The Age of Kali (40 page)

Moreover, the Tigers still retain the capacity to mount the occasional horrific ‘spectacular’. On 31 January 1997 they claimed responsibility for a massive explosion in the heart of Colombo, near the Central Bank Building, where Sri Lanka’s gold reserves are kept. The explosion killed two hundred people and injured 1,400 others. In July, four thousand Tigers, led by Castro, emerged from the jungle to launch a week-long land and seaborne operation against the government’s military base at Mullaitivu, 170 miles north-east of Colombo. They eventually succeeded in storming the base, taking away large quantities of heavy weapons. Except for a handful who managed to escape, all 1,200 military personnel in the base were killed. This was arguably the government’s worst defeat in the entire civil war.

More seriously still, the government has totally failed to win the battle for the minds of the Tamils: despite offering a form of federal autonomy and other concessions, it remains deeply distrusted by the Tamil population, and the Tigers retain mass popular support. As there seems little hope of their laying down their arms in the immediate future, the prospect of any solution appears very remote.

In the fifteen years since the 1983 riots, an estimated fifty thousand lives have now been lost in the conflict.

SAINT-DENIS, RÉUNION
,
1998

On 5 April 1721, two pirate ships appeared off the coast of the Île de Bourbon, a mountainous Indian Ocean island known today as Réunion. Commanding them was a French corsair, Captain Olivier Levasseur. The captain was more commonly known as ‘La Buse’, the Buzzard, and with good reason: prior to his appearance off Réunion, he had been busy plundering the shipping off the Malabar Coast of India; only when the British East India Company sent out the entire Bombay Fleet to hunt him down did he beat a retreat towards his base on Madagascar.

As they sailed homewards, the pirates found they were running low on water, and La Buse decided to call in at Bourbon to replenish his tanks. Approaching the harbour of Saint-Paul, he saw moored there a massive seventy-gun Portuguese man-of-war, the
Nostra Senhora de Cabo
. Without hesitation La Buse sailed straight in, fired a broadside at the galleon, then boarded it, almost without resistance. It turned out to contain what was probably the richest prize that ever fell to pirates: over £1 million-worth of Indian gems being shipped by the Viceroy of Goa back to his masters in Lisbon.

It was nine years before La Buse returned to Réunion, and then in rather different circumstances. In 1730 he was captured by a slave-trading bounty hunter, brought back to Réunion in fetters and sentenced to death. But on the scaffold, La Buse made a speech which would assure him a measure of immortality. As the noose was placed around his neck, he scattered a bundle of parchment charts among the crowd. The maps, he said, indicated exactly where
on Réunion his treasure lay buried. But first the finder would have to crack his code. To this day the treasure has never been found, despite adventurers coming to Réunion to search for it for over 250 years.

The grave of La Buse is, however, somewhat easier to locate than his treasure. It lies in the old Marin Cemetery, overlooking the deep fragmented blue of the ocean, on a flat apron of land lying between the tall black basalt cliffs and the rustling palms on the shore. On my first evening in Réunion, intrigued by what I had read of the exploits of La Buse, I walked barefoot along the coral beach from my hotel to pay my respects to the old pirate.

Today much of the coast around Saint-Paul is like a miniature St-Tropez: a little down the coast, at Boucan Canot, lines of topless Parisians can be seen splayed out under the palms, frying in Ambre Solaire. But inside the footfall-soft silence of the cemetery the atmosphere is very different. Within the high walls, hidden by a long screen of ilexes, you are suddenly back in the eighteenth century, surrounded by the obelisks and mausolea of sea-captains and corsairs, exiled aristocrats and shipwrecked plantation-owners.

These low basalt tombs are classical in inspiration, but naïve in execution: pillars rise through Ionic capitals to oddly misshapen pediments; below, rough inscriptions record the often brutal deaths of the early colonists:
‘Ici repose Capt. de Bellegarde tué par les corsaires’
;
‘Ici repose la famille Chandemerle morte dans une naufrage …’
As the night draws in and the ocean wind gusts through the graves, you suddenly realise how remote this island on the Tropic of Capricorn must once have been: seven months’ voyage from Marseilles, visited by only one supply ship every six months.

It did not take long to find the grave of Levasseur, although there was no grandiloquent mausoleum marking it, like those erected by the colonial gentry who now keep him company. Instead there was just a headstone of black basalt. On it was inscribed a skull and crossbones, and the brief epitaph:

Yet while the other graves in the cemetery were forgotten and overgrown, that of La Buse was clearly much-visited. Piles of flowers and the wax of innumerable candles covered the graveslab, while to one side stood several newly opened rum bottles, apparently left as offerings. Stranger still, alongside the bottles there had been placed three or four packets of Gauloises and Gitanes. The packs had been torn open at their base and the cigarettes left to burn out, so all that remained were the charred filter-tips. On some of the packets had been scribbled incantations and petitions to La Buse.

Outside the cemetery I approached a large Créole woman. In the gathering darkness she had set up a brazier on an old oildrum, and was now roasting corncobs on the embers. I bought one, and asked her in the course of conversation why she thought offerings had been left on the grave of an eighteenth-century pirate.

‘I don’t believe in it,’ she replied, her tone suddenly becoming sharp.

‘Don’t believe in what?’

‘In … all that business.’

‘But some people clearly do.’

‘I don’t know them.’

