SURESH RAMPHUL
Hundreds of things are happening around us every day. Very often we do not have time for them. Yet even the most mundane events can prove to be significant if we care to draw out the necessary meaning from them. Life is about learning. The 15 stories in my book “The Street Child and other short stories” (published by the President’s Fund for Creative Writing under the aegis of the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage, and printed by the Government Printing) revolve around life-changing discoveries about oneself, about others and about life. 
Readers will be pleased to find that there is more to the stories than what appears on the surface. I have made sure that they are pleasant to read. I have said only what is necessary and I have left the rest to the reader. I hope it’s a good way to keep the reader interested. I believe, like Bernard Mac Laverty, that writing is about revealing the world in some way to other people. The book covers a range of subjects: medical negligence, computer misuse, hypocrisy, teenagers and drug trafficking, reversal of fortune, nepotism, cheating in examination, a fake immigration agency, and the wide gap between what a politician says and what he does.
Here is an extract from “The Street Child”:
“I am sixty-seven. Eight years ago, my wife died of breast cancer. It turned my life upside down. From bon vivant, I became a pessimist. I stopped hanging out with friends or receiving guests. I lost interest in sports activities and spent hours wondering why God had made her die in agony. Television and books became my favourite hobbies. I shunned people. It was not that I was phobic or something of the sort. To put it simply, I was comfortable with my own company.
I accepted my loneliness. My children were abroad; Sadhna was in India, married to a businessman, Shyam was in Germany, working as researcher in a medical laboratory.
On Tuesday, I had to go to Quatre Bornes for a check-up in a private clinic. Lately, I was having indigestion problems. I woke up early at about 4.00 a.m. to arrive there early. I was at the Rose Belle bus-stop before daybreak. There were only a few vehicles on the road. The rest was silence. The bus shelter had recently been built, so, it was comfortable. It was still quite dark. There was no one, except a boy. He had just woken up. His eyes were still clouded by sleep.
I took a seat. His hair was unkempt, his clothes slovenly.
“What are you doing here?”
He blinked and pulled away.
“Where are you going?” I asked in a tone as friendly as possible.
“Nowhere,” he said.
“Are you waiting for the bus?”
“Not at all,” he replied without looking at me.
He was not keen to talk. I told him I was not going to harm him. It intrigued me that he was there all alone. Gradually, he opened up. He was from Cité Bethléem. His name was Mevin. I knew the place. It was a pocket of poverty. Everyone knew about it, except politicians. No one would believe that in a fast-developing village, such a place existed.
I asked him again what he was doing there.
“I was sleeping,” he said.
“Are you homeless?”
He nodded.
“What about his parents?” I wondered.
He must have been eight years old. He tucked his feet under him. He had a bottle of water. I told him to wash his face. He left me for a few minutes and came back after splashing water on his face. I saw him cleaning his teeth with his finger. He then threw the bottle into the river. I told him he should not be doing this because there was a mosque nearby.
“Where were his parents?” I kept asking myself.
“Why are you on your own?”
He looked at me, probably wondering why I was questioning him so much. But he answered nonetheless.
His mother was abroad.
“Where? Rodrigues? La Réunion?” I queried.
He shrugged.
“What is she doing over there? Is she working?”
He said he did not know. All he knew was that a man had taken her somewhere.
“What about your father?”
He paused for a moment before answering that he had never seen him.
“He is dead?”
He remembered his mother saying that he had disappeared before he was born. It was therefore a case of being born out of wedlock.
I wanted to know who he was living with?
He said he was living with a step-brother.
They had quarrelled. He was a helper in a lorry. He spent his money on household commodities and the rest went into liquor. He was seventeen. When drunk, he would start shouting. Mevin had told him to stop it but he had pushed him out and closed the door. Three days. Three nights. The child had been abandoned.
He had slept in the bus shelter.
“Aren’t you afraid?” I asked.
He said he was not sure.
He could have been attacked or arrested. One question was nagging my mind: “Wasn’t he afraid of the darkness?” I managed to ask him the question.
“Of course, I am. But once I fall asleep, I remember nothing.”
I was curious to know about his schooling.
“Do you go to school?”
He pointed to a primary school not far away.
People started coming. I had two loaves still warm from the oven. I spread some butter from a pot in one of them and offered him. He hesitated. I encouraged him to take it. He smiled shyly. He ate greedily.
“How are you going to spend the day?”
He said that he did not know.
My bus arrived.
I was not worried at all about him. He was none of my business. My policy was: “Mind your own business.” Who was I to interfere in other people’s matters? It concerned two half-brothers who did not even know who their fathers were.
The next day, on the recommendation of the doctor at the clinic, I went to Nehru Hospital at 10.00 a.m. I recognised the boy. He was in a wheelchair, his left arm was in a sling. He also had a scraped knee. His head was bandaged. A male nurse was pushing the wheelchair.
I followed him. He had just been seen by a doctor and was being taken to the ward. I asked a few questions. A nurse filled me in with the details. The boy had been caught stealing in a house. From information gathered from several sources, I learned that someone had pinned him to the ground, and had beaten him up. His hand had been scalded with hot water. He had later been found in a field by a worker.”
The man will endeavour to rehabilitate the child by placing him in a shelter. The bond they develop will help them discover the magic of human warmth.