In partnership with Commonwealth Foundation, Granta presents the regional winners of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Reena Usha Rungoo’s story is the winning entry from Africa.
She collected stamps when she was younger, then switched to books, degrees, and – when she moved abroad – white lovers. Later she returned to the familiar, and turned to teas. The careful, deliberate steps of preparing her tea became a habit, and, as with most habits, it was folded in with ingredients and histories preceding her.
She bought teas from regular stores and specialty houses, on errands to the local grocer and visits to her home island. Friends indulged her and added to her hodgepodge collection. Once, on her birthday, a lover took her on a surprise trip to the Davenport and Sons tea house, and she came back home with quite the loot. In this way, we grew into uneven rows of boxes and tins on her shelves, a dry garden tended by love and ritual.
Back home on her island, household altars were commonplace, erected in a special room in the house or assembled in a dedicated corner of the living room. Some altars housed statues and images of goddesses, garlanded with flowers. Others held pungent incense and the photographs and personal belongings of dear departed ones. Irreverently, Durga liked to think that her boxes and tins, fragrant and framed by a pell-mell of old teapots and chipped mugs, were her altar.
Then she gave us up. We know exactly when it happened.
It was when Durga came back from Dadi’s funeral in Mauritius. Her grandmother’s passing had emptied her heart of home, even as her travel bags were heavy with the familiar foods of her childhood. Sifting through them, she carefully removed a sealed envelope and an unassuming blue box labelled ‘Bois Chéri Vanilla Tea’. She placed both at the back of the shelves, behind the rest of us, hidden from view. She threw out the food. And then, as if the newcomers had tainted us with their presence, she avoided us for a long while. Almost a decade elapsed as we gathered dust and waited patiently.
Then Mama left the island and moved in with Durga, to the island in Massachusetts. The day she arrived, she dug out the blue box from behind the lot of us and proceeded to make tea in the same manner she had done every day of her life back in Mauritius. She flavoured it with cardamom pods, crushed lemongrass roots, and the Red Cow milk powder she had brought with her. A simple family recipe. The familiar hustle and bustle drew Durga to the kitchen. Mama had made her a cup without asking, which soothed and irked her in equal measure. She brought the cup to her lips and inhaled.
Durga had moved from island to island, up socially and away from familiarity, discarding everything except for her journals – and us. She started writing as a teenager, and kept the habit well into adulthood. Her journals recorded her life (les filles à l’école ont remarqué mes chaussures Nike, ça valait la peine d’avoir économisé mon argent de poche toute l’année; Rajiv m’a souri, je pense que je suis amoureuse; Durga – – , PhD!). And so did we. But the carefully constructed narratives, which Durga wrote in impeccable French and interspersed with exciting milestones, were not for us. Our domain is smells and associations, the quotidian and the transient. As we punctuate frantic mornings and lazy afternoons day after day, we modestly gather, in aromatic interstices between our leaves, the quiet intimacies of humans. We are no different from a beloved fruit from childhood, an old wooden toy, or the last song on a mixtape, lost and found again. We are easily forgotten. That is, until we remember.
As Durga inhaled the tea her mother had made her, its aroma bloomed into a remembrance as intense and engulfing as it was evanescent. A childhood memory, which had coalesced around the long-buried but instantly familiar fragrance of the tea, invaded her nostrils. Her body at once retracted and protracted into prepubescent angles, all knees and elbows. As the tea burned her throat, she was recalled into the body she used to inhabit, and the ways in which it had inhabited the world.
–
Bring water, loose leaf tea, five cardamom pods, and one crushed lemongrass root to boil in a small deksi. Add three teaspoons of milk powder, mix well, and remove from heat.
The kitchen is small and warm, the loud, flower-patterned curtains are open, and the tropical afternoon sunlight floods in through the window behind Mama. The smells of our old house in Riambel float around: fried fish, garlic and thyme, milk and cardamom, salt from the sea breeze. I do not yet know where one ends, and another starts. I will unfurl and catalogue them to make sense of the tangled threads of a lost archive, long after I have left my island.
I am back from school, ravenous. Usually, Mama makes pudinn vermisel for teatime. Today I smell gato franse. Like all the women in the neighbourhood, she borrows on credit throughout the month from boutikier sinwa, the grocer who keeps tabs in a large, tattered notebook: rice, oil, flour, and, when we start going to school, exercise books and pencils. Like most of the men, Papa drinks on credit from the local bar. At the beginning of every month, his pay is swallowed by the previous month. But occasionally, when there is still some money left, Mama buys gato franse like feuilleté custard, napolitaine, maspain – those local pastries with French names that are uniquely Mauritian and for which Muslim bakers on the island seem to have a special talent.
