1966 (Johannesburg)
Fatima walked slowly through the garden, a little
girl, and Lenz had a suppressed, silent calm about it today; like nobody had
anything to say. There was smoke in the
air and a pleasantly palatable non-school day feeling which hung about her as
she stepped barefoot over roughly mosaiced stones in the garden. She had a bronzy skin which shone, even in
the dry Transvaal morning air, with a glowing sheen throughout her slim ten
year old body. In the distance hunched
over a flower bed full of blooming marigolds was her father; the love of her
life.
“Fathu,” his voice boomed, “tell your
mother make tea!”
His voice was always too loud, lending the type
of eccentricity often confused with the partially deaf. The little girl sprang to attention, her brow
crinkling with focus, and conscientiously made off around the side of the house
towards the back door to the kitchen. Although
unaware, she was carrying out an age old tradition amongst spouses handed down
in this way, for she would soon be returning with a cup of tea; the little
waitress, a messenger of love. It was
very rare for a cup of tea to be passed directly from a mother’s hand into the
fathers if there were children around. They
were always drawn into everyday activity.
It kept them out of trouble.
Her father was not a big man, but his stoutness
and wide chest gave the impression of unlimited power. He stood always as though looking afar, like
there was something in the distance that had surfaced, and to which he was
listening intently. Leaning slightly
backward and with his shoulders drawn back, arms hanging at his sides; he
acquired a sort of high-noon posture, and even though he stood in champals, his ivory-whitened toenails
betraying his age, nobody quite doubted that mad strength which seemed to hang
latently onto his frame. His hands were
workman’s hands; spade shaped and sheathed in leathery skin, which more often
than not bore the stains of earthy dirt.
He insisted however, on an almost military attention to hygiene, and the
children, like most in the community, were wary never to stray into the house
without taking their shoes off and never left the house looking scruffy or
unkempt.
“Cleanliness is next to Godliness!” one would
often hear being shouted at some unfortunate child who had inadvertently
managed to acquire a stain, or had unwittingly left the soccer field with clods
of earth still attached to his clothes. Ancient
cultures retain their sense through these clichés. They are never really derided or questioned. It is understood that it serves good advice
and that the conventions that the clichés bring mark the pillars of society.
Suleiman was a man who was discovering new
conventions to incorporate, however, and in some sense it may be understood in
terms of the historical context of the time.
These were the days in which beliefs were plenty and men sought to
effect changes to the world. In some
sense I guess it was the hubris of a post-war, post industrial revolution age
where proverbial, patriarchal man went about changing everything, exercising
his God given right to shape landscapes, skylines and tree-lines. Armed with deterministic vision everything,
including himself, became objectified, yet subject to the logic of cause and
effect, and there was no end of great speakers and great writers with great
ideas and great plans for mankind.
Suleiman had heard some of the ideas of these
great speakers and in his mind, which constantly worked away separately from
his chopping, snipping and weeding hands, some of these ideas rang true. Every man has his own way of understanding
the world, a kind of model that his experiences are interpreted with. In time I suppose we become so comfortable
with our model that we end up building upon it, fitting things into places
where they seem to provide more rather than less coherence in the model.
Suleiman had heard ideas which had fallen
tantalizingly into place with the thoughts that occupied him which he chopped,
snipped and tended to the cricket field upon which his municipal corporation
home lay, and was beginning to feel that he had finally found a ‘way’. He had already announced to his wife and
children that he was a ‘socialist’. I
suppose his eccentricity wasn’t entirely a behavioural construct attributed to
bad hearing. He did have a certain
bloody-mindedness about him that also hung latently onto his powerful frame.
Equality was one of those ideas which, when first
uttered by his friend and principle drinking partner - Johnny-Bhai - had
consolidated many impressions and feelings he had been struggling with over the
years. A life on the lower rungs of
society had imbued him with a cynicism towards the idea of superiority. Whenever you learned the ‘true facts’ as he
was fond of saying, you were forced into the realisation that ideas of
‘civilisation’ were largely ambiguous. He
was fond of using the colonial British as an example of this – them, with their suits and ties and airs
and graces of today were none other than the conquering thieves of yesterday. Wherever they had built their colonies they
had left poorer upon departure. He’d
seen the starving poor of India, in fact he’d been one of them until the age of
ten when his family had bustled him onto a ship to South Africa. So desperate they were for a better future
that anywhere was better than this!
“I tell you dikrah, these Africans don’t know
what real poverty is.”
“The star of India is sitting in Her Majesty’s
crown, I ask you, nothing better than thieves.
All these Europeans for that matter, with their Jew-killing world wars …
very strange civilisations those?”