‘But what exactly is going on?’ I persevered. ‘Why do people …’

‘It’s their business!’ snapped the old woman, turning away. ‘Why don’t you ask them? They come here every night
pour gratter le bois
.’ (‘To scratch the wood’, i.e. sorcery.) ‘But I tell you this,’ she continued: ‘whatever they say in Saint-Paul, it’s no secret that half the wickedness in Réunion comes from that grave …’

The first thing that strikes you when you arrive in Réunion is the sheer – almost ridiculous –
Frenchness
of the place.

The island may lie at the heart of the Indian Ocean, halfway between Madagascar and Sri Lanka, but it was uninhabited until the French began colonising it in 1646, initially by dumping convicts on its beach, later turning it in to an important naval base and refuelling point for French East Indiamen on their way to and from the
Compagnie des Indes’
headquarters at Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu. Legally, it is as if the French East India Company still ruled the waves. For Réunion is still part of France; indeed, at first sight it appears to be every bit as Gallic, as developed and as prosperous as its distant mother country. The people all have French passports, and male school-leavers are obliged to go to France to perform their national service. The language is French, the television is French, the cars are French, the croissants and baguettes at breakfast are French, and the wines in the restaurants are defiantly and exclusively French. Nine-tenths of the island’s trade is with France. It is as if Réunion lay just off the coast from Cannes, not ten thousand miles to the south.

It is only later, after you have been on the island for several days, that you notice the degree to which this Frenchness is modulated by Réunion’s tropical geography and what the Réunionnais call the
métissage
: the racial intermixture that has made the island a model of melting-pot multi-culturalism. ‘If anyone born on this island tries to tell you he has “pure” French blood,’ I was told by one Réunionnais friend, ‘don’t believe him. It’s simply not true. In the
métissage
lies the very essence of this island.’

By the mid-nineteenth century, Réunion had a population of several thousand French exiles: a mixture of down-at-heel aristocrats turned plantation-owners and a leavening of
pauvres blancs –
usually impoverished, landless Breton farmers who had emigrated in the hope of opening hill farms in the island’s mountains. These colonials were outnumbered roughly two to one by ex-slaves, most of whom were of Madagascan origin. The mixture was spiced up in the years that followed by an infusion of Tamils, north Indian
Muslims, Canton Chinese and Yemeni Arabs, all of whom were brought in to work the plantations as indentured labourers after slavery was abolished in the 1840s.

Today, these very different communities are intermixed in the most astonishing manner: there can be few places on earth – and few moments in history – where so many radically different peoples, religions, cultures, languages and cuisines have become so spectacularly intermingled.

This
métissage
, combined with the island’s extreme isolation, affects every aspect of life on Réunion. The process of intermingling and cross-fertilisation has, for example, moulded much of the island’s folklore and religious practice – as the bizarre offerings at the grave of La Buse so intriguingly indicated. Grandmère Kale, who is said to live in the island’s volcano, emerging to eat up Réunionnais children who don’t finish their greens or who refuse to do their homework, is a cross between the witches of European and African folklore, and Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. The mixture of different faiths, often within a single family, has had a profound influence on the Réunionnais’ attitude to the world. It has made them unusually tolerant and open-minded, but also deeply heterodox.

‘Beliefs and ways of living are forever mingling on this island,’ I was told by Father Samy Anarche, a Tamil Catholic priest who ministers to a parish in Réunion’s capital, Saint-Denis. ‘In the same family you can find a Chinese Taoist, an Indian Muslim, a Metropolitan Catholic, an African witch-doctor and a Tamil Hindu. Inevitably ideas percolate from one religion to another. I have many Chinese Catholics in my parish who are involved in ancestor-worship, as well as Indian ones who believe in reincarnation. It all makes a lot of work for the priesthood: we are continually having to explain to our parishioners what is and is not Christianity.
Bien sûr
, it is the same with other religions: the Hindus here all eat meat and perform blood sacrifices. That’s something you’ll rarely see in India these days, and it probably derives from the influence of African
gris gris
[voodoo].’

The
métissage
has also formed the islanders’ language: they speak both conventional modern French and an impenetrable Créole patois which mixes Malagasy, Tamil and Arabic on a base of eighteenth-century nautical French.

More enjoyably for the traveller, the island’s brand of Créole cooking is also wonderfully multi-cultural, and quite unique. It mixes French and Indian culinary enthusiasms with a dash of Arab, Chinese and Malagasy influence. The result is a fusion startlingly unlike any of its parent traditions. A typical Réunion meal might consist, for example, of
cari z’ourite et cari poulpe
(a creamy sea urchin and octopus curry) with a scattering of side dishes of puy lentils,
choux choux
(crystophene),
rougaille
(a spicy tomato chutney) and
bredes (
a spinach-like digestive); pudding might be
gâteau patate
(a sweet, heavy potato-cake). To add to the complexity of the island’s cuisine, in some areas of Réunion Arab influence results in the use of cloves and nutmeg, Chinese influence in a taste for ginger, and Malagasy influence in a variety of delicious dishes with a coconut-cream base and several memorably disgusting ones involving roasted wasp grubs.

With an island of Réunion’s racial complexity and degree of isolation, none of this should be a surprise. But it is, if only because of the strong initial impression of French modernity that greets you on your arrival at the island’s western coastal strip – the glossy Renault garages, the wide motorways, the suburban villas and the neon-flashing nightclubs. All this lulls you in to thinking that you are somewhere settled and unsurprising, when in reality Réunion is a crucible positively fizzing with bizarre practices, strange ideas and unexpected juxtapositions.

As I soon discovered, the offerings at the grave of La Buse were barely the tip of the iceberg.