Fatima Chapter 2 | 1924: The Juggler

As a child, Suleiman was a sensation in Kholvad, a small town along the Jumna river in Gujarat.  His talent had been discovered at a young age.  Suleiman had always been able to juggle things, but by the time he turned six he was the Mozart of juggling, a child prodigy with suspended objects, a feat requiring great focus and intense concentration.  His brow had been furrowing since he was a child as his forehead crinkled and sweated over his eyes, which seemed oblivious to the entire drama occurring just overhead.  It had all started when his uncle had shown him the simple 3-ball juggle after buying a few cricket balls for the boys in the family.  Suleiman had studied him intensely before disappearing outside for a while.  When he came back he had fashioned 3 paper balls and showed him that he’d learnt the trick.  He threw them about as if it was no big trick at all as his uncles jaw dropped in awe.  Suleiman was three years old. 

For every year since he turned 3 he’d learnt to juggle two more objects, and at six was juggling 9 objects in suspended symphonies, altering rhythms with ease, and changing objects from a pile on the ground which would grow and shrink with his act.  It started off as a family show, which soon became a neighbourhood show, and pretty soon all of Kholvad knew of the little boy who seemed to float things above him with ease as he moved and juggled at the same time to a beat which seemed to come from inside him, an alternate reality of rhythms which enabled his strange talent.  The human brain, it is said, can only accommodate up to seven different things at the same time.  How Suleiman, and indeed many other jugglers, manage to defy this limit with their own internal systems of reference is indeed astounding. 

Unlike most jugglers however, Suleimans development as a juggler occurred while his cognition and speech was still developing in early childhood.  A young mind with the capacity to juggle is a rarity indeed, and so was his mind, even at a very young age.  It would develop into a rare balancing act of its own later in life as his speech developed in a mind already constructed for juggling, it had to develop within a much more complex framework of taxonomies held together in simultaneous harmonies of suspension. He never forgot anything, and it seemed like he had to account for every relevant fact in his mind before he could come to a decision.  He would appear to retreat from the space that held him in conversation with a person or a group into another one, somewhere in his mind, where the intensity of the juggling act required such concentration that he would have to venture deep within himself to acquire a focus within it all.  Over time, he became better at accessing this state of mind, travelling back and forth more rapidly and with shorter pauses - but they always remained a little too long, provoking a feeling of discomfort in the listener, like they were supposed to say something to fill the space between them which had suddenly become so vacuous in the absence of his engaging eyes. 

In particular, his speech found a rare rhythm of its own within, occurring in a kind of counterpoint to the way in which the rhythm of his own thoughts occurred.  In his mind, he could suspend many thoughts at the same time, forming a kind of thought laboratory of quite some value.  He could evaluate and relate a whole plethora of concepts in relation to each other – a true generalist mind, with a penchant for tying up little idiosyncratic facts into amazing tapestries of stories. 

It was fertile ground for the imagination to flourish, and Suleiman was comfortable dwelling in his mind.  As a child, his mind was calmer and he would often ponder to himself for hours.  Perhaps being able to physically juggle helped him establish the calm needed to juggle the thoughts in his mind.  His speech was a mirror of this complex machine, and he would soar to great heights of expression with language as a teenager, juggling concepts and metaphors with great ease and accomplishment.  Only his closest friends noticed that he spoke more easily in the open.  Indoors he would often grow silent, and when he did speak it was as if the roof prevented him from adequately juggling the concepts in his mind and he would grow frustrated.  Without the perception of a great deal of space above him he couldn’t establish a feeling of clarity in his mind, and was unable to adequately elocute his thoughts freely, they seemed to clash and fall against themselves, like a juggler under a low roof.

 

Religion often puzzled him.  It seemed, everyone’s beliefs were really the same and he could never quite figure out why everyone was arguing about it so much.  To him, even at a young age it seemed clear that people constantly confused religion with tradition, and only a wise few knew their own religions to adequate factual depths.  They seemed to need to disagree more than they needed to find agreement.  It seemed that they sought out conflict in order to justify their positions, each keeping to his or her own caste, even after converting to Islam.  The world wasn’t as simple as was taught in the religious schools – outside it was far more complex.  It seemed inevitable that something large and troublesome was brewing.  The British Empire was in its final decline.  In the aftermath of the 1st World War it seemed to grow more devious.  Like all empires their worst nature is exhibited in its declining phases.

