Читать книгу Fatima Meer - Fatima Meer - Страница 13

The family I grew up in was never confined to my parents and siblings. It extended to many uncles and aunts and dozens of cousins living in a kutum, a constellation of nuclear families who could trace their origin to a common progenitor. My father was the recognised head of our kutum. As such he was not only highly respected but also held responsible for all members of this extended family. He was also the first member to establish himself in Durban and thus our home became the reception point for relatives who migrated to the city from northern Natal and Kimberley.

In Wentworth our family soon almost doubled in size. First came Papa’s brother, Gora Papa (Ahmed Meer) and his wife and two children from Kimberley. Gora Papa worked with Papa in the press and he and his family lived with us. Later Papa and Ma’s cousin, Gora Mamoo (Hoosen Meer, son of their Uncle Chota Meer), and his wife and daughter came from Dundee to live with us also. Some months later Papa and Ma’s cousin, Choti Khala (Ayesha, daughter of their Uncle Chota Meer), joined our Wentworth household.

Our uncles brought with them three cousins – Gora Papa’s sons, Unus and Abassi, and Gora Mamoo’s daughter, Zohra. We had three bedrooms and we lived a family to a room, the older children sleeping on mattresses on the floor or with the parents on the beds, as space permitted.

The day Gora Papa came into my life, the family was in celebration. I was four or five years old and there was love between us at first sight. Well my sight was somewhat dim, for I had been awakened early that morning to travel from Wentworth to the Durban station and had promptly continued my sleep in the car. When we arrived at the station, Uncle Cas (Amina Ma’s brother), had draped me on his shoulder and I lay there, a dead weight, while he carried me all the way from the car. I was roused from my sleep when the train steamed in, in time to welcome my new uncle, my father’s brother.

I saw my new uncle and aunt and my two boy cousins, Unus and Abbasi, through sleepy eyes. In fact, I think my sleepy eyes saw only my uncle. I more than saw him, I felt him, for he immediately took me from my Uncle Cas. I snuggled against him, spontaneously claiming him as my own as he claimed me his own.

My cousin Unus was the elder of Gora Papa’s two sons. My first recollection of Unus was that he spoke words that were foreign to us – he spoke Afrikaans. My eldest brother Ismail led the way in laughing at him and we all followed. Abbasi, the younger of Gora Papa’s sons, was a Down syndrome baby. He lay inert in his cot or pram, unable to move. There were few things that made him laugh. He was helpless, harmless and always pleasant.

I had always complained that I had no one to play with since I had no sister. When Gora Mamoo’s family came to stay with us I expected his daughter, Zohra, to fill that vacuum, but she, like my cousin Unus, was eight years old, and closer in age to my brother Ismail than to me. Zohra, Unus and Ismail went to school together. They were the big children and I was in a hurry to be part of their bigness. They were our older siblings and we, the younger lot, who were not yet at school, my two younger brothers Solly and Ahmed and I followed them whenever allowed to do so. When they returned from school we particularly enjoyed eating their leftover sandwiches. It was most fortunate for us that we had our elder siblings for they made it possible for us to go places we would never have ventured on our own.

The clearest memory I have of Zohra at Wentworth is going to the toilet with her at night. The toilet, a bucket enclosed in a tin shed, was some distance from the house in the bush. We had to take a hurricane lamp to light our way, and we kept each other very good company as we took turns on the bucket and chatted away. We were never in a hurry to leave the toilet.

I also remember spending some nights at Uncle AC’s flat with Zohra. Her father, Gora Mamoo, would make shadow animals on the wall and tell us stories about Shaka and Dingaan and how a seer predicted that once they quarrelled and lost their unity a white man would take over and they would be enslaved. It was from him that I heard my first political statement. I was sufficiently impressed by it to remember it as an adult.

I met Choti Khala (Ayesha), when I was five years old and I fell instantly in love with her. She was much older, in her late teens. I had never known anyone like her. She was so vivacious, so pretty and so fashionable. Choti Khala wore her long headscarf as a decoration piece, as part of her dress. She swirled her scarf under her arm, brought it across her breast and pinned it on her shoulder with a glittering brooch. With my mothers, scarves were a sort of nuisance cloth that got in the way when they worked, something they respectfully and hurriedly draped over their heads when visitors came. I had the impression that they would be rid of most of them if they could, save the going-out long scarves that were trimmed with gold braids.

Choti Khala was a gifted reciter of the life of the Prophet and she was invited to recite at public mouloods (celebrations of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad). Ma would take me to these and Choti Khala would sit with the other reciters, three or four young women like herself, in front of a row of pillows, beautifully embroidered with gold beads, alongside vases of flowers and incense sticks. At the end of the event the reciters would be given presents. I was so proud of Choti Khala on these occasions.