As she hands me tea and a napolitaine, I cannot quite see my mother for the light behind her, and I pray that she does not see the red shape imprinted on my cheek. Like all children at Permal Teeroovengadum Primary School, I know better than to tell my parents.
The teachers each have their own style, moulded by calculated sadism, dogmatic righteousness or blinding anger. They also have their own tools, hewn from dried bamboo culms, coconut fibre rods, or badamier stems. I sometimes imagine the Permal Teeroovengadum Primary School teachers taking a walk with their families on weekends and stopping in their tracks when they find just the right cane, as if waiting to be stripped of its leaves and polished.
When I am eight years old, in Standard 3, the lashes begin. I have been coddled enough the first two years of primary school, I am told. Monsieur Hassan’s cane, which he hides in a different place every time, appears out of nowhere and provides a swift lash for mistaking the French acute accent for the circumflex, or confusing Grande Rivière Sud-Est with Grande Rivière Nord-Ouest. No matter that we know the local names of our rivers, their depths and swells, like our own backyard. The cane disappears just as quickly as it appears. By the time the pain comes, the punishment has already ended, and relief taken over. Monsieur Hassan then makes a slightly clownish face, as if to mitigate our humiliation, or maybe his own discomfort towards what he believes he must do. He is the nicest out of the twelve schoolteachers.
Guru Manikam is not our teacher but often visits, unannounced, to chat with Monsieur Hassan. His enormous handlebar moustache twitches as his big red eyes scan the class. Once, they pause on Ahmad, who freezes. Guru Manikam beckons and Ahmad walks to the front of the class, eyes wide with silent terror. Guru hooks his index finger around Ahmad’s waistband, pulls it toward himself, and peers inside. He murmurs thoughtfully, as if deciding on which fish to pick at the market, or debating the merits of a particular rédaction. We collectively breathe a sigh of relief at not being Ahmad. Monsieur Hassan makes a clownish face and looks away.
The following year, Madame Ramsarai teaches Standard 4. She specializes in shaming rituals. When Preeti and Sarah-Anne, whom she forces to sit in the back and well away from everyone else, start chatting instead of following the lesson, she calls them to the front of the classroom. She pulls a chair close to her own desk, as if setting a stage. She sits Preeti in the chair, parts her hair gingerly with a pen, and shows Sarah-Anne the lice and nits. Sarah-Anne picks them between her index finger and thumb and quickly crushes them between her fingernails. They make a satisfying pop, and it makes Sarah-Anne smile. This goes on for a good half hour until it is her turn to sit and get her hair cleaned by Preeti. The rest of us look over to the spectacle from time to time, but mostly we carry on with our rédaction.
Madame knows that we do not quite fear her the same way we do her male colleagues, and she gets creative. Once, she tells us to wear our best uniforms, clean and ironed, for a dictée the following day. A dictée is a special occasion, after all, she says. And don’t forget to wear your best underwear, she adds, as we laugh. The next day, she calls to the front of the classroom all those who have omitted their silent t’s and d’s or have spelt –aux as –o. Their backs facing the rest of the class, the boys are asked to pull their pants down, and the girls to lift their skirts, before the obligatory lash on the buttocks for each mistake.
At the end of primary school, every child on the island competes in a national exam, and Monsieur Beekoo is our teacher for the last two years. His reputation precedes him. Out of the thousands who take the exam, his students regularly rank in the first five hundred, going on to join so-called star secondary schools. The rest go to regular schools, vocational schools, or no school at all. Monsieur has a panoply of punishments in his arsenal, and they flow out of frustration for the avoidable mistakes his favourites make – and indifferent disregard for the rest. When he asks me to conjugate the verb ‘instruire’ in the perfect tense, my tongue betrays me, skips over the pointed French u and flattens directly into the i so familiar in my native Creole. I feel the sting of the slap after he starts yelling, his face inches away from my own.