“I’m actually a refugee here dikrah!” he would tell anybody who would listen, “I fled the British ... out of the frying pan ...” it would end. 

When he was bustled onto a ship for South Africa one winter evening, he had become aware that India might not be safe for Muslims anymore.  He wondered how anyone could hate someone just for worshipping God in a different way in a country whose dominant religion had a thousand faces for God.  It seemed incongruous, almost manufactured.  It is true that the mogul period had indeed brought Islamic conquerors to India, but they were not necessarily averse to learning from and indeed adopting some of the practises they learnt from their subjects.  So powerful and attractively diverse a country stokes the imagination of many who visit it, but to Suleiman it was a place in which he had to juggle many uncertainties at a young age, culminating in a personal exodus to a strange new land filled with yet more uncertainty. 

His mind found no rest on the ship.  The sway of the sea made his ears pulsated and pounded within, as if rejecting the changing movements of the ground beneath him, juggled by the great ocean like a toothpick the ship never stabilized and his internal gyroscopic systems were scrambled.  He lost a lot of weight, but some of the cook’s assistants had taken a liking to him and sneaked him treats from the galley.  Everything he ate came back up and he was constantly nauseated.  He knew he would never return to India.  He had flown the coop, forever.  The ocean did offer him some peace, occasionally, and he would sun himself on deck, amazed that seagulls could be found so far away from anything, trailing in the wake of the ship, picking out scraps that were thrown out to the sea, and which the ships rotors turned up to the surface, confused little fish caught in a mini-whirlpool glinting their signals to the hovering gulls.   

By the time his ship reached Durban in 1929 he’d already decided never to juggle again.  It seemed like a thing children do, and having felt the true loneliness of adulthood at a very young age in a terrible sea journey west across the Indian ocean he’d decided that he would have to be his own man from now on.  To juggle would make him an attraction of a kind which betrayed the nature of the act; he would seem like an entertainer, when he was really a juggler of thoughts and ideas.  He decided he would have to be a man who could juggle his life, already in pieces, so that he could keep them all there albeit in different states of suspension and hence relevance, at different times in his verbal juggling matches.  It was a good decision in one sense, there was a lot of verbal juggling matches going on in South Africa at the time.  Already his mind had become an ideological minefield, with trip-ups and conflicts between the many things he held in his mind.  He was always looking for the elusive synergies that tied things together.  His knowledge of various religions, their philosophies and histories, had helped him identify his first synergies, which to him defined all spirituality in humanity. 

"There's only one God dikrah, so what is all the fuss about?"

And at other times,

“A god is a thing only when you yourself are a thing – in reality God is unknowable, like his name, so how can God be a thing if he cannot be named?”

He would bombard confused visitors in the living room with this one in particular.  This was one of his favourite verbal jests.  He would repeat it many times and on many different occasions in the living room of his Lenz council house into his old age.  Their eyes would shift to the floor, not sure what the appropriate response to this kind of question was they would remain silent, or offer up a smile and a nod.  In all the years that he threw that statement out he never received any satisfactory comment back.

However, the South African Indian community had impressed him with their ability to discard some caste trappings and establish a community.  It wasn’t perfect, and a lot of this unity had been formed as a reaction to an oppressive colonial system of abuse, but it was a lot better than the strict distinctions imposed upon an Indian in India.  Here, he was truly a more modern and free man than he would be allowed to be back home.  His hardships as a child and a young adolescent never left him though and later as he grew into an adult he struggled to assimilate the traumas of feeling abandoned to a hopeless fate by an un-wanting family.  Hence, there was a schizophrenia about him; sometimes he was a proud man, needing no-one and nothing to support him, a real soldier of life.  At other times he was an abandoned boy, searching to fill a space in him which he couldn’t quite understand, an emptiness which always seemed to catch him unawares around the corners in his mind.  He was aware of his almost demonic bearing when thrashing the boys. 

