The end of the road

My dear Billy, It’s another year that ends this week. For the calendar it may be just the end of the year, but for me it’s the end of a lengthy journey upon which I had embarked over 55 years ago in 1961. I was part of the team of young hopefuls who had joined the weekly Mauritius Times and since then there was no looking back. In those days a journalist was expected to write feature articles, report on events like sports, public meetings, theatre shows music concerts, in short everything.

Then in the early 1980s  I started writing to you in this column. Allow me today to bid adieu to you and through you to the thousands of readers who have done me the honour and pleasure of waiting for their weekly Dear Shakespeare column. I don’t know how much laughter I provoke or how much ire, but sometimes people grin at the sight of me, as if I reminded them at once of last week Dear Shakespeare.

Topicality which is often the essence of the sort of articles that I write allows them a very short life indeed. But in Mauritius History has a knack of repeating itself too often and too soon: road works would be an everlasting feature of our life, so will be the clues and the inadequacies of our services. Some drivers will never stop breaking the traffic rules while our politicians will continue fooling the people; rumour mongering and character assassinations are an integral part of our system.

In the process I have compiled three volumes of these articles in book form. When the 1st volumes appeared, Stephen H. Arnold of the Department of English at university of Alberta in Canada wrote, “written to Shakespeare as if to a pen pal, most of this collection are short, humorous pieces were taken from a column in Week End, a Mauritian newspaper. The author who takes delight in writing irreverent drama and film criticism, presents a collage of sarcasm about typical Third World problems endemic in this island, where Africa and Asia blend under a western veneer. Among the topics addressed with whimsy irony and cynism are: water supply, public transport, filth, provincial chauvinism, corruption, the population boom, inefficiency on punctuality and gossip as an art form.”

Another critic found that “the articles flow is a rich mastery of style which gives dignity to the issue at hand, however light, serious or natural it may be. There are also these piquant undertones, like the flutter of a fan, which convey raillery and irony but never fatalism.”

In her foreword to the third collection, Shakountala  Hawaldar says that “Bhishmadev Seebaluck is a rar’avis,  a rare bird in our literary landscape. He is a writer who elegantly combines subtle sarcasm of Pope and the not so gentle witticism of Oscar Wilde. He laughs, he guffaws, he tickles, he provokes, and he massages us with his narrations of Mauritian reality and tit-bits.”

Alan Perry from Wales, short story writer, poet dramatist and painter, observes that “Bhishmadev Seebaluck’s Dear Shakespeare columns read like the conscience of not only Mauritius but the world at large. Satirist, polemicist, controversial list, persistent hounder of the establishment and the powers that be and, always humorist and humanist, is literary preoccupations and target are wild ranging and divert, from the trivial to matters of great fist and moment: the universal acutely observe in consequential grains of Mauritian sand. He is hard on his homeland: the corruption in high places, the prosperous Mauritian industries of gossip, rumour and back biting, but with a fond and fatherly sense of anger and concern for the waywardness of a loved one.”

At a certain time, I planned to stop writing at the age of 70 but when I turned that age, I simply could not. Then I decided to postpone the event until I was  75. Now that I have reached that point and no more enjoying the best of health, I believe it’s high time to quit.

I believe that I must offer my thanks to you for having borne with me during all those years of Dear Shakespeare; I also have a tender thought  for all those who have been reading me during that time. I must add one word here: I have always chastised my compatriots so that they may mend their ways, never to offend them. Now that the time has come to say good-bye, let me leave quietly on tip-toe.

Parting is always painful yet it must be done.