My GUILTY PLEASURE

THERE IS NO PLEASURE quite like a piece of gossip blowing in on the wind.

- BY JEAN MARC AH-SEN

When I was a child growing up in a Mauritian household, gossip was something to be savoured. I learned that the reward for bad behaviour was widespread circulation of your misdeeds. I attended many bull sessions where my family cut our calamity-prone familiars down to size. We gossiped in kitchens, waiting on slow-cooking rougailles, over carrom tables and spirited games of dominoes, and in the now-shuttered Blue Bay Café—to my knowledge, the only Mauritian restaurant in Toronto.

But I did not regard this behaviour as a guilty pleasure until I was a teenager, after I began to understand that a penchant for scandal and rumour was frowned upon in broader society—that nosiness, strictly speaking, was not proper. Within a short time of this realization, I swore to commit myself to a life of minding my own business.