1
As it happens, in Point Louis, on a blacktop street that stretches onward into a blue sky, as if it and the heavens long for oneness, I fall in love with the national dish of Mauritius. Of the two flavor profiles, I usually prefer food that melts in your mouth as opposed to food that is crunchier. This one is a hybrid, a manipulation of texture and flavor profiles. You can feel the sensation of muffled grinding in the tender savory yellow split pea pancake that kind of reminds you of Indian parathas. You can also feel the dissolving condiments it is slathered with: the pickled vegetables, a type of curry, and chili seasoning. It has a very light aftertaste. It brightens the palate.
Here, they call it Dholl Puri.
I am seated on a low stool, next to a roadside stall. The grand space in the vicinity seems to invite the lungs to expand, to absorb the floral aromas from some flowers nearby. The Mauritian sunlight brings a frisson of joy to my skin. The sight and aroma of the Dholl Puri being prepared, the mango sour, and different types of currys in the stall, feels like a gentle massage to my soul.
I remember how in my city, Nairobi, we also have a variation of this. We call it Smocha. Our iteration of the pancake is Chapati: the main condiment is made up of fresh tomato and onion salad and chilli sauce placed inside a ready–to–eat smoked sausage. Unlike Dholl Puri, Smocha is a street dish that always has a taste that promises a destination which flickers chimerically on the horizon, receding and diminishing, that you never get to experience. Dholl Puri, as the structure and ingredients are changed, gets you to experience a textual element that you are not used to whenever you have interacted with Kenya’s variation of the meal.
A good dish always tells a tale. It tells a story of a place. Cooks are like artists that work with food to convey heritage. Food is the inevitable and unchanging expression of a culture. In Port Louis when I close my eyes and take a bite of Dholl Puri, it tastes like Mauritius on a palate.
2
It is my third day in this new city. Port Louis feels like a stage upon which dreams uncurl beneath both a blue skyline and bright sunlight. This city is inviting, in its serenity — and in this French colonial architecture, it is easy for dreams to begin to play in sweet imagination. You can see why Mark Twain wrote, ‘Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and heaven was copied after Mauritius.’
I came here on a whim. The kind of decisions you make at twenty-four. Impulsive and reckless in one neat parcel. One night, when gin had become the amber that brought resolve to my soul, alcohol had made me stupid in the way that only it can do. I had booked a flight. For the first time, I had bought a plane ticket with my own cash and not airfare provided for by an employer.
To come from nothingness in childhood, means you spend adulthood trying to prove a point. Not to anyone else but yourself. Self–determination when you have known lack feels good. You grit your teeth, dig your heels in, and aim high. ‘You were born to dream in starlight.’ These are the words that reverberate in your inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there. You book flights to vacay in places you had not planned to. Just because you can.
This is what I did. I came to Port Louis in search of a sacramental experience. No better place to seek such than heaven.
For the past few days I have marveled at the light of dawn and the symphony of eventide hues this city offers. I have munched the street offerings that blossom with their own special fragrance in the stalls here. I have ignored the downside, which is that the stink of onions and garlic and cilantro salads might haunt me for days like a friendly ghost.
Street food is art, and I am an art connoisseur. I make a living creatively through interrogating the manufactured consensus when it comes to art and arguing for its ambiguity and complexity. Whenever I visit a new town or city, I make the point of letting the hawker’s bazaars and food trucks become the canvas in which the portraits of the locals are drawn. The street cooks and their specialties—creatives that all cherish—have the kind of magic at heart that conjures a portal to the heart of a place.
3
The city I live in is nothing like Port Louis. Nairobi is unfathomable. In its streets are tenacious blossoms, born to take whatever comes their way, however bleak, and make beauty of it. At times, the place stabs its own, it suffocates; and when it doesn’t make them scream or weep, it leaves them numb. Men and women in Nairobi have the habit of speaking about the past as if it has just simultaneously begun. Maybe because living through the years there is akin to sprinting through fog — and when asked how that is, they might say, “talk not to us of faith, we have earned our stripes and then some”.
Most days, an aura of desperation lingers, so pervasive that it colors even those periods where it seems we are having a good period in my country. At night, a gloom hugs the skins of the tenacious blossoms like a protective brother, always bringing a sense of stoic calmness until the light returns.
While in Port Louis, away from all this, I seem to find a good rhythm, a pathway emerges to the goals of my heart, and I feel momentarily relieved. The serenity of this new city, in its own peculiar way, invites me to draw upon my artistic soul once more, to expand that great canvas and create new paths to dream, new doorways.
4
On my fourth day in Port Louis, I am in the city’s outskirts, sitting on top of a small green hill that rises as if to blow kisses to the sky. Around me are a lot of tourists, most of them white unlike me, who stream to this country as a river of smiles, each brightly reflective in the sun. From where I sit, I can see the ocean. The water, blue in the channels, is clear and swiftly moving. On the bed of the Indian ocean I can see pebbles, dry and white in the sunlight.
I carry a snack with me. A vendor, whose stall smelled of disinfectant and malt, informed me they call it Chana Puri. In this one, the yellow split peas are formed into balls, dunked in butter, fried in hot oil, and served with tomato chutney. As I take a bite, daydreaming of how slow living in this city where sunlight is brighter and no one counts the days would be, a feeling unfurls in me. I miss home. I miss chaotic Nairobi. I miss the appearance of my people who have learned the look of confidence as a survival skill.
My city and country might be that monster that wraps itself in beautiful skin or the rancid hide of the decaying creatures of the abyss, and although I see it regardless of disguise, Nairobi’s cityscape is the graffiti of my heart. In my eyes it is perpetually bright and beautiful.
5
Two weeks later I am back in Nairobi. Broke as a church mouse from my trip.
I am walking along the pavements of downtown Nairobi which are ripe with a marriage of sounds, from music in Matatus to chattering. The ground I am walking on absorbs the hot sun’s heat as if intent upon sending heaven’s wrath back through my soles. I am brushing shoulders with struggling men and women, some who present as persons who had died long before and are casually rotting from the inside out. I come across a Smocha stand. I order one. Expectedly, it looks or tastes nothing close to Dholl Puri. However, when I close my eyes, and take a bite, once again, I can taste Mauritius on my palate…….
