining portion in the blue packet, and stashed it in her blouse. That left her a quarter of a cigarette to smoke later. Yet another thing she’d had to learn here, how to smoke a cigarette in four parts, how to give up the pleasure of that flavorful satisfaction that touched her palate as the cigarette burned down, while she contemplated the sea.

  The sea. The sea had been everywhere back there. Behind them, beneath their eyes, the inner sea, the outer sea, its muted, soothing rhythms harmonizing to protect and cradle the horseshoe that was their land.

  “Ou tande Charlesia? Vinn ekoute! Kanon lindepandans!”

  Those busybodies just couldn’t stop pestering her. Of course Charlesia could hear it! In this space where every sound ricocheted, resounded, and was amplified in an inverted echo, it was impossible not to hear the Independence Day cannon. She felt like her head was in a drum being banged over and over and over, the stretched skin absorbing and intensifying the blows, scattering them in short bursts that pounded on her eardrums and crashed against the walls of her skull.

  Charlesia straightened up. There was too much noise here. The air was too heavy in this slum. This whole mass of metal imprisoning and reinforcing the heat in its ribs, shrill music spewing endlessly from sleepless radios, secondhand mopeds backfiring and choking like asthmatic hens as they spat out smoke that stung everybody’s lungs, the sauna-like heat that clung to sleep, this overcrowding that made everyone feel like the entire slum was crammed under their own roof.

  She walked into her small shack, grabbed the red headscarf on the bed, and knotted it quickly over her frizzy, sweat-soaked hair. She felt with her toes for the sandals under the wardrobe and went back out without shutting the door.

  Miselaine saw her walk by, opened her mouth to ask her where she was going, and, upon seeing Charlesia moving like a sleepwalker, changed her mind. As Charlesia made her way down the slope toward the far end of the slum, Miselaine followed the woman with her gaze before turning around and shrugging in frustration.

  “Huh. She really is a halfwit.”

  She took care not to say it loud enough for Charlesia to hear. She knew better than to cross this tongue sharper and more dangerous than her own.

  Charlesia walked at a sluggish pace. Black gunk from the overheated asphalt stuck to her soles. She walked straight ahead, her nose thrust forward, waiting for it to orient her, for it to guide her toward the sea she needed to see. But her compass needle was broken here. Too many smells meant too many obstacles, the thick, rancid oil of the fritter stall on the street corner, the strong odors of rubber and gas emanating from a mechanic’s shop a bit further off.

  Nothing was right here. Streets with tight curves, cul-de-sacs stopping people in their tracks as they headed downhill. Walking here made no sense. Back there, she had glided down the natural slope of the sand with her eyes shut, the sea before her, the sea behind her, calm and beautiful, caressing and stroking their land like a languid body held close by its lover.

  Charlesia walked. At last knew which direction to go. She started to smell it, diffuse, subdued. It was still a long way off. But she was prepared to take the whole day if she had to.

  It hit her like a shock, as she made her way past a massive gray-brick building. It was there, so close, right there, on the other side of the long road where cars rushed past, leaving traces of metallic color in their wake. She just had to cross it. She looked to her right, her left, her right again, everything was moving too fast, the cannon burst within the walls of her mind. She shut her eyes, stepped forward. A loud screech, a harsh smell of rubber and asphalt hit her nostrils, a honk, a volley of curses. She opened her eyes. Behind her, the cars were speeding past again. There was just a gate to get past, then a huge stretch of concrete.

  “E, kot ou pe ale?”

  She didn’t stop to tell the man who had jumped out of the sentry box where she was headed. She started walking faster. The end of this quay was where she needed to go. The end of this quay. That was where her boat had to be. Where it must have been. That was where it had disappeared, suddenly, a year ago. Without a trace. Breaking the mirror. Destroying hope.

  He’d barely had time to react before she’d slipped through to the other side. If he’d just lowered the volume on his transistor radio, he would have heard her coming. But he didn’t want to miss a second of what they were broadcasting about the ceremony over at the Champ de Mars. “This moment, March 12, 1968, is a historical one as our island of Mauritius gains independence,” the announcer was saying in a voice that shook slightly.

  Historical, that word kept coming up again and again during this broadcast, he wasn’t going to miss it, for once he was witnessing capital-H History, he wanted to experience every last bit of this so that he could tell his grandchildren about it one day. “Yes, I was there, well, almost, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  The excitement was great, the moment solemn. Historical. They were both there: the last British governor, Sir John Shaw Rennie, and the first Mauritian prime minister, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, side by side, watching the British Union Jack come down and the Mauritian Quadricolor go up. A singular moment. And then the cannon thundered, once, twice, ten times, the mountains surrounding Port Louis echoing each salvo back to the harbor, and the welter of sounds swelled within his sentry box, yes, he was there, in History, he’s there, right there. He’s exactly where he’s supposed to be. Who could have thought that someone might show
up here today? She’d taken him completely by surprise. With all that excitement, after all, he hadn’t been prepared. He’d seen her poking her foot in between two of the barriers and making her way toward the end of the quay. He should have stopped her, of course. Who knows why he didn’t. Something held him back.

  The headscarf. The red headscarf she’d wrapped around her hair. He knew it. He recognized that figure. Or was his mind playing tricks on him? It was so hot in the sentry box under the March sun, he’d asked for a fan to be put in such a long time ago. He always felt like his body was leaking during the summer months as sweat just oozed out of his skin, flowing in small rivulets around his temples and down the slope of his neck, along his back all the way to his belt, into the hollows of his bent knees where fiery red rashes kept on breaking out and which he tried to soothe by rubbing them worriedly against his chair.

  It couldn’t be her. That trailing gait, those slumped shoulders. The other one was fast, she had intensity, she planted her feet firmly on the ground. She had made enough of an impression on him that he couldn’t help but keep thinking of her. Maybe that’s why he thought he was seeing her now, with the excitement of that day and all that.

  But it was her. That red scarf knotted tight in the nape of her sinewy neck. Yes, it was her, the one he’d seen there, last year.

  He remembered that morning of 1967 especially well. It was his first day working at the harbor. He had barely slept, afraid that the alarm clock might stop working in the middle of the night, or he might sleep too deeply to hear its ringing. If he missed his first day after having looked for work so long, he would never have forgiven himself. His wife had tossed and turned the whole night beside him. The bed was apparently a double, but what the local cabinetmaker had delivered was far too narrow. There was no way to move without bumping the other’s belly or butt. And Jeannine’s belly was far bigger now. She was on her third pregnancy, and he’d never seen her so heavy. She complained about it a great deal, especially with the unrelenting heat and humidity. It was stifling and, at night, she kept whining that she couldn’t find any position to sleep in. He was forced to sleep practically on the edge so he wouldn’t jostle her if he shifted his knees. Double bed, ha! This cabinetmaker must have figured they were both just as wiry as he was. Long as a week, that was how they said it in Creole, and just as thin too. He had to grant that the cabinetmaker had let him buy it on credit, but the fact was that he hadn’t delivered any sort of extension for the bed upon the final payment.