The Age of Kali (42 page)

The cult has also proved popular with the descendants of those slaves who clung to the old spirit-worshipping beliefs of their Malagasy ancestors. In Madagascar the palm is associated with death, while St Expedit’s spear and raven are taken to be symbols of sacrifice, as if he were a white witch-doctor. More exotic still, some of the island’s sorcerers have given the cult a slightly sinister aspect by decapitating the saint’s image, either to neutralise his power or to use the head in their own incantations. According to Loulou, the sorcerer at Îlet Trois Salazes had a small oratory in which he kept several heads of St Expedit.

‘He used them to cast spells,’ said Loulou. ‘He thought that by cutting the saint’s head off he was taking his power and stealing it for himself.’

‘Did you believe he had power?’

‘We were all terrified of him: everyone believed he had very strong powers. But in the end the people kicked him out. He was too dangerous – he began to demand bribes not to cast spells on us all. In the end we had enough.’

‘Weren’t you frightened that he would take revenge on you for throwing him out of the Îlet?’

‘We took precautions,’ relplied Loulou.

‘What sort of precautions?’

‘We used stronger magic. We sent someone to the grave of La Sitarane in Saint-Pierre. It is the most powerful grave on the island. With La Sitarane on your side, no one can harm you at all.’

On my last evening on Réunion, I drove in to Saint-Pierre to look for the grave of La Sitarane.

Beyond the mosque, just before the Hindu temple of Kali, a group of old Créole men were playing
boules
on a square of carefully clipped grass; through the palm trees I could see the surf exploding on the coral reef out to sea. After the clear but chilly air of the mountains, the coast seemed gloriously hot and humid.

Graves seemed to form a grim symmetry to my journey through Réunion. I had visited the tomb of La Buse the night I arrived; now here I was, on the eve of my departure, making for another cemetery, intent on seeing the grave of an even more reprehensible character than the piratical Buzzard. For La Sitarane, it emerged, was not just a sorcerer, but also a murderer who had been executed after committing a number of bloody killings at the turn of the century.

‘He only killed three people,’ said a Réunionnais historian I quizzed on the subject, ‘but according to legend he first drugged his victims with
datura
[a sleep-inducing poison derived from herbs], then afterwards drank their blood. Just before he was guillotined, he made a speech vowing that he would return from the dead to punish his captors. It caused such a shock in Réunion that La Sitarane has never been forgotten. But I’ll tell you an odd thing.’

The historian leant a little closer to me: ‘When I first visited his grave, twenty years ago, there were no visitors, no offerings and no burning candles. But now the grave is more visited than even that of La Buse. All these offerings, this sorcery: far from dying away with development and education, it actually seems to be on the increase.’

This idea fascinated me, for it touched on something that had become clearer to me the longer I stayed on Réunion: that the island’s ever-increasing
métissage
was leading to a fundamental metamorphosis in its character. Réunion had been born and shaped by the accidents of French colonial history, and three hundred years after the French flag was first raised at Saint-Paul, the island was still supported by an umbilical cord from Paris. Yet with Réunion’s customs and traditions continually evolving through the intermixture of its different communities, it seemed that the island was visibly becoming less and less French every day. Certainly the façade was still there – the croissants, the baguettes and the burgundy – but at its heart the island seemed to be fast evolving its own quite separate identity, spinning off in to its own orbit, as the
métissage
led to a constantly shifting fusion of faiths, ideas and superstitions.

Inside the cemetery, the cross head of La Sitarane’s gravestone had been broken off, and the remaining shaft was painted bright red. On the graveslab, just as the historian had said, was piled a mountain of bizarre offerings: rice, potatoes, oranges, radishes, wine gums, milk, coconuts and incense sticks, as well as the inevitable bottles of rum and packets of Gitanes.

‘You see, people here think La Sitarane is alive,’ explained Jean-Claude, the gravedigger, who was busy preparing a plot nearby. ‘That is why they bring these presents: cigarettes for him to smoke, rum for him to drink, and so on. They think that if they honour him in this way La Sitarane will help them in their work – or help them punish their enemies.’

Jean-Claude hauled himself out of his grave and wiped his hands on his trousers.

‘So who is it who comes here?’ I asked.

‘We get all sorts,’ replied Jean-Claude. ‘An hour ago there was a woman dancing on the grave. First she cut the head off a chicken, then she started dancing. She was Créole, I think, but lately it’s been mostly Tamils who’ve been coming. They stand by the grave in groups and their priests read from their bad books. All the
Tamils believe in La Sitarane’s power. They are great sorcerers.’

I walked over to La Sitarane’s grave and reached down to pick up a coconut that someone had left on it, but Jean-Claude restrained my hand.

‘It’s better not to touch,’ he said. ‘There was a gravedigger here when I was a boy. One day he drank some wine from the grave. The next day his mind was finished. Now he’s in the asylum in Saint-Denis. Or so they say.’

‘So you actually believe in La Sitarane’s power?’ I asked.

‘Bien sûr,’
said Jean-Claude. ‘Of course. Everyone does.’

He smiled at the question, as if it were something only a
z’oreille
could possibly ask.