Like the teachers, the pupils each have their own style. Some jump and yelp, their eyes widening in surprise at every lash, their eyebrows disappearing into their hair. Others overdo the crying, hoping to soften the teacher’s heart, although we all know it never does. And then there are those who attempt to flee the lashes altogether, but with one arm in the teacher’s vice-like grip they only manage to dance in a revolving circle. I stand tall and silent, holding in my cries until my throat hurts more than the welts on my body.
I will soon leave for the Catholic secondary school Monsieur Beekoo and Mama wish for me. There will be no lashings there. It is, after all, a star school, one of the most respected. There we will mostly just suffer detention, either for wearing short skirts (Rule 7 from the Code of Conduct: the hem of the skirt needs to be at or below the knees and not reveal too much skin) or for speaking in Creole (Rule 2: only French allowed). Sometimes, when we fail to remember the main themes of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, a blackboard eraser is thrown in our general direction, easily dodged. And in my case, a teacher will replace my surname daily with funny ones from Voltaire’s Candide when doing roll call. I will stand tall and silent through it all, feeling no pain at all except for the strange one in my throat.
Presently Mama notices the red marks on my cheek, the ones left by Monsieur Beekoo. She promises not to tell Papa, but sits with me at night while I write lines: I conjugate ‘instruire’ in the present, perfect, and future tenses, and copy each ten times. I do not need my Bescherelle conjugation book. My written French is excellent, as Monsieur Beekoo himself tells me. When Mama gets up and starts to make tea for both of us, she tells me that I am lucky to be in school. She tells me that I need to focus and get an education, so I won’t be at my husband’s mercy one day. Or so I won’t end up even worse, like our neighbour: raising her daughters on her own, working night shifts in a tea factory where women are vulgar and curse in Creole – just like the men.
–
Bring water, tulsi leaves, and ginger slices to a boil. Remove from heat and strain. Add this water to your own waters, for the sake of your unborn child.
Water is primordial memory. My first memory, like my first water, is not my own, but Mama’s. It is of a time before I am born, stitched together from the bits and pieces my aunts share with me, weaved into my sense of self, the prologue to my story.
In this sepia-coloured memory, I imagine Mama to be very thin, not showing yet. The additional weight from carrying and birthing three daughters will come later. As will the calluses and cuts on her hands from cleaning and cooking: washing bed sheets and cloth diapers, grinding ginger, garlic, and masala with the small, rounded baby rock on the tall mama rock outside. When Papa yells, he says, bour to sime ale – get the fuck out. They have always rented, never owned, but he says, this is my house. When he yells, Mama thinks of her last day in school, the day before she turned fourteen. School was not free in pre-independence Mauritius, and her brothers were a better investment. She stayed at home to look after them, and to clean and to cook, wash clothes and grind spices. When Papa yells, to enn fam lakaz, you are a housewife, you do not work, she thinks of how she has had to work for men her whole life. But she does not say anything.
In my borrowed memory, she has one foot out the door of his rented house, as if about to leave. But she does not. Instead, she drinks the tulsi and ginger brew standing squarely in the doorway, putting all her hope in her unborn child.
I see all of this as if watching from outside that house in Riambel, hiding behind the hibiscus tree like a thief. The light in the house floods out of the doorway where Mama stands, and she is all chiaroscuro. I mostly see her movements in silhouette, but I imagine her standing tall and silent, and drinking in her tea.
When I am pregnant, Mama will make me a brew with tulsi leaves and ginger, and tell me that when she was pregnant, she used to stand in the doorway and drink the same concoction. Old women said that if she did this her son would be tall. You don’t have any sons, I will say back. And mama will laugh, as she often will after leaving the rented house and moving in with me. Me mo bann tifi edike, she will respond after a moment of reflection, giving in to my defiance. But my daughters are educated. And she will tell me that I am a professor of French because of her, that I am the tallest woman of the family because of her.
–
Pour hot water over tea sachet and let steep for five minutes. Add warm milk. Enjoy with a cucumber sandwich or scone.
I find a table at Quill and Ivy, the only tea room on campus. A few students around me are having tea and sandwiches, some of them working on their laptops or reading. Vandana, the only other Mauritian student I know at the university, works there part-time. She hands me a tea sachet in a handsome black-and-gold sleeve, next to a small creamer full of warm milk. The sleeve reads ‘Vanilla Comoros’. The vanilla bean, which gourmets associate with Bourbon (now Reunion Island) and Madagascar, looks dissonant in its pairing with the Comoros, these other islands of the Indian Ocean, even though it also grows there. I peer closer at the sachet, and presiding over the name, in smaller letters, I read: ‘Davenport and Sons Master Tea Blenders’. Even more intriguing and incongruous: the tropical, archipelagic tea is under the aegis of a staunchly New England name.
