Mauritius

I went to Mauritius to visit my sister Marie-Claire, her husband Kevin and their baby Hugo.

July 23: I pick up my luggage and walk through the arrivals door. There’s a sea of brown faces looking expectantly back at me, or rather, beyond me. I’m surprised to see Marie-Claire waiting for me with baby Hugo. I have absolutely no previous experience with infants, and had assumed they need to be kept in a sterile environment. But here they both are! I give my sister a big hug but I’m not sure how to proceed with Hugo: a hug’s out of the question (we’ve only just been introduced) and a pat on the head seems condescending. In the end I offer a finger, and his fingers curl sugar plantation out of it, around it, and his eyes focus on mine for the first time. I say “Hi Hugo” and realize I’ve assumed that high pitch voice baby voice that befalls grown adults everywhere once confronted with a baby. Marie-Claire introduces me as Uncle Donal, and we go outside to meet father Kevin.

Mauritius is a little island 500 miles off the East coast of Madagascar. It is just about as far away from San Francisco as countries get, literally on the other side of the world. And it feels I felt felt just far away from everywhere else too. Humans didn’t even set foot here until the 1500s, and it wasn’t until the 1600s that they decided to hang around. Those first inhabitants — Dutch — stayed for less than a hundred years and then called the island quits, abandoning their settlement here. Then the French came along and made a successful sugar plantation, which the English then fought them for and won, but ultimately even the British called it quits, granting Mauritius its independence in 1968.

July 24: I squeeze into a borrowed wetsuit and walk down the the beach with Kevin. Marie-Claire is walking ahead, carrying Hugo, and pointing out the tiny blue jellyfish, each with an inflated bladder of a sail, that have blown up on-shore. We’re walking to the Southern end of the beach so that the current can take us back North once we’re in the water. Marie-Claire and Hugo will walk back along the shore. Hugo watches us put on our flippers and walk gingerly — for that is really the only way to walk with flippers — into the water.  The water is only knee deep for the first few yards, so we clamber onto all fours and begin to float, my mask not far from the bleached white sand of the sea bed. We swim out and the water gets a little deeper and bluer, and then the coral is there, black and pointy and in thickets like thorn bushes. In between the coral colorful fish shelter from the current and nervously eye us. I in turn nervously eye the coral, razor sharp as it is delicate. We float away from the coral and into an area of deeper water, and Kevin points out a barracuda fish below us,  stationary against the white sand. I float past it and then twist, like a cat in the air, re-orientating myself so as to to paddle up-current, so that I might be with the fish a little longer. But the current is too strong now and It takes everything I have just to remain almost stationary. Traveling up-current is no more a possibility than traveling backwards in time. I stop trying and allow my body to go limp instead, and it feels good being blown along in the current. Then I take a deep breath and dive down ten feet to on the sea floor, on my tummy, arms and legs outstretched like a star fish, my head pointing up-current. I go limp again and I feel current gets under me and is peeling me off the floor, chin-first. I feel my my head begin to rise and my back begin to arch until, for a moment I’m standing vertically under the water looking up-current and the the current keeps pushing me until I’m looking up at the shiny underneath of the waters’ surface which gets closer until I burst through it and see the clouds and blue sky beyond. I look around and wave to Kevin, and to Marie-Claire and Hugo from their spot on the beach.

July 26: This trip marks my first time back in the southern hemisphere since my family left Zambia when I was four. It’s winter here, fresh and rainy, a relief after the stickiness of the Tokyo summer. When the sun doe comes from between the clouds it is undoubtedly tropical: warm and bright, and it’s movement across the sky from right to left is unnerving to me. Tonight is the brightest night I have ever experienced. The moon is absolutely full and sits almost directly overhead at midnight, like a streetlight, and it casts shadows of the clouds that the wind then raced over the water and onto the beach.