‘This is Réunion, not Paris,’ he explained. ‘Here things are – how do you say? – a little different from
La Métropole
.’

I interviewed Imran Khan twice: once in 1989, when he was still a bachelor-playboy and captain of the Pakistan cricket team; then again seven years later, after his marriage, when he had entered politics to campaign against corruption in Pakistani public life
.

LAHORE
,
1989

If you brought together Kylie Minogue, George Michael, Princess Diana, Ian Botham, Prince Charles and Joanna Lumley, bred them, and created some monstrous celebrity super-creature, that being might possibly figure in British gossip columns as prominently as Imran Khan does in the press of Pakistan.

The man is a National Obsession. He combines the status of royalty, the prestige of a cabinet minister and the gossip value of a pop star in a country which doesn’t have any royals, whose cabinet ministers are hopelessly corrupt and whose pop stars are mostly Indian, and therefore national enemies. Every
chai-wallah
in the country can – and will – give you a breakdown of Imran’s batting and bowling statistics, the details of his horoscope and a list of his girlfriends in pidgin English or Urdu, whether or not you ask him. His sex life is a matter of national speculation.

‘Imran Khan has too many girlfriends,’ my rickshaw driver announced on the journey from the border.

‘I’ve heard he has a soft spot for English girls,’ I said.

‘English girl, yes,’ replied the rickshaw driver. ‘Also Pakistani girl, Indian girl, German girl, Bangladeshi girl. Also they are saying Sri Lankan girl and American girl, French girl, Italian girl, Spanish girl, African girl and Chinese girl. All girl. Lots of too many girl.’

Those not busy worrying about his sex life spend their time trying to marry him off. ‘You see, he is intelligent, educated, and comes from a good family,’ explained the tweed-jacketed schoolteacher in the bus. ‘He’s a very eligible young man.’

More to the point, he is the captain of the Pakistan cricket team. He is the man who turned Pakistan from a very mediocre side in to what is now the world’s second-best team (after the West Indies), and he is also, in many people’s opinion, the best all-rounder currently playing. And he is all this in a country which is utterly fixated on cricket, a game everyone plays and which no one can ignore. Pakistani television is dismal even by subcontinental standards: so as far as entertainment goes there is pretty well only cricket and cricket and more cricket; it has a captive audience of hundreds of millions. The collective gasp as a Pak player is dismissed can be heard several miles in to Afghanistan.

When Pakistan beat India in the 1986–87 Test series, 150,000 people turned up to welcome the team at Lahore’s airport, lining the road in to the city for ten miles. Less than a year later, when India narrowly beat Pakistan in the World Cup, the newspapers reported twenty-seven coronarles and brain haemorrhages up and down the country, and Pakistan went in to national mourning for a week. No wonder then that General Zia personally intervened to beg Imran to come out of retirement, and that he later offered him a prominent ministry in his cabinet.

Following Imran around Pakistan, I soon discovered the extent to which his aura rubs off on those even distantly associated with him. Just having a copy of his autobiography in my hand got me through customs unchecked, and allowed me to change my traveller’s cheques at a special rate. Judicious dropping of his name provided free taxi rides, free meals, discounted hotel bills and enough cups of tea to rupture my bladder. In Sialkot, where every hotel
for thirty miles was booked up for the Test match, mentioning the magic word ‘Imran’ got me the manager’s own room. It was handed over to me with the solemnity of a Papal Indulgence. ‘Do not thank me, Sahib,’ said the manager. ‘It is not choice, it is duty.’

Imran Khan is, indisputably, a very good-looking man. I first saw him on the balcony of the players’ pavilion during the Pakistan v. India Test at Sialkot. He was leaning forward on to the balustrade, his familiar dark features and mane of coal-black hair offset by the white of his cricket jersey.

When, a little later, it was his turn to come out to bat, the already volatile crowd exploded in to an orgasm of cheering, horn-tooting, banner-waving and general unabashed idolatry. The people on the terraces leapt to their feet and began dancing and screaming and waving Imran’s picture, until they were commanded to sit by a nonchalant hand signal from their hero. But one section of the crowd refused to obey him. Pakistani cricket is strictly segregated by gender. The men may have got the hint, but no one was going to stop the normally silent Pakistani sisterhood from having their fling. From behind the canvas shelter of the women’s enclosure came a deafening racket of adoring screams and a slow, high-pitched chant in Punjabi.

‘What are they saying?’ I asked the man sitting next to me.

‘These ladies are saying that they want to marry Imran Khan,’ he replied, blushing slightly. ‘And they are saying that their love is like an ache in their belly.’

Yet Imran is in many ways an unlikely sex-symbol. When I arrived for supper at the house where he was staying, I had to sit waiting for five minutes while he finished his prayers. The names of the internationally glamorous may trip off his lips in his conversation
(‘Sting and I never really hit it off …’ ‘Ian Botham’s just a common bully …’ ‘When Mick Jagger was here …’) but Imran is nevertheless a practising Muslim who prays to Mecca five times a day and goes to the mosque on Fridays. When he came to greet me, I expressed surprise at the intensity of his devotions.