Choti Khala spellbound me. I followed her around like a little puppy. I slept with her at night. I was mesmerised by her dainty movements as she applied her creams and powders, and when she settled down to tell me stories, I was sold to her forever. Yet all the while I got this insidious message from my mothers and from Gorie Apa, married to Choti Khala’s eldest brother Gora Mamoo, that she was “bad”. They frowned on her use of cosmetics: Who was she preening herself for? They did not say it in words, it was implied in their attitudes.

Ma spoke disparagingly of people who were too free. Could one be too free? Was Choti Khala too free? Such questions began forming in my mind and I answered them by drawing unreservedly closer to Choti Khala. My mothers could really do nothing about it, for their disapproval of her remained unspoken. What was there to speak about? As I was to learn much, much later Choti Khala was, at the end of it all, guilty of no more than escaping her unhappiness which began with her marriage at the age of seven.

When she joined our household Choti Khala must have been seventeen, but she had already been married ten years. Although married at seven years old, she had joined her husband’s home when she was thirteen. She had not taken to her equally youthful husband. She had found him clumsy and crude and rumour had it that she did not allow him in her bed. Her mother-in-law did not stand for that and so the little girl’s life became hell. Choti Khala would not knuckle down to her marriage and there was continual friction between her and her husband and between her and her mother-in-law.

As my mothers and the women of the family saw it, the mother-in-law, Bhabie, was a terror, but then which mother-in-law was not? It was the lot of daughters-in-law to be punched and slapped. In their eyes Bhabie’s treatment of Choti Khala was not exceptional, but Choti Khala’s treatment of her husband YC, was shocking to them.

“How could a wife behave like that towards her husband?” they said. “She did not want her husband. So who did she want? She is a loose cannon.”

As far as they were concerned, she was the worst kind of role model a young impressionable girl could have, and my mothers were afraid for me. Choti Khala was a free soul who had taken charge of her life by leaving her husband, and it was this freedom that my mothers and her cousins resented. It was this freedom that they sought to stifle. Choti Khala had no right to that freedom since they had no right to it.

We children were far more mobile in Wentworth than we ever were in Grey Street, largely because we were older, the environment outside the house was safer and because there were more of us in Wentworth than there had been at Grey Street. Our parents felt more comfortable when we went around together, conscious of both safety and pleasure in numbers.

We would go on errands together. The butcher shop was at quite some distance and we broke our journey midway, sitting on the grassy bank, dawdling. Sometimes my brother Ismail produced a sausage or two which we shared, eating them raw, relishing the meat squeezed out of the membrane. My mothers never bought sausages – that was too much of a luxury. Dried beans and lentils cooked in a substantial soup was our usual fare. What with sixteen mouths to feed, they never bought more than a pound or so of the cheaper cuts of meat and this had to go a long way. Ismail said the butcher had given him the sausages, but in retrospect I suspect he had just helped himself to a few. However, he came by them though, we enjoyed them.

We went into the bushes, gathering berries and sweet-sour (khati mithie) herbs and weeds. There was a kind of unproclaimed competition over who would collect the most herbs. On one occasion I displayed a huge pile, outstripping all. “Look at Behn, she’s got the most,” my big brother Ismail called out in praise. I was inflated with pride, but was as quickly deflated when Zohra examined my pile and said, “That’s not khatie mithie. That’s just weeds!”

I had no idea what I was picking. It was all the same to me. The praise had come as a surprise, the disappointment was an unbearable shame. I had let myself down; I had let the others down. I felt so ashamed and wondered whether I would ever be admired again, for to me, at that age, praise and love was one and the same thing. To be loved, one had to be praised and to be praised, one had to be loved. That was my understanding of a good child.

Our herbs and blackberries gathered, we stored them away for after supper when we put them out on a white sheet, danced around them, and then sat down and relished them. Our parents came nowhere near us and appeared to be quite oblivious to our goings-on. It was our great luck that we didn’t collect any poisonous herbs.

When mango season arrived, our parents bought the ripe juicy round sugar mangoes in large dishfuls and left them under the bed to take on that rosy red colour that brought out all their sweetness. I walked on the veranda ledge, precariously, and for that reason all the more joyously, sucking one sugar mango after another, until I fell off and bruised my knee and arm and got a scolding from Amina Ma for doing so.

