Читать книгу Fatima Meer - Fatima Meer - Страница 8

Ours was an unusual family – with two mothers, Ma and Amina Ma, and one father, our Papa. We were nine children, six brothers and three sisters – Ma’s four (Ismail, Solly, Ahmed and Gorie) and Amina Ma’s five (including me, Bhai, Siddiek, Farouk, and Razia). We children discovered that two mothers were better than one. They complemented each other.

The grandparents I knew were Ma’s and Papa’s parents. I never saw them, but we were told about them so often that they were in my memory – a part of me. I never knew anything at all about Amina Ma’s parents or grandparents. The only person from Amina Ma’s birth family I knew was her brother Cassim, and he was a floating presence, drifting in and out of our lives.

Ma and Papa were first cousins. They came from the lineage of Ahmed Asmaljee Meer, the grandfather they shared. The earliest Meer patriarch that can be traced is Ahmed Asmaljee Meer’s great-grandfather Cassim Meer, who lived in the village of Garah in Gujarat in a time when the British East India Company had entrenched itself in India as a military–cum–political force.

The British imposition of taxes on farmers and produce had reduced peasants, including the Meers, to landlessness. Having lost their land and all their possessions to the local moneylender, Cassim’s grandson, Asmaljee Meer (Ahmed Asmaljee Meer’s father), was forced to migrate with his family from their village to the city of Surat. By 1860, Asmaljee Meer’s two sons were established in Surat, eking out a living as telis (oil pressers).

It has never been explained why Asmaljee Meer named both his sons Ahmed. He differentiated between the two by adding the suffix ‘jee’, after the one son’s name. Since ‘jee’ is a term of respect, one assumes that Ahmedjee Asmaljee Meer was the elder and Ma and Papa’s grandfather, Ahmed Asmaljee Meer, the younger.

Ahmed Asmaljee’s first wife, Maryam Bana of Tadkeshwar (a town not far from the city of Surat), died when their son Suleiman was about seven years old. Following her death, Ahmed Asmaljee married Sarah Amin also originally from Garah. Sarah Amin was the mother of the three Meer patriarchs who would migrate to South Africa – Mohamed (Ma’s father), Ismail (Papa’s father) and Chota (my husband Ismail’s father).

Suleiman, Ahmed Asmaljee’s son from his first wife, never came to South Africa, though his son, Cassim, the father of YC Meer and MC Meer did. He became a successful businessman in Dundee and was close to his uncles. Suleiman married his first cousin, Maryam, the daughter of Ahmedjee Meer, and set up home next door to his father. It seems that Suleiman, or Halloo as he came to be known, and his new mother never got on. In fact, the hostility between the two was so intense that Sarah Amin is said to have left a testimony that her descendants should never marry in the line of Halloo Meer. Despite this, her granddaughter Ayesha and great granddaughter Zohra married grandsons of Halloo Meer – YC and MC respectively.

Ancestry of my grandfather (Ismail) and his brothers (Mohamed and Chota) who settled in South Africa.

Life for the Meers would have continued in a placid unambitious manner in Surat but for the Motalas who lived across the road.

Ebrahim Motala had emigrated from India and settled in the then British colony of Natal in South Africa, where he had established a lucrative business and was sending large sums of money to his elder brother in Surat, Ismail Motala. Ahmed Asmaljee Meer was influenced by Ismail Motala to send his eldest son, Mohamed, to Natal. He was further encouraged because Mohamed’s uncles, Karodia and Saleh Mall, the husbands of Sarah’s two sisters, were already in Natal. This was a time when the members of their community in Surat and surrounding villages were inspiring each other to migrate to Natal to improve their fortunes.

Ahmed Asmaljee Meer entrusted his son Mohamed to the care of a community member, Dawood Chuptie, who was returning to Natal, and they sailed steerage1 on one of the ships owned by Durban-based shipping magnate Dada Abdulla2, reaching Durban in 1882. As Ma told it, her father Mohamed was seventeen years old, the hair on his face not yet sprouted, when he arrived in Durban.

Ebrahim Motala met Mohamed at the Durban docks and took him under his care. They travelled to the town of Verulam, just north of Durban, where Ebrahim lived with his family and ran his business. Mohamed spent almost a year with the warm-hearted and helpful Motalas. Ebrahim had married a South Indian woman, the daughter of a sirdar who had come to the colony as an indentured labourer.

Ma often quoted an adage:

Seek a marriage partner in the family and if you can’t find one there, then look in the neighbourhood, and if there is none there too, then look in the village. Heaven help you if you are forced to go beyond the village.

Heaven, it seemed, did help Ebrahim Motala, for his wife Goriema was, by all accounts, a wonderful woman.

