The Lost Shoe
His copy books were always besmirched with ink, as were his fingers. The pages of his Claude Augé which were not missing were torn. His body was covered with cuts and sores, because he never listened to anybody, his nose was always dripping. All he was good for was hanging about in street corners with the young vagrants of the neighbourhood and kicking a ball made of an old sock filled with rags filched from under the sagging mattress. This did not stop him being his father’s fav (and everybody else’s bête noire). Still the old man could not help shaking his head when news of his latest misdemeanours reached him. He summed him up: You are gonna end up a peanut vendor at the Albion Docks at this rate, whilst your brothers will become doctors and judges.
The brothers were indeed models of assiduity, both top of their classes at the Ecole des Frères, and always had their heads pored in some book. They had both won bursaries to the famous Royal College, where all the future professionals of the island were educated. You only got there if you won a primary school scholarship at eleven. Ten lucky boys a year were thus anointed. This gave you an automatic place at either at the Port-Louis branch, or the Curepipe one, where the top white families sent their sons. On top of an assured place at this scholastic institution, which were often described as the Eton of the Indian Ocean, each scholar received a bursary of ten rupees every month, for books and clothing. His two brothers had obviously both won that esteemed prize. There was not the slightest hope that when his time came, that he would win anything of the sort. Peanuts were beckoning.
But all was not lost. There were about fifty places still available to the lesser lads who were not scholarship material, and to fill them up, there were entrance exams. In a fair society, there was no way S would have earned a place to either of these hallowed centres of learning, by beating four or five hundred other youngsters, all much more deserving, but it was said that the sifting process consisted of two routes. First, the names of the applicants were studied, and if you came from a certain echelon you were in, or again if you had siblings already embedded who had made a good impression. Finally after three-quarters of the quota had been filled, the results of the entrance exam were taken into account. Young S certainly did not get in because he had beaten hundreds of his competitors. That much he knew.
Although the family lived in Port-Louis, he was offered a place in Curepipe, miles away. To go to Curepipe, you first had a twenty minute walk to the railway station, where you caught a train to Curepipe Road Station, over an hour away, the college being ten minutes from there. Which meant about four hours of travelling a day. This regime is going to be a punishing one for the boy, everybody said, he’s gonna find it very tough.
He did not.
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This regime was turning every single day into Christmas. Ah the joy of riding in a train everyday! Watching the landscape glide, to the accompaniment of the symphony of the engine, of the wheels on the tracks, the whistle, the various cacophonies when the train stopped at the eleven stations en route. Add to that, a tradition that he quickly picked, shouting and teasing people going to their businesses on the roads outside as the train overtook them. Milkmen on their bicycles, hawkers lugging their heavy baskets. At first, he shouted Eta Poupette, Dolly, at women, specially the heavily made-up ones, but soon enough he began following the older boys and started swearing. He had learnt choice swear words from the vagrants he mixed with in the street corners with the same diligence that his brothers had learnt the imparfait du subjonctif of irregular French verbs. The train journeys were everything, which meant that learning was an irrelevance.
He was small and ungainly, but found that by being loud and rude gave him a certain aura, and was quick to use these as his trump cards. In class he started arguments with his teachers, but the more they punished him, the more popular he became with his peers.
There was a boy in his class, François L who struck everybody as strange. He always knew all the answers, and was never seen to talk to anybody. He was therefore asking for it. Someone called him a Six, 6. S had no idea what that meant, but never referred to him as François, but as “ça 6 la”, that fellow six. If he saw his schoolbag lying anywhere he’d grab a piece of chalk and write 6 on it, to everybody’s hilarity and applause. During the breaks, François would just sit on a bench in the school veranda and eat his sandwich and take out a book to read. It was soon discovered that he loved reading poetry. What a pretentious idiot everybody said, S the loudest. Then he started running on the race track, by himself, and trust him to go counter the traditional sense. Truly that 6 is mad, was the unanimous consensus.
François lived in Beau Bassin, and every morning he could be seen on the platform ready to board the school train, when everybody would shout abuse at him, pretending to stop him getting on board, to which he paid not the least attention. On the way home in the afternoon, he’d get off at the same station, and he could be seen on the road, a few hundred metres away as the train overtook him, and again he would be the recipient of derisory and abusive language. In the compartment it was easy to stand on the seat, open the window, and make threatening gestures with fists and even feet. S was quite adept at the latter.
One day the inevitable happened, while engaged in this activity, one shoe slipped and fell from S’s foot. He was fully aware of how precarious life was in their family. A pair of shoes cost half his dad’s earning. How was he going to explain how he had lost it. The telling offs and the remonstrances would never end. He might even be given a sound beating, but he was used to these and knew that he would survive them. At school, he, who thrived on the admiration of his peers, would now have to put up with their jeers. Perhaps now that he was going to lose the protection of the crowd, François L, who was much bigger than him, would feel encouraged to confront him and make him pay for his countless mischiefs.
Not unexpectedly, next morning, during the morning break, he saw his perennial victim coming towards him. On this occasion there was no ally of his close by. François made eye contact with him and they were now face to face.
Yes-yes-terday, you, you…dropped you sh-shoe f-from the train. S was not comfortable, he clenched his fists, ready for the worse. And opening his bag François L took the lost shoe out and offered it to S, who looked at it open-mouthed.
On the way home yesterday, he had thought, what’s the point of one shoe when you have two feet, and he had taken the one he still had and had hurled it against a rock outside the track.
