I was trying to put some order in a particular cupboard wherein sits the vast collection of photos which my family, like most families, accumulated before the digital era.

 I don’t like looking at photos of the past anymore. I never do. They bring me nothing but sorrow and stabs in my heart. As Desdemona in Shakespeare's Othello comments: "There is no greater pain than to remember in our present grief, past happiness." This of course is also a quote from Dante. The Bard must have lifted it from La Divina Commedia: ''Non c'e peggior dolor di ricordarsi dei momenti felici nella miseria.”

One particular photo caught my eye and brought back many memories at once sad and happy. It was that of Bibi who, together with her daughter Vilamba came to help in the house everyday. Bibi looked after Camille while we were at work and Vilamba did the housework.

They were Hindu.  Bibi was better known as Bibi L’Eglise, having spent many years cleaning the local Catholic church of Saint Jean in the town of Quatre Bornes where we had our first little house in Mauritius. Bibi remained in the habit of praying at the feet of the crucifix which stood outside the church when she got the chance, broom in hand, when the going got especially tough. It was one of her lifelines, that crucifix. “Every little helps,” she would tell me in patois creole.

Another lifeline was a multi-armed Indian goddess. This she kept in her little hut surrounded by candles. It was her altar where she did her daily puja. Those candles were her one luxury.

She came from a family of some 15 children. Or maybe it was 18. Sometimes she counted the ones that had died – at childbirth, with tetanus or gastro-interitis. Numbers and figures meant nothing in Bibi’s life. The date of her birth was as obscure as her age. These things were not important to her. She did not know what a birthday party was and did not care what they were doing in California. Indeed, she had no knowledge about the world beyond the town in which she lived. She did not seem interested either.

Her childhood had been spent in one of the seaside villages. They had never had enough to eat. There was no Red Cross at the time to distribute milk to the needy and she was brought up on flour mixed with water. In patois creole she would tell me about her life, over coffee, usually on Saturday mornings when I was not dashing to work and while we were cooking. She loved making dahl pourri and chipati for us and we loved them.

Bibi was estranged from her husband who was now looked after by her mother, in a hut next to hers, in a compound where other members of the family had a small abode. The huts were made of corrugated iron sheeting. The tropical rain pelting down on the roof made an infernal noise. The sun at the height of a hot sub-tropical summer turned indoors into an inferno.

Water was collected from a communal tap outside but inspite of the seasonal torrential rain often, even that tap, was empty. Water management did not feature high on the government’s priority list.

Sanitary facilities consisted of a pail, the mango or banana tree outside.

Just before the mild Mauritian winter set in, I would collect the month’s newspapers and drive her home with them so that she could use them to cover the cracks in between the corrugated iron sheets.

This ritual would be repeated winter after winter.

The cyclone season was an anxious time. Would the corrugated iron roof, which was held in place by a few concrete blocks, fly away?

Bibi’s possessions were so few that losing them did not worry her. Hers was a hand to mouth existence. But where would the blocks land? She managed to survive many cyclones without a serious mishap. But she was lucky. Each year there were casualties from these corrugated sheets or the blocks as the high winds sent them hurtling through the air.

Bibi was a gentle soul. I never heard her shout at anyone. She placidly played with our daughter Camille and lulled her to sleep far more quickly than I ever did, singing to her in Tamil, for her ancestors had arrived in Mauritius from the south of India. I learnt to spot them as they were much darker than the average Indian.

Many Tamils had come to the Isle de France in 1735 and had participated considerably in the construction of the harbour of its capital, Port Louis. But most Indians had come as indentured labourers to work in the sugar cane fields after the abolition of slavery in 1835. They came to replace the African slaves for by 1839 the slaves started to gradually abandon the sugar plantations. There were 76,774 slaves at the time. To quote Jean-Henri Bernardin de St Pierre the famous author of Paul et Virginie with its Mauritian background: “Whether coffee and sugar are really necessary to the happiness of Europe is more than I can say but those two commodities have brought wretchedness and misery upon two continents. One of these is depopulated that Europeans may have a land to plant them in and another is stripped of its inhabitants for hands to cultivate them.”

Bibi always wore a worn out sari and each morning, when she arrived, she left her rubber sandles, savattes, on the doormat outside. Her saris were faded and full of holes. It was the rats, she would tell me, which invaded her little house at night. Just another obscenity she took in her stride. She believed it was her karma and hoped that when she would return to earth next time round, she would have a better one. It was important to accept one’s life and not rebel against it she often told me. She had one sari for special occasions which she kept at our home.

Bibi never grumbled. She never begged. She never stole anything. Hers was a noble heart. She would sometimes turn up with half a dozen delicious samosas which she had laboriously fried over a kerosene lamp. Her cooking was done on that.

She had the wisdom to escape want by rejecting all wants. Bibi had realised that it is our unfulfilled desires and expectations which cause a large part of our unhappiness. She had learned that if you are willing to take the punishment, you are halfway through the battle.

Like many poor Hindus she was thin and dignified. But there came a time when I knew she was getting weaker, thinner. She told me, reluctantly, for fear of losing her job I suppose, that she had a sickness but she could not tell me what it was because she did not know. But I became alarmed. We went up to hospital where she was receiving treatment. I finally tracked down the doctor who was taking care of her. She had some rare form of leukemia he told me. “She’s an interesting case. We only get two or so such cases a year. There is nothing to be done. The disease will take its course.”

Our Bibi had become a mere case. A statistic.

She had one wish which she had shared with me. One of her sons was in France. He had been there for many years and each year he said he was coming to see her but each year he could not find enough money to pay for his passage. But one day Bibi was all smiles. He really was going to arrive the following week and she asked me to bake a cake in his honour and would I put his initials on it: R.V. for Ramoo Virahsawmy.

Ramoo did come and she brought him to see us. The shine in her dark expressive brown eyes which had disappeared because of her illness, momentarily returned.

A couple of weeks later her youngest daughter Vilamba, who kept our home clean, came one evening sobbing to tell us that the angel of death had called and her mother had died during the night. Bibi died as quietly as she had lived without disturbing anyone. Her wish fulfilled, her son at her side, she finally stopped struggling with life and disease. She embraced death as she had embraced life, without flinching. She had that intangible quality: courage.

The following day I went to pay her my last respects. This time it was my turn to leave my shoes outside her humble home. She lay there in her corrugated iron hut conveying an image of death but looking peaceful as she had always done.

And irony of ironies her bed was covered with brand new saris: silk saris, cotton saris, saris in all the colours of the rainbow. They were a last gift form her friends and relatives.

Life spared Bibi nothing. It mocked her to the bitter end. But she has remained permanently fixed in my heart for she was an example to me and taught me many lessons. It was the idea of karma that kept her going. She hung on to it to the very end.

Don’t miss Patrimonju Malti’s exquisite exhibition of Maltese jewellery. When are we going to be able to see some 500 items displayed in one venue? Do go and see it. Vanity, Profanity & Worship: Jewellery from the Maltese Islands can be seen at the Casino Maltese, Valletta from 31st March until 26th May 2013.

Open every day from 10am till 6pm and until 9pm on Friday. Last entries are an hour before closing.

For further info: [email protected]; www.patrimonju.org

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