SILENT WINDS, DRY SEAS

This coming-of-age story set mostly on the island of Mauritius touches on political, religious, racial, and family tensions.

On a visit to Mauritius after years living overseas, narrator Vishnu Gopal recalls his boyhood and adolescence in the time leading to the island’s independence in 1968 and his move abroad to attend university. Life was defined by the immediate family and the larger clan and by the frictions that arose from disagreements over Hindu rituals or property. The boy’s roots go back to Indians who came to Mauritius in the 19th century as indentured labor; the island is also marked by French and British colonial rulers and African influences. His clan has moved on from the sugar-cane fields to better trades. Vishnu’s schoolteacher father wants his academically gifted son to go even further and win a university scholarship, and an overlong episode concerns a “bureaucratic foul-up” that costs the young man a chance to study in France. Busjeet, who left the island to finish his education and has worked for the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, has no doubt mined his own youth for this debut novel. The strongest scenes trace the pressures of family life and clan feuds amid the larger strains of the island’s multiracial society. Busjeet’s prose is workmanlike though sometimes stilted (“He’d tried to initiate me to yoga, but I was recalcitrant to any form of physical exertion”). Details of local life—young Vishnu sees Grandma carrying sugar-cane leaves on her head to feed her two cows—reflect a culture far removed from IFC corridors. Within the Hindu clan, it’s a heavily male culture, and the novel has few strong women.

An often compelling but uneven view of life in Mauritius.