The excitement of us children heightened when visitors arrived to stay. They usually had leftovers from their padkos which we found delicious. Our usual fare was curries with a lot of watery gravy. The padkos were rare treats such as fried or grilled meats, fried fish, samoosas and so on. We children made a party of it, orchestrated by the oldest of us. We placed the ‘offerings’ in the centre and danced round and round them. There was a joyousness about it that came not simply from the delicacies we were about to relish, but from being together, the younger children with the older, and most important of all, the younger accepted by the older as having the same rights, the same claims, though dependant on them for protection if it came to that.

One morning I awoke to Ismail’s screams. He and our cousin Unus were caught smoking cigarettes in the toilet. Their sin though was suspected to be more than smoking. What that suspicion was, we couldn’t imagine and never came to know. Years later Unus confided to us: “All we were doing there was smoking. They wanted us to confess to something else and we never knew what that something else was.” They were both punished severely.

On summer evenings, the whole family, all the elders and their children, walked up the heavily forested hill to the lighthouse. We made quite a group, three sets of parents and their children. We watched the light circle the sea, illuminating the path of ships and far beyond we could see the lights of Durban. It was also an occasion for our parents to tell us about shipwrecks and sea rescues. Some days we would be taken to nearby Salisbury Island into the mangrove swamps, where the forest warded off the light. We lost each other in the sinister darkness and our hearts pounding, we called out to each other.

Our greatest pleasure though was Sunday picnics at Brighton Beach. This was our beach, since no one else appeared to use it. We would all pack into our car, parents, uncles, aunts and children, and spend the whole day on the beach. We would run down the dunes to the sea and run up again at the end of the day, and if a child could not make the climb, a father would sweep him or her up onto his robust shoulders.

Our uncles would lie on the sand and encourage us to bury them until only their heads could be seen. We would struggle to bury them and then dig them out again, and they would erupt out of their graves, and stand up, giant-like, shaking off the sand.

We didn’t have bathing suits. We children swam in our briefs and vests, our mothers fully dressed. They would stand at the water’s edge, allowing the waves to do their will and the waves would soon lash them and fling them and pull them down and they would be thoroughly wet from head to toe.

I would run from Choti Khala for she was invariably after me and I knew why, and I trembled in delicious suspense of being caught and hurled into the sea, and then frightened to death as the waves whirled around my ears and into my nose and I gasped for breath, and panicked at the feeling of being washed out to sea, of never seeing the shore again and then come up spluttering and crying from the shock of it all. But Choti Khala would be laughing, and Amina Ma would chide me for being such a crybaby, and I would realise that what had seemed to me to be an eternity of being lost in the waves was only a moment in time.

We were not often taken to town, so I remember clearly one Sunday when we were all put into our best clothes and Papa took us. For some inexplicable reason I was dressed like a boy in my brother’s clothes. We were taken to Mitchell Park to ride on Nellie the elephant. That was the first time I realised that we belonged to a group called non-Europeans7. I sat on a bench and the park ranger was promptly on to me, shooing me off the bench. My father came as quickly to my rescue. He whisked me off the bench and distracted my attention away from something he resented deeply, but did not think I was ready to understand. He was determined not to have our day spoilt. He bought us ice creams and settled us on the grass to enjoy these and then we had our rides on Nellie. A year later I visited Nellie’s birthday with my brothers and cousins and we received gifts of handkerchiefs and balloons and buns.

I was a little more than five years old. Sleep had not quite left me when Ma, excited to give me the news, awakened me and told me I had a little brother.

“Brother!”, I cried, “I don’t want a brother. I want a sister. Where did the brother come from? Let him go away.”

My curiosity was however roused and I followed Ma. I saw Amina Ma lying on the floor. Dai Ma, the traditional midwife, was beside her and there was blood. It was a fearful sight and I retreated into my bed and lay there quietly until Papa came and picked me up and took me to see my little brother who was lying in Ma’s lap. Ma smiled at me and said, “Come and see your beautiful brother”. I looked at him but remained pouting. If they had to bring a new baby to our home, why could they not have brought a girl? There were so many boys in our house and I was the only girl. I needed a girl to play with. What would I do with the boy?

The new brother was laid to sleep in the jhorie, a cradle made of cloth suspended from a red and green cradle stand. Dai Ma looked after him, sitting nearby, getting on with other chores like cleaning the vegetables for cooking while she rocked the jhorie by pulling the twine attached to the cradle with her big toe. I have an image of myself bending into the jhorie in an attempt to see my baby brother and nearly falling on top of him as Dai Ma screamed and Amina Ma rushed in to arrest an imminent catastrophe.

As baby Mahomed, who we called Bhai, grew, I came to love him and showered him with kisses. Ma could not restrain herself from teasing me.

“You didn’t want this brother, now why do you smother him with kisses?”

I protested, “He is my brother!”