Ever heard of La Caverne-Vacoas, Vacoas-Floreal, Rose-Belle – Baramia or Tyack-Rivière des Anguilles? They sound and rhyme like twins and when you leave one you are leaving both. My emotional presentation on a very small, an iota, fraction of my memoir on Tyack published two weeks ago has prompted a few friends and readers querying me about my sentiments on Riviere des Anguilles.

Tyack was home in as much as Riviere des Anguilles was important for administrative and organizational services that the village people would require as a routine. It’s the human touch greasing the interpersonal relationships that gives proof, if proof was required, of solidarity. Residents of Tyack would always refer to ‘Vilaz’ speaking of Rivière des Anguilles, a village which has a center carved out of a crossroad bordered time back by ‘magasins’ and retail shops. The Chinese veterans had called their shops Paris facing frantically London. They were competitors headed by severe ‘captains.’ The young generation would not know this streetscape of the 60s. Today, they are witness to an incongruous mixture of furniture sales, clothing, pastry protected by safety rails. These have no pretensions to originality as a postcard picture taken here could well fit in another center of another village. The trend has been for the Chinese shops to close, sometimes derelict structures pulled down and other seemingly modern ones, rectangular or square areas pitched up.

Riviere des Anguilles has been and is home to a host of public services that have served generations of rural people from neighboring village of Camp Diable and sugar camps, Beau-Bois, Britannia, St Avold, Riche-Bois, Benares, St Felix, Bel Air, Senneville, St Aubin, Union Ducray, Combo and Fontenelle. Sundays were interestingly eventful when the labourers and artisans of each of these places would cross, going to the church, to the kovil, or to ‘aste rasion’, buying foodstuff either for the fortnight or for the month. There was no shouting about Manchester United or Liverpool. People commented football matches for days, for example, when Mohan Bagan or Burnley played a Mauritian team. Goswami and Stanley Matthews were household names like Cosmos and Bolton. There was a kind of lull at noon as another flux of outsiders would appear to queue in front of Olympia and Mon Cine halls for a three-film show.

A silent revolution

What would a village be without its men at work in the fields and mills, its women in the fields and stables? Because development is inflationary escalated by natural calamities gradually the interface of Riviere des Anguilles changed. Semi-corrugated ironsheets housing gave place to concrete ones, more shops appeared through a maze here, another one at the other end of the village. On the closure of mills around, the local population found themselves neighbours to people they had no problem to accommodate with. In parallel, there emerged a silent revolution through the longtime respected vision of Yogi Rummun, founder manager of Presidency College and Mr Saddul founder Manager of Lincoln College followed by Hanoomanjee’s Shakespear College. Of note Mr Jagadisa Vencatasamy founded Newton College meters away in Tyack precipitating the closure of the last two. The last-born, Mc Millan, followed suit. These have all closed for good.

These fee paying private institutions have offered windows of opportunities to the children of destitutes: R10 in Form I, R12, R14, R16, R18 and R20, Form I to Form V which was onerous and one can imagine how parents had to do more than two menial jobs, field labour, cattle and goat rearing, then, though not all, catching eels in the river, picking taro leaves, chopping brush, collecting crushed sugar canes on road surfaces for fuel. All did the washing at the river and collected drinking water from the public fountains. There were three actually on the limits of the village center. Two other colleges appeared, Washington and Victor Hugo but their flames dwindled prematurely.

The road side image is changing inexorably. Houses are being demolished leaving space like in a sad movie, sadness soon forgotten, to commercial outlets big and small. Cut flower sellers are adding some colours and sophistication to the noisy roads that is a mark of business, the bookshops try hard to resist given a dwindling interest in reading which is a kind of national epidemic, Cheval Blanc Studio still braves the test of time. Oh! The visitor cannot miss Vishnu, the bicycle mechanic, the roti and dholl puri sellers nor the Saturday venison seller. Then, we forget three essential services, the Police Station, the Post Office, the Social Security and its sub office where you register births and deaths. The Citizens Advice Bureau has never had any impact on the villagers so austere is its front elevation and yard.

I am refraining to write on people who ‘have succeeded’ in their career because I consider everyone has made their best and have reaped what they have sown each in their respective domain. Certainly, the heart cannot express independently of the mind, ‘c’est toujours triste un depart.’