No … none of these regal ideas of civilisation worked. The only thing which made sense, and there
was beauty in its simplicity, was equality.
“If all men were treated equal then what problems
could there be?”
“The reason those white fullahs don’t like all
this equality talk dikrah, is because they can’t make money from equality”.
This he knew to be a fact. He tested, or more accurately, wholly
implemented his idea of equality with the black labourers that he employed for
private weekend jobs. Even when times
were hard and earnings meagre he’d split the money earned in equal proportions
and dole it out at the end of the working day.
He’d make no profit off these men who worked as hard as he did – that; was equality. Mariam, his wife, would often lament to Aunty
Fawzi, their neighbour, that her loud speaking husband had no ‘business mind’. ‘Still,
what to do’, the Koran says that a
woman must walk two steps behind her husband; and he must lead the way. She’d sealed her fate in a marriage of
orphans who found solace and security in their mutually maligned fates being
brought together to right the wrongs of their pasts. At least she, with nobody to pay her dowry
had found a husband.
Suleimans efforts were, I suppose, confused with
entrepreneurship. In a community where
business sense is keen, it made no sense to be making an effort otherwise.
However, the elusive but tangible eccentricity
which hung loosely upon Suleimans frame had inspired a certain
bloody-mindedness to “do things right”. There
was no point ‘talking and talking’ about equality without practising it. God knows how those rich fullahs have started
selling the Indians out; all their equality talk was just bunk. And so, bit by bit, consciously and
unconsciously, he set about making sure of his family’s mentality. The domestic servant - "the maid",
as it was called back in those days - would always be the first to eat. Often, he would have large African men to
dinner and the children soon learnt that their father wouldn’t tolerate
conventional attitudes. Boys being boys,
they often stepped out of line in their own childish amusements, mocking and
imitating these strange accents and hair but not unlike the great thinkers of
his time, Suleiman had little patience for dissent.
Often the boys were brutally whipped. It was unfortunate that nobody had ever
discussed Satyagraha at length with him.
Perhaps it was a daunting task to him, parenting. Never having been parented himself he had to
make it up as he went along. His lack of
patience and deep insecurity of failure as a parent culminated in a panic
within him, and he resorted to the very same methods of intimidation that he’d
encountered as a child in the orphanage.
Thus, in his attempts to ensure the mentality of his children he’d
planted the seeds of a polymorphic fate.
Their development would be as a reaction to him, the Leader, but each
would develop in their own way.
Fatima was content to watch this big man work
away in the garden. This was when he
seemed devoid of frustration. When
occupied, he seemed to enter a state of calm.
He’d never totally ignore her, making little comments now and again, but
on the whole she was content to bask in that presence of his. It was unlike the agitated gesturing which he
lapsed into when sitting in the living room.
When people visited, Fatima was often delegated as the tea-bearer. She was very sensitive to the change in her
father’s demeanour in the living room when receiving guests and would often
remain as unobtrusive as possible, serving tea and sweetmeats like a ghost. His voice would boom with opinions,
remonstrations and denigrations while the guests would smile dumbly, not sure
whether to agree or disagree. His
presence inspired meekness in those around him by its sheer force. Many a drained relative would return home from
a visit only to find that within minutes they’d fallen into a deep sleep which
would break only with the arrival of the next morning. His power of sedation did not go unnoticed,
and many a visitor was secretly someone who’d been recently assailed by bouts
of insomnia. It worked, well, for people
who slept less understood him better.
Fatima knew better than to ask him questions when
he was indoors. She preferred to ask her
questions in the garden. Out there, he
took time to make her understand the things he was saying, appealing to her
child mind with apt simplicity. Indoors
he’d often get so carried away that it seemed that only he knew what he was
talking about. She always asked
questions in the garden. He enjoyed
answering them and seeing how well his answers sat in the virgin child mind. Often, her questions seemed related to his
thoughts.
Today, she sat on her haunches directly behind
him on the lawn while he worked. Her
feet seemed to hover above the surface of the ground, caught on the top layer of the densely intertwined grass forest cover of the lawn grass, her toes
clutching the blades as she crouched, watching the red ants starting to close
in on them. She raised her head
towards her father’s broad back and bullock legs before asking,
“Papa, before,
when you were in India, where did you stay?”
She often asked after his childhood life in India. To her, India was a fabled place. She knew of its poverty and its greatness and
she hungered after the little bits of description her father would let out from
his often hazy recollections of an early shuffled village life in India. Her questions often magically released
memories which had lain dormant for years until then. But India’s drawbacks were never far from
Suleiman’s mind.
