Fatima Chapter 4 |1969: Spikes and Whites

Fatima was in good company.  Safinaz, daughter of Aunty Fawzi, also known as Fuckinarz to the boys, was at fifteen a fully formed woman of the world in Fatima’s eyes.  She always had new and exciting things to share with Fatima and more recently had begun to replace the role that the boys played in her social life.  She was the first person in Fatima’s life to speak about being modern.   To Fatima, this word soon began to embody all that was fashionable and independent about adult life and as time passed so her imitation of Safinaz grew.  You see, Fatima, like many children, had begun to feel the need to fit in.  Safi fitted in well.  She knew everyone and everyone knew her.  Even the older boys who hung around at the corner shop knew her by name.  She had a loud, giggling, laughing voice and always seemed happy.  She seemed to bounce along on her feet wherever she went and always had a wide smile ready for anyone who happened to pass by.  She could smile, greet or tease yet nobody ever took offence.  In fact, they seemed to like her more for it.

Usually, Safinaz would rest her head in her arms which lay perched upon the backyard wall and tell Fatima all her classroom gossip while Fatima sat cleaning the odd bits of stone which inevitably managed to find its way into the dry dahl kernels that were sold at the local store.  There would be a lazy timelessness that would punctuate their conversation with long comfortable silences and tired laughter.  Today, however, Safi was abuzz with excitement.  It was impossible for her to remain still.

“You don’t know what?  Today is when the Natal boys are coming to play.  Oh Fathu, so many good looking rich boys you won’t find on one single field anywhere.”

Fatima giggled! She was shy about boys now.  At thirteen she had begun to exhibit the first signs of female sexuality.  She was aware of her own confused feelings of attraction to males, especially older males.  Boys her own age were more interested in teasing, laughing, running, fighting or standing on their heads for all she could care.  In a way they were too equal to be attractive.  The older boys, however, could turn her to a blush with just a little comment.  Often, she would picture herself in the arms of a Hindi movie star and she would feel a little flutter in her heart.  Love was all nostalgic infatuation to her at this tender age.

Safinaz was sorting through all kinds of clothing trying to decide what to wear,

“How I look in this one, eh?  Nice?  Nice enough for one of them to fall in love and bring proposal?  He’ey, why you blushing like that?  Maybe you’ll get one boyfriend too!”

Fatima laughed out loud.  She, like everyone else, liked being teased by Safi’s probing, loving, naughty questions.  Despite her youthful lack of tact, Safi often perceived the true desires of those around her.  It was her ability to state it publicly in a way that revealed that she herself might share the same feeling that made people like her.  She teased; she didn’t mock.

“Come, come, come Fathu, time to go do some sight-seeing”

And with that, they made their way down to the field.  There were many people from the neighbourhood sat on the grass, most only paying half their attention to the teams who were tossing balls and warming up on the field.  Fatima could see immediately which team was from Natal.  They spoke differently.  As they shouted and called to each other she could distinguish the difference in their accent.  They had a more traditional way of pronouncing their words.  They sounded more like the older people around her.  There was little of the thickness of the Transvaal accent and more of the nasal twang of the various vernaculars used by the older generation.

Through the milieux of voices, samoosa smells, laughter and cigarette smoke she caught her first glimpse of him.  He was doing a full forward stretch, but kept his eyes on the ground and seemed uninterested and somewhat shy of the eyes that were all congregated around the edges of the field.  His tall, sinewy frame was made all the more attractive by his hair, which curled fashionably over his ears - “like a movie star neh?” Safi would later comment.  His skin shone with a deep red tan, which was exaggerated by the cricket whites that rested on his frame with an ease that suggested tailoring.  He looked up, and for the briefest of moments their eyes met.  It was in this moment, Fatima would later claim, that she first became aware of her destiny.