After arriving in Natal and living with an uncle for a few months he had decided to join family in Johannesburg but was surprised at their dampened response to him.  They were poor and in reality he was another burden thrust upon them by misguided family in India.  He felt desperate and alone but remembered what he had promised himself on the ship, “He was now his own man!”  Ten years old or not he had stepped up to the plate and taken the reins of his own life.  The results would be his karma alone but he felt his life had become a drifting ship and needed to be steered.  His next action was calculated and he would incur the age-old transaction; the experience would make him stronger, but he would pay a penalty too. 

One day he packed his meagre belongings into his sleeping blanket and went to the nearest orphanage and declared himself an orphan.  He pronounced in his loudish voice; “My parents sent me here by mistake, they thought we still had family here but there is none.” It was a bold-faced lie - he was merely disowning his family because he already felt disowned himself.  It was an action he would repeat in later life, a departure which would hold far more symbolism than appeared to the normal eye.  It would take him through three different marriages and two families but would come to define him too.  A child may fantasize about many things in the security of love, warmth and companionship of their parents but a child abandoned, better off with someone else is always lost to the world in some ways.  They had lost him when they put him on that ship.  The hardships of the journey had hardened him; in the face of overwhelming fears and insecurities fantasy was no real refuge.  He couldn’t blow out a candle and fall asleep to a world of dreams and fantasies – he had to watch out for the rats, animal and human, that he encountered on that first journey. 

Ship journeys then were a more community affair.  People from the same ship were transported en-masse to demarcated areas where they would build communities together.  The relationships that developed on the ship would come to define the communities and their histories, alliances, friendships, feuds, stories of humanity, deceit and love.  In particular, the areas around Dundee, Newcastle in Natal were settled with whole shiploads of people from India.  It explains some of the distinctness of Indian features which change from place to place across the Natal landscape.  There is more ethnic diversity within the Indian community than outside of it in Natal – it is a world of various features and traits all invisible to an untrained eye and to Suleiman there was more equality here than in India.  Imagine if everyone could be equal?  The slight migration towards this principle by a diasporic patchwork of Indians in Natal had already yielded leaders like Ghandi, who consolidated the strength of a weakened and abused community against the might of the British Empire and helped build a kind of settler unity amongst the Indians in South Africa.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than what he’d experienced of India. 

The orphanage was not quite what he’d expected.  He thought it would be a kind of bed and board arrangement that would leave him to his own devices during the day, able to get out and find a way to make an earning or learn a trade for himself.  People who experience extreme rejection and abandonment at a very young age have to find a way of co-existing with the world.  They never truly feel a part of it, but feel subjected to it.  They are the limbless subjected ‘I’ at times, at other times a process which can be deconstructed only in terms of its experiences, actions and reactions – a planet unto themselves even though immersed in the world.  The orphanage required him to develop into an even fiercer independence.  The children in the orphanage seemed to fall into two categories – those who quietly and humbly suffered their fate and those who reacted against the world for the perceived injustices thrust on them by an unkind fate.  He would learn to assert himself, to take little truck from anyone and to take his life by the reins.  He became, in his view, more of a man. 

The cycles of abuse always have a starting point.  They don’t always have an end; they tend to persist.  Suleiman didn’t escape this cycle, and learnt that sometimes violence was necessary.

