The Doomun Shop lies along the main road in the remote village of Deep River, Olivia. Do not confuse with Deep River Beau Champ. This one is on the outskirt of its bigger neighbour, Bel Air and a few kilometers from Belle Rive, the native village of the Father of the Nation. It is in this shop that I made acquaintance with Soodamah Chaytoo, the owner, a kind of psychic with the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Hence our chemistry worked marvelously. He opened his heart.

Soodamah was born in January 1956 in the village of Montagne Bambous, at the foot of the mountain, just outside Belle Rive. The village of Montagne Bambous has disappeared following the exodus of its inhabitants to nearby places while Belle Rive, today Kewal Nagar, has gone through a level of development commensurate with the infrastructure put in place to honour the Father of the Nation. Soodamah’s dada (paternal grandfather) told him about the one who was to become a great Mauritian personality, but he was too young to understand. Soodamah remembers having crossed sugar cane fields twice daily to attend the Olivia Roman Catholic Aided School, until he unilaterally put an end to his schooling in Standard 4. He accompanied his father to the fields at that tender age and very late in his adult life did he leave the field work.

As a mystic, Soodamah saw the cycles, patterns and reasons for going ahead at the same time being able to connect the dots in his life. He negotiated with the Beau Champ Estate management to facilitate his moving from the sugar camp while at the same benefiting from a Government policy of land distribution to estate labourers, they were some 40 of them all. This is where the psychic in him operated seeing the future and the past. The past he had lived it up to when he decided to have his own house. The future was in his hands to organize construction, a profession he had never exercised. He hired the services of a professional mason, Mr Bercaud Ferdinand, whom he observed with the eagerness to learn fast, faster than at school. The day when his resources were stretched Mr Ferdinand left to come back as often as possible to monitor Soodamah, now turned mason in the completion of the works.

Soodamah’s abode offers an essential service to the community. In his shop you can find consumer goods from biscuits, cakes to tools, household appliances and hair cream. Then all around there is an air of serenity although taxi cars are particularly large in number filling the area with noise. But Soodamah does not hear them. His psyche is strong he says. During the time he was a hawker in the village of Central Flacq he had an extraordinary encounter. I listened to his story with awe. He had received a mobile phone call which prompted him to move to an opening where through the process of levitation Lord Krishna’s partner the Goddess Radha appeared to him. He does not oblige me to believe him.

The front view and the front boundary wall are illustrated by paintings which bear the signature of Soodamah. He has never been coached in wall painting but his acumen has guided him in the choice of colours, of designs, of proportions to match natural and artificial flowers rendering an aesthetically pleasing effect, common in design, art and nature. He has never heard of Malcolm de Chazal or Vaco Baissac but he likes capturing scenery landscapes on television. He has conspicuously portrayed the Gods and Goddesses who fascinate and guide him, among whom Krishna, Jesus and Sai Baba. When he looks at the past, it’s the long haired non-chalant young man and now it’s the image of a sage whom people look for advice, cure and assurance, as from a mystic, a remote village mystic.