I am waiting for Nigel. I supplement my partial doctoral scholarship by tutoring high school and college kids. Nigel is neither. He is a musician who wants to speak French fluently, before his band tours the Caribbean with Martinican and Guadeloupean artists. While I ponder the disparate islands that conspire to bring us together – from Nigel’s touring locations to the implied provenances of my tea – he arrives. He waves, all smiles and ease. I find out that he is American despite his British name, and that he loves tea despite his country’s predilection for coffee. All these cultural nuances I have acquired in the five years I have lived here, at the same time shedding so many of my own. I have traded oiled-up tresses and dark skin turned ashy from skin-lightening creams for the sea-, sand- and sun-kissed images that dance in the eyes of most Americans when I tell them I am from an island.
I allow myself to flirt a little during those first months I tutor Nigel. He has a very easy, very white smile. The night he returns to Manhattan from Martinique he calls me, and I invite him to my apartment while my housemates are out. He smiles in the dim light of the bedroom, and I remember that his teeth are very straight, very white, somehow accentuated by his frayed sweater and faded jeans. He wears old clothes the way rich people do, a carefully curated aesthetics of poverty. I kiss his open smile then, taking it all in, the ways he has fucked and loved gorgeous men and women, the ways he owns spaces that push against mine, the not-quite-white of his Sicilian ancestors, laundered after Ellis Island, the unburden of his every day.
As he kisses me back, his greedy mouth searching for an opening, his hand slides down my stomach looking for the same, finding it quickly. I will his fingers in, revelling in the easy authority with which he moves in the world and in me. I turn my face and my aching throat to the wall, even as my sex pulls me toward his virtuoso fingers, all dexterity and controlled passion.
He stops then. His fingers, still inside, suddenly still. He puts his mouth to my ear and demands: I want to hear it. He has found my tongue, but does not find my voice. I stretch tall, silent, as I come in staccato, anticipating what his fingers are a proxy for. And desiring what his white teeth and blue eyes and accent are metonyms for.
When we have sex, my moans and postures are as deliberately arranged as my words. They come from years of watching Jason Priestley, Andie MacDowell, Shah Rukh Khan, and Rani Mukherjee speak love in English dubbed in French. The words I actually want to say never make it to my tongue, which has by now fossilized into pointed and squared morphologies. They escape me once in a while, but always outside of sexual intercourse. ‘Ayo,’ that protean sauce of an onomatopoeia that goes with every dish, comes first to express sheer pleasure, utter disappointment, and everything in between. Then ‘fouf’, more and more impatience. After a fight one day, something long forgotten almost escapes my lips: bour to sime ale. The painful knot in my throat alchemises the words and translates to Nigel: it’s over. He moves out of my apartment the same day. Although we break up on my terms, we say it in his words. That’s why it’s over.
I still go to the campus tea room. When Vandana sees me on my own, she comes over to chat and asks where Nigel is. I think of the long, intimate relationship language and sex have had in my bed, of the French we loved to flirt in and the Creole – Mauritian, Martinican or Guadeloupean – he never bothered to learn. But instead, I raise my voice and say, intending to shock: I don’t know how to say ‘Fuck me hard’ in Creole.
I expect Vandana to recoil or, at least, look away. Deadpan, she tells me how, and even adds her own spin on it. I recoil and look away. I have only ever heard these words used in violence toward women. They sting like a slap and their shape remains imprinted on my cheek for a while.
That night, the pleasure in my groin moves upward and explodes on my tongue, suddenly unsilenced, in words finally unviolenced.
Bour mwa for, ziska mo sousout bate.
I come as I breathe in the tea scent lodged in Vandana’s hair: Vanilla Comoros.
Vandana whose mother raised her on her own, working night shifts at a tea factory, cursing in Creole just like the men.
Vandana who is also her mother’s daughter.
–
Feast your eyes on the authentic vista of green tea bushes and local women picking tea while enjoying a tasting from the comfort of our colonial teahouse. Begin with our airy and refreshing vanilla tea, a favourite among customers, and end with the bold and complex Gold Label.
