With a Little Help from Friends-3
The Black Sheep
When I die, they will write this on my epitaph: “He was nothing like his brothers”. I was always breaking my slate, and when the time came for me to use exercise books, called copy-books in those days, they were full of ink splashes. My fingers had turned blue. I was always getting told off for mixing up my subjonctives and my futur antérieur, but for no reason anybody could understand I knew my times table backwards, and although one was supposed to stop at 12 times 12 equal one hundred and forty four, I could go on and on to 16 times 16 was two hundred and fifty-six. What’s the use of that? they asked.
I hated school, and it seems that I was only interested in playing with the voyous of the neighbourhood — the bad boys. He prefers the street to his home, everybody said. When you looked for him to go on an errand, he was in some street corner, kicking a tin or jumping like an idiot and generally misbehaving. Even Papa, who made it obvious that I was his favourite child, and who cherished me much more than I deserved, was so disappointed in my not being like my brothers that he forecast that whilst my brothers would end up as doctors or lawyers, he could only see me as a peanut seller, hawking my wares in the Albion Docks.
On top of everything, I had dark skin and a flat nose, and I told lies. I was a rabacheur, a blabbermouth. Also, what nobody knew, I was quite adept at extracting one or two five cent pieces from Papa’s pockets whilst no one was looking. I had the unique capacity, when sent to the corner shop, twenty metres away, to take half an hour.
Required to read ten pages of the Quran aloud everyday, I glued some pages together with coal tar prised from the melting street, so that one flick enabled 2 pages to be turned, undetected by my two-year older sister whose self-appointed task was watching me, halving my reading time. At least he’s a fast Quran reader the family said.
My brothers had both won bursaries and automatic admission to the best secondary schools south of the equator, as we were told, but this young boy came nowhere near. It was, however, possible to gain admission through an entrance exam, which would account for perhaps thirty youngsters from the whole island. Normally I would have had no chance at all of being among those thirty lucky ones, but it seems that in those days, the choice was a little more haphazard. If the panel of examiners recognised a name, there was a strong chance that it would make the list.
Thus it was that I won, not just the lottery, but the jackpot. There was no more room at the Port-Louis branch, so I was offered a place at the Curepipe site. That meant having to catch a train everyday and back. Undeservingly I was floating on air. I, who had almost never seen the inside of a car, was granted the ultimate wish: Living a large part of my life inside a train. Although with no bursary, there was a fee of Rs.8.00 per month to pay to attend that hallowed institution, one had a little pink piece of cardboard entitling one to travel on the any Port-Louis-Curepipe train, the so-called contract. It was worth more to me than Aladdin’s lamp. Schooling was a minor matter, and seemingly of no significance to me.
Travelling by train was such fun. One travelled in special schoolboys’ compartment, and it was stories and jokes for the duration. There was looking out the window, and shouting jokey insults at people going on their businesses on the roads running parallel to the track. A milkman who used to cycle to do his work had won the Cycling championship, and henceforth every single cyclist we saw was addressed as “Eta marchand di lait”, “eh there milkman”. There was a transgender woman who was usually overdressed and with too much make-up, and I would lead a c horus of “eta zom-fame”, “eh there man-woman”. Once a month, wives of locals serving in the forces overseas would pour out of the railway station in Vacoas, each with a handbag, on their way to collect remittances and we would (good-naturedly) greet them with cries of “fête cabas”, “handbag feast”.
After Vacoas, the lines to Floreal were quite steep, and the train would struggle not to slide backwards. Older boys would often jump off the train and run alongside the track, jumping back on again as the incline levelled out. Inside the train, we would burst into the rhythmical refrain, in harmony with the cries of despair of the engine, “mo le caca mo pa capav (bis)”, “I want to shit but I cannot”.
Once in the classroom, I was unable to shake off those happy memories, and paid scant attention to whatever teacher was nattering on about. My homework was never satisfactory, and I was regularly awarded after-school detentions. Often I would get two or more in one day, and this spilled over into a Saturday morning detention, equivalent to 3 normal one-hour ones. On the way back after school, the mood was more subdued, but during the “coupe”, the cane-harvesting season, when the train stopped in Richelieu station, many of us would rush out to raid the cane-field and come back in time with our trophy, one or two cane sticks, which we would savour during the last twenty minutes of the journey before we reached Port-Louis. Inevitably, on one occasion, arriving on the platform after the raid, the train had started moving, and with 2 sticks, I was unable to run after it to get on board. This meant a ninety-minute walk back to Port-Louis.
A lesson I learnt was that bliss is not forever. I was looking forward to my second year next January, when during the New Year holiday, an official letter arrived at rue Labourdonnais: I steamed it open. There was a long list of my misdemeanours, but this one sentence has stuck with me all my life: “… as a result we are asking you to withdraw your son from our school in January.”
I was not destined to earn a laureateship, life is so unfair!