His favourite memories of the orphanage were of the times he spent up on the roof, alone amongst the cooing of the homing pigeons that were kept by the master of the orphanage, but tended by the orphanage handiman who was only known to the children by the nickname ‘Pepsi’.  He had made a habit of escaping to the roof, finding solace amongst the pigeons and the afternoon sun.  Here, his mind roamed free and the passing of time seemed eternal.  If there was any true immortality, he mused, it could be found up on a roof like that; fractured souls beneath it, and the heavenly sky above it, a passageway to the gods.  He befriended the pigeons in his characteristic manner, getting to know them individually, one by one, until their cooing felt like the purrs of a cat within his breast.  When Pepsi discovered him asleep beside the coop one afternoon, sunning himself like a Cheshire cat, he thought he could put Suleiman to work a bit, seeing that he liked it up here.  Pepsi taught him how to harvest their guano to use as fertilizer, how to make fans out of their feathers that could be sold, how to tend and care for them, and introduced him to the concept of 'homing pigeons'.  This fascinated Suleiman.  Unlike him, these pigeons would always fly home, no matter where you took them in the world they would find their way back.  It was a blessing in Suleiman's life to be assigned these duties.  It gave him a sense of purpose, and an excuse to spend time alone up on the roof.  He could invent duties for himself and excuse himself from the more boring daily activities of children at the orphanage.  Up there, he dreamed of flight, of soaring, gliding and floating on air.  It was the freest he had ever been, and the world seemed an endless journey for the young adventurer.

Later he would go to war for General Smuts, expecting to return home to a future of a free world, where all men irrespective of class and colour would be equal, having all fought side by side for the freedom they now enjoyed from the monstrous Nazis.  He’d endured many hardships in North Africa, travelling with a Pathan dominated troop who taught him the ways of battle.  They would all return to meagre rewards, a bicycle for some, a pittance for others – the soldiers returned to a post-traumatic abyss and depression and anger was quick to set in.  The first to suffer were the families.  The men drank more, and became restless and violent.  They were were relegated to a succession of restrictive laws by Smuts.  He had betrayed them to a depressing fate, which included amongst other things; the Ghetto Act of 1946.

Suleiman eventually juggled a life with three marriages and two families too.  He married a coloured woman during the time of Smuts – the bastard led him to lose his family.  Alcohol and the pressures of identity being thrust upon them by the new Nazis drove them to depression and there was constant worry over their fate as a family. 

Later, at 35 he’d married Mariam after a second union which proved childless.  He’d just settled into a family life in Kliptown, when their land had been stolen from them and given to the whites; they’d been moved from Kliptown to Lenz into these council houses.  They’d resisted, but the bastards had shut down the schools.  The children now had to travel ninety minutes by train to get to a school. 

"They went for our soft targets,"

As Suleiman was fond of saying.  The men were stuck in depression, emasculated and further stripped of the security of extended family structures.  There was no way to live as an equal even though they’d all fought as equals in the war and the returning men expected emancipation.  Instead, they were slammed with Smuts’s new laws which restricted movement, restricted them to ghettoes and slums, and many turned to thuggery, alcoholism and depression.  The downward spiral of these communities begins here, where families, communities and whole social structures, which have been evolving in some cases since the journey on the ship from India, are now broken up, tearing away the centre which holds things together, relegating them to a new world where there is never enough space for everyone. 

It seemed that Gandhi had failed to ensure a reasonable future through his wise and peaceful ways.  His inner wisdom relied on an oppressor ultimately being able to acknowledge the suffering caused by his actions and to make amends, recognising the humanity in its oppressed subjects.  It seemed that the British Empire was locked in its last spasm of domination and the blinkered Victorian elites and working class yobs had spread a kind of deeper disease throughout their dominions.  Maybe Gandhi felt that the end of slavery was a beginning of a progression to a new way of human society, but the Victorian arrogance had choked all possibility of that out of existence.  They used their notions of civilisation as a way of justifying their superiority over others.  Being civilised, being Christian and being western were all one and the same now, in a very anglo-saxon kind of way and a vicious class distinction had been placed on all and sundry who were conquered. 

For Suleiman, as a young man, there already was a need to find new way of doing things.  Socialism, with its disdain for class, race and caste alike had found a resonance within him.  It seemed to fit neatly into the underlying framework of all religious philosophy he had encountered, not explicitly, but in its humanitarian intentions; to focus governance on communities and societies rather than rich elites.  Indeed, what differentiated Islam as a religion was equality amongst believers.  To Suleiman, socialism was also a natural outcome of the principle of equality. 

“Dikrah, how can there be equality if some people are starving and other people get rich off it?”

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