The Last Brother

The Atlantic’s passengers, fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust, had been refused entry to Palestine by the British authorities (designated by the League of Nations to administer the Mandate of Palestine) because their papers were not in order. They were to spend the next five years imprisoned on the island, the men in the former prison of Beau-Bassin, the women and children in adjoining corrugated sheds. Of those who originally arrived, 1,320 survived to travel to Haifa in 1945 after their ban was rescinded. Natacha Appanah, a French-Mauritian, has given voice to this shameful episode in the history of World War II. The Last Brother is a plaintive monologue delivered by an old man, Raj, who continues, as he approaches his own death, to grieve for the loss of a child prisoner in Beau-Bassin with whom he formed a brief, life-changing relationship.

Raj lives with his parents and two brothers in a shanty town sprung up around a sugar factory. His father, a brutal drunk, works cutting sugar cane; his mother works in the homes of the owners, managers; he and his brothers, Anil and Vinod, gather kindling, prepare the house for their mother’s return, and collect water from the mountain stream. In a marvellously evocative depiction of the life in the village, sugar cane determines the life cycle and nature provides the antidote to poverty. If a god has any role to play in this world, it is to convert the magical clouds rising from the factory chimneys to the angry masses that spew rain with such force the stream becomes a raging torrent which takes the lives of Raj’s two brothers.