Translated from French by Geoffrey Strachan
Published by Maclehose Press, 2010, 201 pages. Original version published in 2007.

This is a story narrated by Raj, an old man looking back at a crucial period in his childhood, a time that changed his life forever.

Raj grows up in Mapou, a village in the north of Mauritius, where he lives with his parents and his brothers, Anil and Vinod—brothers whom he loves and is very close to. His father is violent and best avoided. When Raj is eight, his father sends him to school—he is the only one of the siblings to go. Anil, being the eldest, is needed to work with his father in the sugarcane fields, and Vinod is too young.

Mapou is more of a camp than a village. Situated on the edge of the cane fields, it is a collection of houses made up of anything the villagers can lay their hands on: wood, bamboo, twigs, tree stumps, and sugarcane leaves. It is not an easy life. There is no medical service: if a child falls ill, it is assumed that the child will die. The weather is harsh. During the sunny months of the year, there is acrid red dust everywhere, made worse by the wind. And when it rains, it does so in torrents, causing floods. “[T]he rain was a monster. We could see it gathering strength, hugging the mountain like an army rallying before an assault, hear the orders for battle and slaughter being given.”

And then on New Year’s Day 1944, the three boys go to the stream to fetch water. There is thunder and a storm breaks, with heavy rain. Vinod is swept away by the stream and Anil disappears. They find Vinod’s body but there is no trace of Anil. Suddenly, from being one of three children, Raj becomes an only child. To add to his survivor’s guilt and overwhelming grief, Raj has to live with his father’s anger because the only son left is one the father considers the weakling of the family.

As “a family at our wits’ end, poleaxed by immense grief”, they leave Mapou for Beau-Bassin, a town in the centre of the country. Beau-Bassin is very different from Mapou—the soil is fertile, and their new house is in the middle of a forest.

In Beau-Bassin, the father gets a job as a prison warder. One day, after delivering his father’s lunch to the prison, Raj does not go straight home. He finds a hiding place from where he can see into the prison. Instead of the hardened criminals he was expecting, he sees a group of thin white people with hunched shoulders. These were not the “dangerous men” his father had said he was guarding. They were ghosts, “pale, shadowy figures”.

This is when he sees David, a blonde boy his age. The two boys find each other through the barbed wire and bond. And then one night, after his father beats Raj so badly that he has to be taken to hospital, Raj finds himself in the prison ward. At least there he is safe from his father and is able to spend time with his new friend David.

Raj knows nothing of the outside world. He has no idea there is a war going on, or that David and the people being held in the prison are Jews. “I had never heard of Germany, in reality I knew very little. In David I had found an unhoped for friend, a gift from heaven, and at the start of this year of 1945 that was all that counted for me.”

It is the kind of intense friendship you can have at that age, and it is one that haunts Raj for the rest of his life. He sees David as another brother, one who could replace the two he had lost, and whom he misses desperately. But David is not allowed out of the prison, and the boys have to find other ways of spending time together without the adults—especially Raj’s father—finding out.

As the book begins, Raj, now an old man, dreams of David. “I reached out my hand to him and it was morning, my room empty, the light dazzling, David vanished, the dream gone, my arm outstretched, outside the bedclothes, numb with cold, and my face bathed in tears.” He asks his son to take him to David’s grave at St. Martin’s Cemetery, a grave he had never visited in all these years. This is the start of Raj’s attempt to come to terms with what happened over 60 years ago.

The book is based on a little-known fact. In 1940, 3,500 Jews from eastern Europe landed in Haifa in Palestine and were turned away by the British authorities because they had no entry permits. Of these refugees, 1,580 were sent to the then British colony of Mauritius and held in a prison camp in Beau-Bassin. The survivors eventually left but 128 were buried in St. Martin’s Cemetery.[1]

This is a poignant and heart-breaking story. Nathacha Appanah writes beautifully. Raj’s anguish at losing Vinod and Anil feels raw—their absence is palpable throughout the novel, a huge hole in Raj’s heart. He needs the friendship with David, with someone who could understand loss and fill the emptiness.

This is a story told by an old man, full of regrets and pain, as well as joy. It is about devastating grief and the power of friendship.

A book to remember.

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[1] See The Beau Bassin Jewish Detainees Memorial & Information Centre https://jewishdetaineesmauritius.com/.