After spending just under a year with the Motalas, Mohamed began his journey into prosperity as a peddler– armed with a consignment of goods from Ebrahim Motala. Within a short time, he bought a horse and cart and set up his own little shop. Not long after that Mohamed went into partnership with Dada Abdulla, and together they expanded into the wholesale market, branching out to Johannesburg.

Their partnership ended, however, over the issue of canned beef. There was an excellent market for canned beef during the Anglo-Boer War but Mohamed refused to deal in haram meat and withdrew from the partnership. He folded up his business interests in Durban and Johannesburg and moved to Dundee where he opened a shop on the main street, McKenzie Street.

His business prospered, and he soon scouted the surrounding country on horseback to identify additional business spots. The justice of peace of the district, a Mr L. de Jager, had a massive farm in Waschbank – almost eighteen kilometres of the railway line from Glencoe ran through it. The region was rich in coal and thousands of indentured Indians worked in the nearby collieries in Burnside and Wesselsnek. There was no store to serve this vast population which had cash in hand. Mohamed leased land from De Jager, built a shop out of wood and iron in Waschbank, stocked it with groceries, and placed his maternal cousin, Ahmed Karodia, in charge as manager. The store came to be known as Amos, and it proved to be as lucrative as Mohamed had estimated.

In the late 1880s, De Jager cut up his farm and put up plots for sale. Mohamed Meer and Hajee Ebrahim Khan purchased the two highest priced plots at £200 each. These were record prices paid for land in the Colony, higher than prices of prime land even in Durban, but Meer and Khan knew what they were doing. New mines were being opened all the time and the cash-earning population exploded all around them. Their shops consequently became rich mines in themselves, and Mohamed sent handsome money orders to his parents in Surat.

Mohamed Meer is remembered as a softly spoken gentleman who dressed meticulously. He wore a woollen achkan (long coat) over a long silk shirt, fastened alternately with gold and diamond buttons arranged on a gold chain. His shoes in soft leather were Indian in style. He wore a red fez around which he wound a Kashmiri shawl to form a turban. Mohamed was reported to be fair of complexion, handsome and dignified, commanding enormous respect. He participated fully in the social, religious and political aspects of the community and was instrumental in building the Dundee Mosque and overseeing its typically Indian architecture.

By the time of Mahatma Gandhi’s arrival in Natal in 1893, Mohamed was already a well-established businessman in Dundee. Gandhi relied on him to build up a membership for the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in Northern Natal, and to report to him cases of maltreatment of Indian mineworkers. In a letter to his lifelong friend and confidant Herman Kallenbach, Gandhi makes mention of Mohamed Meer’s assistance at the time of the 1913 strike of indentured mineworkers:

30 October 1913

MY DEAR LOWER HOUSE

I sent you a full message from Ingogo which I hope you received. Mr Mahomed Meer is at Waschbank. He has the ‘phone. It was he who gave the information about the Ramsay Collieries assault. Please inquire further. You know that I telegraphed to the Protector at Durban and the Interior. You may now inquire further through Meer and if there (be) any workers send one to make local investigation.

MK GANDHI3

Mohamed’s brother Moosa left India and joined him in Natal for a time. He was followed by his brother Ismail (my paternal grandfather) who arrived in 1890 to manage a second shop Mohamed had opened in the Talana area of Dundee. The following year Mohamed’s youngest brother, Chota (my husband Ismail’s father), arrived and was placed under the tutelage of the manager of Mohamed’s Waschbank shop.

It is reported that Moosa arrived with a pair of fine bulls, which the brothers presented to the government in Pretoria. It is a family legend that the bulls, used for breeding, were classified genus Meer, but we have never found any evidence of this. Whatever Moosa’s plans for his future, these were prematurely terminated when he drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Mauritius while on his way back to India.

Mohamed made several trips to Surat and during one of these, in 1894, aged 29, he married Fatima Amin, from his mother’s family in Garah. His brother, Ismail, aged 23, married Khatija Variawa, a granddaughter of Ahmedjee Asmaljee Meer.

Soon after their marriages the brothers returned to Natal. Their wives joined them later with their infant sons, born within months of each other, both named Moosa after their shipwrecked uncle. Fatima settled in Dundee with Mohamed. Khatija settled in Talana with Ismail.

The shop in Waschbank that was established by Mohamed and Chota Meer in 1893.

Once his brother Chota had learnt the business, Mohamed went into partnership with him in the Waschbank shop on a 60/40 basis. Chota proved to be an able businessman. In 1893, two years after his arrival, they built a new shop on the same site – the largest in the area – under the name of CA Meer. The businesses flourished and the two brothers prospered.

