Finding harmony in Mauritius’s mix
CLEARLY I was dreaming. I’d drifted to sleep somewhere between Port Louis, the shabby but atmospheric capital of this remote island in the Indian Ocean, and the Grand Bassin lake, rocked into a pleasant slumber as my taxi wove its way down serpentine roads fringed by sugar cane fields. Without warning, the line between reverie and reality blurred as my eyes snapped open to behold a 33-metre statue of Lord Shiva gazing down benevolently at my drowsy figure. I closed my eyes. I opened them again. Nope. Definitely awake.
My cabdriver, Roshan, led me past an entrance guarded indomitably by Shiva and his colossal trident to approach Ganga Talao, Mauritius’s answer to India’s sacred Ganges River. The late-afternoon sun glinted off a lake flanked by statues of Hanuman, Lakshmi and Vishnu while services were underway at the temple. This is the holiest site in Mauritius for the nation’s Hindu majority; every year during the Mahashivratri festival, Roshan told me, he walks here barefoot, three hours from his home in Rose Hill, alongside a half-million other devotees from across the island.
Somewhere not far from where I stood in Shiva’s shadow, people were living the tropical cliché immortalised on office desktops across the globe. Not even a dozen miles away, revellers reclined on the sand, sipping languidly from straws piercing coconuts while they meditated on the colour of the ocean. Is it azure? Turquoise? Cerulean? It’s a Socratic dialogue that could take a whole day to resolve. Most tourists come to Mauritius for worship of a different sort than I found at Ganga Talao, a pilgrimage to the altar of the sun gods.
As a freshman at Boston College, I befriended my first Mauritian over a shared love of Bollywood films. Santosh became a source of endless fascination: I thought he was Indian, but he spoke English with a French accent, chatted with his parents in Creole and said he was from Africa.
“We’re a bit like a puzzle,” said Santoshr. “There are very distinct pieces. People have held onto their own identities but found a way to make it work, so it fits into a picture of its own.”
In the end, it’s that compelling mosaic that lured me to Mauritius’s shores. I was eager to explore what lay beyond plunge pools and bath butlers.
Layers of migration have left an indelible imprint; today, nearly 70 percent of Mauritius’s 1.3 million citizens are of Indian descent, with Creoles, Sino-Mauritians and Franco-Mauritians rounding out the mix. Emerging from Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport on a humid evening, I followed signs that read “EXIT” in English, French, Hindi and Chinese.
“Ultimately, the uniqueness of the place is in its people,” Santosh said. “We’ve evolved our own breed – fairly distinct from the origins each one of us came from. You have people who are sort of Indian but not really Indian, sort of African but not really African.”
The country’s cultures mingle most effortlessly in the food. Disparate culinary traditions have collided here for centuries, and the result is a cuisine simmering with Indian, French, Chinese and Creole flavours.
At the covered market in Quatre Borne, a hilly burg cradled by mountains that look Photoshopped into the background, I tried my first gâteau piment, a deep-fried fritter made of ground chickpea flour studded with chilies. “For breakfast, many people have bread, cheese and gâteaux piments,” my driver Raju explained, as he helped select four perfectly plump morsels for 10 rupees.
With his limited English, my kindergarten French, and some Hindi thrown in, Raju and I were able to cobble together a reasonable facsimile of a conversation. We ambled through the food court, where stalls hawk everything from riz frit (fried rice) to curry agneau (lamb curry) to puri chaud (fried flatbreads); next, Raju took me to a residential street in Rose Hill, where I joined the lunch rush at the no-frills Dewa and Sons. I was there to try the national street food, dholl puri – a messy lentil-potato mix slapped onto a soft puri is to Mauritius. It’s as delicious as it is sloppy, spicy but not so strong as to overpower nuanced flavours redolent in turmeric and cumin.
A 10-minute drive in Mauritius unfolds more like a cinematic montage than topography: corrugated tin shacks giving way to gleaming highrises; children cycling against the backdrop of sugar cane fields; mountains in jagged shapes seemingly culled from the mind of Picasso; a procession of hot pink and cobalt blue bungalows popping against the never-ending emerald expanse.
But really, what of those beaches? There’s good reason tourists throng Long Beach, Grand Baie, Belle Mare and Le Morne, but the ways the locals experience the ocean is quite different from foreign sunseekers. I expected more tourists at Blue Bay in the east, but instead was surrounded by a flock of women singing and dancing to Bhojpuri songs. I struck up a conversation in Hindi with a few ladies swaying shyly at the periphery. “It’s a day off from the husbands, kids and responsibility,” one of them told me of their monthly picnics. And every Saturday evening, on public beaches across Mauritius, locals pitch tents and host barbecues filled with biryani and booze. If only more visitors got off their loungers and lobbied for an invite.
Curious about how different Mauritius looked from those loungers, I decided to check into a hotel for my last two nights. I marvelled at the plush suites with their indoor and outdoor showers, the preternaturally blue water, the cut-and-paste model of a tropical idyll. It was easy to be beguiled into a trance, to convince myself that nothing that existed beyond the peripheral vision from my daybed merited further thought. The rest of Mauritius, its kineticism, felt like a dream.
But then I’d always have Shiva to remind me it wasn’t.