Genie and Paul by Natasha Soobramanien Page B

Paul’s in Mauritius. He must be. Eloise says she gave him money. That must have been what he wanted it for.
    Maybe he needed it for something else, said Sol. Then he said quickly, He always wanted to go back. Life’s too complicated for him here. Don’t you ever want to go back?
    I don’t feel like I was ever really there . I remember hardly any of it. No, it’s not my country at all. This is.
    Then Sol told Genie about his friend, his friend who was always strange: he’d been strange as a child, he was strange at school, he was strange to his family and, even when he grewup and his friends and family had all become used to him, he was still a stranger to them. But then he went to Japan, and in Japan he was not strange. They understood him there. He fell in love with a Japanese girl and married her and never left. Japan had been his home all along and he’d never known until he went there. Then again, Sol said, he knew some people from outside London who lived here and loved the feeling of never feeling quite at home in the city.
    I would love to go to Mauritius, said Sol. What’s it like?
    I can tell you a story about it, if you like. The story of how me and Paul got our names.
    Yes, said Sol. Tell me.

(xiii) Paul and Virginie’s Story
    A long time ago in Mauritius, when the island was still owned by the French, some sixty years or so before the Revolution and a hundred years or so before the British claimed the island, there lived a young boy called Paul and a girl called Virginie. Raised as brother and sister, they fell in love, but, alas, their love was doomed. Dunno if it’s a true story or not. It’s written as if it’s true and something that happens in it – a shipwreck – is true. It’s kind of considered half-true in the same way that Romeo and Juliet is. You can go to Verona and see Juliet’s house and her balcony. So this is what happens. Virginie’s mother, pregnant with Virginie, leaves France with her new husband to start a life in Mauritius. Her noble family have rejected her for marrying a commoner so the young couple head out for the colonies where such things don’t matter. They want to set up a plantation. The husband travels to Madagascar to buy slaves but while he’s there he gets a fever and dies. So Virginie’s mum, pregnant and alone apart from her slave Marie, unable to return home now her family has abandoned her, goes to hide herself away in a remote corner of the island. Troubled souls often seek out the wilderness. There’s a lot of expressions like that in the book. A lot of stuff about nature and solitude, and how it can soothe us. But in this wilderness she comes across another young woman who has also shunned society. Or rather, society has shunned her. Paul’s mother, a simple peasant girl, had been cast aside by a rakish nobleman after she fell pregnant. He neverintended marrying her, as he’d promised. So, ashamed, she too has sought out the wilderness and now she lives there, cultivating a piece of land she staked a claim to with the help of her slave, Domingue. The two women become friends and live in adjoining huts, raising their children together, befriended by an old guy who lives nearby. In fact it’s this old guy who tells the story. The story begins with someone out walking in the Mauritian wilderness, who comes across the ruins of two small cottages. He wants to know what the story is, so he asks this old guy who happens to be passing by. And the old guy says, I know the story. It’s very sad. It concerns two young people and their mothers… so then he pretty much tells the young guy what I’ve just told you so far. Anyway, this old guy was a hermit, having moved away from society for reasons of his own. He lived near the two women and befriended them. So the little community living in their self-imposed exile was poor but contented, happy to let their lives follow the rhythms of nature. The two slaves married one another and they grew such wonderful