When I visit Dadi with Mama and Papa, I pretend not to like her, because Mama does not like her. Mama blames her mother-in-law for her husband’s temper. But Dadi knows how to win me over. She beckons to me with the hundred-rupee note she keeps hidden in the folds of her sari. She wraps my fist quickly around the note and urges me to hide it in my pocket, all the while whispering conspiratorially as if she is entrusting me with a treasure. She feeds me dal puri and tea with heaps of sugar. She swallows her own dal puri with a generous dose of arrack, but not before having poured a libation on the floor for Somoreeah. I laugh as she calls me Durga, rolling and trilling the r in her Mauritian Bhojpuri. I do not know Bhojpuri and she barely speaks Creole, but the way she says my name is another gift with which she tells me she loves me.
I like it most when Papa takes me, without Mama, to the plantation at the end of Dadi’s shift. Dadi puts me in the basket hanging on her back, on top of fresh tea leaves, so that I can see the large colonial house on the hill, beyond the rows of tea bushes on the Bois Chéri estate. There are people coming in and out of the house. Although they are the ones who look like ants, it is Papa who seems to become small next to me. I want to become small too, but on Dadi’s shoulders I am an extension of her strong, tall frame, and I cannot. The scent in her hair comforts me, as she silently picks tea to fulfil her quota.
Dadi started picking tea when she was nine. She picked tea twice as fast as her husband, earned more than him. And at home, she was twice as likely to lose her temper, especially after a few glasses of arrack. She would tell him bour to sime ale, get the fuck out of my house.
She stopped working on the tea plantation when she was seventy. But she did not lose the tea-picking basket, still weighing down her back despite its absence. When I visit from the US she walks toward me, bent almost at a right angle at the waist, the six-foot powerhouse that she once was now barely three feet tall, the height of a child. She unknots a corner of her sari and produces a hundred-rupee note for me, even while I protest that I am now a professor. She smiles, not understanding my words, my work, my world. But it does not matter when she hides the note in my hand and says my name.
The last time I visit Dadi before her death, she unknots a corner of her sari, but instead of the usual hundred-rupee note, she shoves into my hand a couple of pages, whispering in her usual way, gesturing for me to put them away.
A few days later, I stand in front of the pyre where Dadi lies as if sleeping. The eldest son or grandson traditionally lights the pyre, but Papa did not leave her any grandson, so I hold the torch. Later that day, I dig into my bag and find the papers she gave me. My aunt recognizes them. She tells me they are the only official document left of my paternal ancestors. They arrived in Mauritius from Bihar, replacing the enslaved on sugarcane plantations after the abolition of slavery. Dadi must have asked a distant relative who works in the National Archives to do her a favour. These are the only written testament of the couple from whom we are all descended. But the enormity of the situation does not correspond to the sparse two pages I hold in my hands. All columns and lists, they look like they were taken from our old grocer’s ledger. As I peer closer, instead of oil, rice, and flour bought on credit, I see the names of coolies borrowed on colonial contract. Next to each name, butchered by French orthography, cold details: registration number, provenance, age, height.
A painful knot forms in my throat when my eyes see before I can understand, ‘Height: 3 feet 2 inches’. When he arrives on the island in 1880, he is six years old. He has a first name only, the same that will become our surname, the same that my secondary school teacher will replace with funny ones during roll call. I look at the other page. She arrives a few years later, the same year tea is introduced in Mauritius. Her name is Somoreeah. She is five, and spends three weeks in a depot before being sent to the Bois Chéri plantation. The sparse documents bring more questions than answers. But they do tell me that she is three feet five inches. She is tall, taller even than him.
–
Some altars housed statues and images of goddesses, garlanded with flowers. Others held pungent incense and the photographs and personal belongings of dear departed ones. For Durga, we, her teas, held her dear ones, her goddesses.
When her daughter turned five, Durga took her to Mauritius, and to the plantation where Dadi had worked as a métayère, a sharecropper, in the last years of her life. Mama accompanied them but stayed in the car on the side of the road. Her daughter hanging on her shoulders, Durga waded into the waist-high leaves as Mama advised caution on land that they did not own, land she said had only been rented to Dadi. Voices from the colonial house drifted down toward them, muted, but they were quickly drowned out as the leaves tickled the feet of the five-year old and she laughed. Pointing to the tea leaves, she asked: ki ete sa? What is this?
Standing tall over the bushes, Durga breathed in the humid, pungent scent and replied, dite.
Photograph © Kelly Ann Bobb
