A rainy day in Mauritius
"Why is it that a white man never delivers fish?", he asked. A Mauritian Indian was delivering fish on his moped. "Why is it only an Indian or an African?", he said. I was stuck in a restaurant talking to the restaurant owner on a rainy day in Mauritius. I was on a flight to Mauritius from Bangalore, India and the pilot had just announced that we were passing the British Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. The Mauritian woman sitting next to me said, "That island belongs to Mauritius. The British stole it from us". The British had forcefully evicted all the residents of the island and shifted them to Mauritius island in the 1960s. A few of them still live in refugee camps. "We call it Chagos Island", the woman said. Diego Garcia now houses a large American naval and air base. I was having a Mauritian meal of crab curry with lemon flavoured rice on the flight, when the flight attendant came and asked me, "Are you an Indian or a Mauritian?...