The death stare

Ramblings on Mauritian roads.

On Mauritian roads, rage runs rampant. Rage so visceral, you feel the smallest hairs on your body stand on end. Serving as the country’s arteries, Mauritian roads are not only a means to mobility but to freedom. Yet they are rarely walked on. Each morning from 7 am to at least 9:30, they are seized up with static lines of cars, buses, and, depending on the season, massive lorries hauling sugarcane. In the evening, as most nine-to-five workers head home, congestion returns, this time under the jaundiced light of the setting sun, casting a romantic glow across an immobilised island. Yet, nothing is romantic about the situation.

I have come to despise Mauritian roads. I find myself longing for ways to (not) navigate the island, retreating to the stillness of my sofa, paralysed by the inertia that surrounds our transport system. In 2021, I returned to Mauritius after nearly twenty years abroad, having lived mostly in England and Switzerland. In Geneva, I walk, bike, and revel in a city seamlessly connected by buses, trams, and mouettes – small public boats gliding across Lake Léman. This is not to say Geneva is without its vices. I am conscious of engaging in language that compares European cities to new(ish) countries and their urban planning dilemmas. I am conscious of indicting an entire population. These concerns coexist with my sense of safety that I have come to cultivate in Geneva when it comes to mobility.

There, I feel safe in the knowledge that mobility isn’t a privilege; it has to be built into the fabric of everyday life. I feel empowered by the countless options for safe, accessible, and affordable transport. And as a woman, this matters deeply. So, when I arrived back on the island, my memories softened by time away and a fading recollection of Mauritius’ poor urban planning, I was hit, violently, by the state of its roads. I felt rage.

I lived with that rage nearly every day for the two years I spent on the island from 2021 to 2023. Sometimes, it festered and mutated into resentment, weariness, and occasionally into misdirected hate, towards the people behind the wheels on a gridlocked island. If ever there were a raw representation of cabin fever, I think I had found it.

Now, in July 2025, after a two-year hiatus, I’ve returned once more – this time for a short period. I am on a break from work (or, in less agentic terms, unemployed), and I find myself in my family home, in my childhood village in the east of the island – a quiet place of around 3,000 people. Of course, as is customary in Mauritius, I got myself a car.

My dad, who just retired and plans to spend a few months in Mauritius later this year, tells me that he doesn’t want a car and that he will rely on Mauritius’ bus system to get around. I recoil in fear.

I am reminded of this piece’s title: the death stare. I now remember what it was I wanted to write about all along. But the thoughts are unruly, sprawling in every direction. I can’t detach the death stare from the fraying threads of Mauritian society – disintegrating, socially, culturally, and politically. I can’t not read into the gender politics, inequalities of class, the crumbling infrastructure, the blatant racism – it is all connected.

Yesterday, as the sun sank behind the horizon and the sepia skies returned, my cousin offered to give me a lift to the village gym. We took a narrow back road, avoiding the village’s only main road, now torn apart by ongoing water pipe renovations. Work that was supposed to take a few weeks has now dragged on for months, recount my frustrated and chatty neighbours, leaning over their fences and gates as I drive past and roll down my windows to say hello.

Rage runs rampant on this island. You emit and receive it – it is inescapable.

As we made our way down the narrow road, sugarcane fields on one side, swaths of pineapple on the other, we saw a car approaching from the opposite direction. My cousin didn’t yield. She drove forward, cautious, with care, the kind of driving shaped by navigating roads and society as a woman. As the two cars met side by side, I looked over and saw the man behind the wheel. He stopped, rolled down his window, and gave us the death stare.

I read it instantly, instinctively, amid the cold silence, as if it were shouted:

You shouldn’t be here, not as women, not at dusk.

You should have ceded the way. I am the king of this road, this moment, by virtue of my gender.

I could hurt you.

In the back of the car, my male cousin sat on his phone, unaware of and unfazed by the situation. These are moments when women gaslight themselves, taught to doubt the clarity of their own instincts, to discard their correct readings of patriarchy, as though those truths belong only in the dusty archives of the mind.

Let me return to Mauritian roads. Mauritian roads are dominated by men in all their glory. There isn’t a single day when I’ve driven here without shouting, “eta couyon, to envi mor” (You idiot, do you want to die). Yes, patriarchy needs dismantling, urgently – but I can’t help but think of the wider cultural unravelling that is long overdue on this island. We need to interrogate every facet, every thread that claims to be holding this place together (for now…), asking the simplest yet most difficult question: why?

Because when we combust as a society, and make no mistake, it is fast approaching, there will be no time to ask. The way we inhabit physical space in Mauritius demands questioning: who owns what? How do we move through these spaces? And what of our belonging – to the land, to the seas, to one another?