The other day I was listening to two friends of mine, who are also cousins to each other, talk about their ancestors. Their family has been living in the island since the late 18th century and their talk drifted from on ancestor to another, there was one who was born further up North in the Indian Ocean, on the island of Diego Garcia, in 1848 ( while the streets of Paris and Vienna were aflame…) and another in charming rue Dauphine in Port Louis, in the early 1900’s. I listened to them with fascination, as their evocation of these old people brought back to me the past of the island in a more vivid manner than do the history books. How nice to have spent one’s childhood in pretty rue Dauphine, on that shady stretch going from the back of the Cathedral to the Champ de Mars, lined with old Creole houses –there’s still a stone trough inlaid in the garden wall of at least one of them. I was a bit envious because I almost got a flat there the other day. It was the Chinese lady at who’se place I usually have lunch in the week, near the Champ de Mars who gave me the tip about a flat being available in the area. It was in a decrepit two-storey building at the back of an abandoned house, and there were Chinese women washing cabbage and hanging clothes in the narrow stone courtyard between the two buildings. The whole place strongly felt like 1950’s Hong Kong. One of the women confirmed that there was a vacant flat on the first floor, but when I knocked on the door of the owner of the whole place a tiny, antique little Chinese woman peered from the window, looking obviously scared, and said there were no flats available. I’ll send my wife to her, when she flies back from Beijing.

Coming back to my friends’ conversation, I wondered about how it must feel, to know that your ancestors have been living in the island for so long, or just to know so many things about your ancestors, to begin with. I know very little about my old people, only some vague descriptions. It seems there was a Gurkha soldier on my father’s side, I think he mentioned that he was a deserter. It seems plausible, because after 1857 there were quite a few Indian mutineers who came to the island fleeing the British backlash. Generally in the family, my father tended to lay stress on the fact that some of his ancestors came from the border with Nepal. My mother, on her side, would mention that her mother’s family were of Bengali origin. The fact that between the two of them, they still had a good deal of Bihari/UP ancestors was a matter best left in a quiet corner.

When I recollect whatever my parents have told me about their grandparents, I have the impression of going back to the world of the Indian countryside at any time between 2000 BC and say the 19th century. Yet they are talking about Mauritius in the early 20th century. I guess it’s partly because the descriptions are so hazy and seem so disconnected with the larger events in the island. One grandparent, for example, was a priest in a temple, and my great grandmother, who was his wife, complained that he was lazy. Apparently, he was solely concerned with his priestly duties, which did not earn him much, and she had to work in the fields to support the family. Then there are the usual stories about bad mothers in law and scheming daughters in law. It all seems to be taking place in some village lost in time, and surrounded by a huge sea of sugar cane.

I tend to have a better grip on the family history on my mother’s side because her ancestors settled in Port Louis, so she would mention places that I can relate to: her father was in some business related to distributing milk in ox carts, and every morning he and his partner would go to Victoria station which was where all the milkmen met to share out the distribution of the milk. I would guess the scene is taking place in the 1920’s, though it is hard to imagine ox carts in the streets of Port Louis by that time… but then they probably distributed the milk very early in the morning, as milkmen do everywhere. Apparently, the milk business went belly-up, and the family got into hard times. I think he must have got into some other jobs, because I remember my mother showing me a cigarette factory in the south of Port Louis and telling me this was where her father worked. At the time, I thought she meant that her father was still working there, though that was improbable, because he was almost 80 by that time. In the middle of that solidly urban atmosphere, confusingly, I have a story of a woman ancestor- maybe not a direct one- on my mother’s side, who “would go about inspecting her plantations” and once, during a lawsuit concerning a plot of land, stunned the court by appearing at the bar and answering the lawyer’s questions in French– a rare feat for an Indian woman, in those days.

Who was that woman ? Where are those plantations ? Wealth pops in and out in my family’s story like in a fast-forwarded Monopoly game. You hear tales of harrowing poverty “and then so-and-so came in his car” A car ? In the 50’s, when most kids still went to school barefeet ? “Well by that time things were going better”. Plots of land which would be worth dozens of millions nowadays appear at the turn of a sentence, flash briefly in one’s imagination like a piece of tinsel, then vanish – a bad investment, a dishonest uncle taking more than his share of the inheritance, or just plain old wasting it away on wine, women and songs.

The problem with all this was that it felt like I didn’t really have much of interest to tell my son, when he would ask me one day about my ancestors. It just felt like a vague notion of people living in some obscure countryside. Especially that on his mother’s side, he would hear a family history which had clear historical landmarks – the Sino-Japanese war, the Cultural Revolution.

But then the other day I came across a story which I felt was interesting and made me, personally, feel connected to somewhere in the past. It was an aunt of mine who told me that apparently, one of our ancestors was the wife of a priest who lived near the banks of a river – probably the Ganges. One day, her husband went to perform a prayer in some far away place. After several days, he had not come back. So, the wife took her baby daughter and ran away from her parents-in laws’ house to look for him. She arrived on the banks of the river and asked people whether they had seen her husband. Then one man in a boat said that he had seen a turban which was very much like that which she had been describing as that of her husband, and it was beside a well in a place further downstream. So she asked the man to take her to there.

But in fact the man was someone who made a trade out of trafficking women to send to Mauritius, as they lacked women in the island in those days. So he had made up that story, and he took her and her daughter to Calcutta where he sold them to a ship taking immigrants to the island.

When she arrived here, she heard about a wealthy Indian in the North of the island who protected people of his caste ( the Gosains), so she went to seek refuge at his place. He was a rich planter who owned a big Creole house, the type with the servants’ quarters at the back. He gave her a room in one of the quarters, she went to work in the fields, and the baby girl grew and eventually got married. I think it all happened somewhere in the 1890’s, because by that time you started having rich Indians.

Well anyway I do hope I’ll be remembered as a good ancestor, further down the family line…