“We stayed in Gujarat; we were very poor. You can’t get nowhere in India if you’re low
caste people”
“At least here we’re building schools now. You can become a teacher one day if you keep
studying. When I first came here there
wasn’t many schools for us like now-days but I still learnt to read. You can’t be ill-literate in this day and age.”
And that was how it always ended, with a slight
rebuke in the direction of Mother India.
He didn’t like the gaudy, nostalgia impregnated visions of the Mother
often spouted by relatives and friends. Many
of them had never even set foot in India and he often thought that the shock of
India would annihilate their illusions had they ever did. He had two ways of regarding the mother; in
an historical perspective, and a contemporary one. Historically he thought of it as a great
place. He’d often read about its great
history and although he sometimes got his facts confused he’d developed an
admiration for its great legacy. His
contemporary perspective was grounded in his own experience and he saw India as
a quarrelling, conniving, loathsome place.
He put this transformation down to British occupation. Often he would comment with that booming
voice,
“The British sucked India dry and left it to
die!”
He had many examples to illustrate his point but
out here in the garden they seemed irrelevant; better left unsaid. It was only indoors that he would spurt point
after point out of his mouth, his temperature rising all the time and his face
reddening to a deeper and deeper shade of purple. Maybe it was that the roofs of the council
houses were too low, sparking some kind of claustrophobia in him that tightened
his veins and constricted his breathing driving him to desperately force out
his words with greater and greater vehemence.
He rarely looked relaxed indoors.
He looked caged.
One day, after he’d learnt that the boys had been
playing truant from school he stepped in though the kitchen door to find that
his brow was furrowing madly. Confronting
them in the bedroom his bellows of rage inspired terror in the boys and he beat
them unrelentingly. Howls of pain echoed
in the street outside while Fatima sat guiltily with her homework in the front
room. She could hear each lash of her
father’s unearthly thick leather belt upon their skinny prepubescent hides. Her guilt rose up whenever her brothers were
beaten and seemed to compound over time.
You see, Suleiman didn’t believe in beating little girls, only little
boys. She felt guilty about feeling
lucky to escape the beatings that were indeed severe. Every time they were beaten their howls for
mercy would drive her to tears. As a
child her main desire was for stability.
She hated the roller-coaster of emotion inspired
by her father’s manic emotions but loved him dearly. The objectivity of later years would bring
her to condemn his behaviour but as a ten year-old child all she could do was
react. Through her behaviour she sought
to pacify him and as she grew her character would slowly transform into someone
who was always eager to please. She
could hardly remember being rude or confrontational to her father. If she became upset she would slink off and
sulk or cry softly in the bedroom. The
tantrums she did throw were directed exclusively at her brothers, and even then
they lacked significant indignance and rebellion. They were more often than not just
expressions of outrage.
For a child, such controlled behaviour does not
come naturally and inhibition-control evolved into her character only because
of her father’s presence. Her shadow had
to grow within his. It would be years
before she realised what a dark and tormented shadow it truly was, but by then
it would be too late. This life contains
only the illusion of free choice. There
are only degrees of free choice, some freer than others. She kept herself occupied with strict
attention to her duties. Her schoolwork
was always done conscientiously and her chores done timely. She played the role of the model child
because it worked best for her everyday existence.
It was not just her father who exhibited vicious
temperamentality. It was everywhere in
the adult world. Teachers often seemed
monstrous with their threats and insults that were ejected with jolting
regularity, often at the poorer children in the class. Her Aapa, the religious teacher, had a thick
cane with which she indiscriminately dealt out blows to whichever poor
unfortunate was unable to remember by rote the verses of some section of the
Koran that she’d been drilling into them for the past few days. To Fatima, God also reined in the adult world
and she resigned herself to thoughts of a vengeful and angry God.
It was not out of place. Everybody seemed to be angry. A child does not question the mood of its
environment. It simply adapts to it. A child’s idea of normality is only ever what
it grows accustomed to. People grew
angry very quickly. It was as if they’d
rapidly anger in order to stifle any ideas or sentiments about their own
weaknesses that they themselves held. It
seemed that their anger was as much directed at themselves as whomever it was
directed against. At this time anger was
not yet the scourge it is today though. These
were the days of an incubation which would hatch its uncounted eggs like poison
into batter. The cake would flop, its
surface sunken, refusing to inflate under heat of its anger it would become
compressed, thick, stuck in depression.
Already in its initial stages Fatima the child
was growing with it, the ingredients of her character being assimilated in response
to this uncertain environment. She was
swimming with the current for the time being.
Click here for the next chapter of Fatima
Click here for the next chapter of Fatima
No comments:
Post a Comment