My father’s father, Ismail, however, was not suited to shop-keeping. He was miserable in the shop in Talana and soon abandoned it to move in with his brother Chota in Waschbank. He had a literary mind, a characteristic that would be evident in both his sons, my father Moosa and my uncle Ahmed. My grandfather was noted for his oratory skills, and it is said of him that he was the most concerned of all three brothers about the education of his children.

Chota returned to Surat only once – to marry Rasool Naroth originally from the village of Kohar. She was the daughter of Nawlakie Naroth, so named because it was believed that he had found a fortune of nine lakh rupees (nine hundred thousand) while digging on his land – nine being naw in Gujarati. They had seven children, all born in Waschbank. The youngest was Ismail Meer, my husband.

Mohamed had six children, three of whom, Khatija (my mother Ma), Ahmed and Essop, were born in Dundee. His two younger daughters, Amina and Ansoo, were born in Surat. Ismail had three children – Moosa, my father, born in Surat in 1897, and Fatima and Ahmed born in Talana in Natal. My grandmother, Khatija, was of failing health and returned to Surat. My grandfather, Ismail, made several trips to India to be with her, and Moosa and his brother Ahmed moved between Natal and Surat as children, while Fatima remained with her mother.

In 1906 at the age of 41, Mohamed decided to retire from active business. He felt the need to return to Surat so that his young children could be imbued with the culture and education of their motherland. So Ma and her siblings returned with their parents to India.

Mohamed sold a part of his Waschbank business for £25 000 to his brother Chota. In terms of the arrangement between the two brothers, Chota sent Mohamed a thousand pounds a year as his share of the profit. This amicable arrangement ended when distrust set in. Chota was influenced by his elder sons who began to resent having to send large profits to a sleeping partner. Mohamed was influenced by his elder sons, who questioned whether he was being sent his fair share of the profits.

In 1922, Mohamed returned to Waschbank to dissolve the partnership with his brother. Amid tense meetings, mediated by their respective advisors (their maternal cousins, the Amins and the Karodias), a bitter settlement was reached. Chota Meer bought over Mohamed Meer’s interest in the business for £10 800. Of this, £6 000 was paid in cash and the balance paid in monthly bills of £100.

In Surat, Mohamed purchased a princely estate – Raja Wadi – part of the local Raja’s estate. He pulled down the purana bangla (old bungalow) that had stood on it and replaced it with a palatial residence that cost 39 000 rupees – a fortune in those days – thereby changing the family’s lifestyle.

Mohamed encouraged his sons to go to Burma (now Myanmar) and they set up businesses there. These businesses, however, did not prosper and within two years his youngest son, Essop, returned to Surat. Moosa, the eldest, however, remained and married a young Burmese woman, despite the fact that he had a wife and several children in Surat. Moosa’s descendants through his second wife continue to live in Burma, so there are Burmese Meers with whom we South African Meers have no contact.

Raja Wadi – the palatial residence built by Mohamed Meer in Surat

Mohamed’s wife, Fatima Amin, died in 1921, at the age of 52. He never remarried. He cared for his children personally, building close bonds with them. At the time of Fatima’s death, Moosa, the eldest, was 23 years old and the youngest, Ansoo, was six. Fatima had lived to see the marriage of only her eldest son, Moosa.

Mohamed Meer died in Surat in 1938 at the age of 73 when I was about ten years old. I recall my mother’s grief when she learnt of her father’s death. It was my first experience of death and the grief death evokes. Ma’s heart had hankered for her father and for her childhood. We knew her father and her Surat home, Raja Wadi, from the stories she told us. Ever since her return to South Africa as a young married woman, she had hoped to visit her father, but she had never returned to Surat.

Chota Meer’s businesses were hit hard by the depression and by 1930 he was forced to sell. His two eldest sons had left the failing business some time before and his daughters were by then married and living in their marital homes. It was their youngest child, twelve-year-old Ismail, who was left with his parents, trying to make ends meet. As Ismail, who was to become my husband, related, he was born a prince but he left Waschbank a pauper.

The family’s last possession was a rooster and Ismail took the fowl from house to house to try fruitlessly to sell it. He took a job in the shop previously owned by his father, but left this to work in a bakery in Waschbank so he could be closer to his parents. Until the day in 1931 when his brother AC arrived to take Ismail and his parents to live with him in Durban. AC was living with his in-laws and had started a cut-make-and-trim shirt-making home ‘factory’. He wanted Ismail to help in the business, sewing button holes, and so Ismail and his parents moved to Durban.

Chota Meer and his two youngest children – Ismail and Ayesha.

Chota Meer died in Durban around 1935, aged around 61 years old. I have dim recollections of visiting AC’s flat in Pine Street as a child. Chota Meer comes to view the clearest, lying on his bed, parting the segments of a peeled orange and giving this to me with a mischievous look in his eyes. Ismail treasured this image of his father when I recalled it during our marriage.