It is easy to be sceptical; to claim it was all post-fact rationalisation, to claim that it was what came later that day that really got her attention, but it is impossible to deny that there were powerful forces at work inside both of them which would bring them together.  A man of twenty one and a girl of thirteen, like Elvis and Priscilla, seven years between man and wife, roughly the recipe the Koran teaches for matchmaking.   A mans age halved and seven years added yields the perfect age of a wife.  It implicitly acknowledges that woman develop faster than men physically, intellectually and emotionally.  It also guarantees that a 60 year old man still has a chance of children with his newly betrothed – a good formula for successful polygamy.

The two captains met for the toss.  There was a light warm breeze which made the umpire at square leg curse.  The toss was decided without any communication to the crowd and it was only when they saw the Transvaal team spread out over the field that they knew what the status of the game would be.  They limbered up as they took up their positions and until now, everything seemed to indicate that this would be an ordinary game of test cricket between two ordinary Indian provincial teams.  These were social occasions as much as they were competitive occasions, and meant quite a lot to a minority community who were desperately trying to retain a sense of their displaced nationality. 

They were South African Indians, Indians who weren’t comfortable with having a blanket identity thrust upon them by Apartheid.  They had arrived with their own caste distinctions early in the century and some were wealthy, of high caste, who had even intermarried with whites, and felt themselves eligible for membership of the ruling classes, while others had been thought of as ‘working class’ castes and had been relegated to second class citizenship.  Generally, these barriers had been broken down by Apartheid and the communities, walled off from others by Verwoerd, had looked inwards and had unified more strongly.  We were all ‘Indians’ now and our history was indelibly linked to that of Gandhi’s earliest teachings and activities and some caste distinctions had been reversed with the twists of fate accompanying life in a strange new land.  Indeed, for some this was as simple as a name change.  "Maharaj" was a favourite, like Jews forced to choose more 'german' names which brought about the deluge of Goldsteins, Rosenthals, Siversteins, Goldbergs and Blumenthals.

They tried their best to remain normal, and this healthy competition was a way of maintaining the feeling of normality.  It must be remembered that these were the early days of Apartheid; the damage was in the process of being done.  It wasn’t as it is today, a mission complete, a derelict house whose foundations are clenched in granite, making it impossible to remove, which has to be built over.  Like the enclosed chapel in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, it contains a place of both death and awakening, something which defies time its legacy of confusion.

The main difference between these respective generations is a simple one; hope versus acceptance.  The generations of old possessed one quality that redeemed them from oppression; they possessed hope.  It was something that reflected in the quality of game that was to unfold.  The young cricketers had many dreams, many hopes and trained hard to realise them.  Long hours were spent in the nets, on the road and on the field; they were going places.  Many thought that if they played well regularly, it would eventually become impossible for them to be refused from joining the official (white) South African cricket team.  In retrospect, their hope was worth having despite their eventual disappointment.

On that stickly hot summer day though, the half-distracted crowd were in for a treat.  It was a showcase of true and genuinely rare talent.  The star (guess who?) didn’t move from his crease the entire day.  Salim Ahmed (known then to his friends as ‘Shakes’) spent the day executing perfect drives, flicks and squares.  His strength lay in his patience.  He chose his shots with deliberate and implacable calm.  Whenever a bowler managed to bowl his best, he would defend with frustratingly deliberate calm.  At the first glimpse of a loose ball however, he would pull out a stroke with perfect classic poise.  He was a dream to watch, a true professional in the making.  The crowd appreciated every second of it.  They forgot their provincial attitudes and were lulled into admiration by his display of skill.  As the time passed at the crease so he began to relax into his game.  The longer he stayed, the more he began to conjure; as the bowlers started to tire in the draining heat so each ball became more and more playable.  It began to look like a demonstration match, a kind of cricketing Harlem Globetrotters equivalent.  There was little, if any doubt, as to who won the game that day.

Fatima was enthralled, but it was not the magnificent display of sporting prowess that captured her attention.  It was the way his tailored cricket whites rippled with a gentle flow as he made each shot.  It seemed that the clothes refused to betray the nature of its wearers true strength; his sincere and gentle calm.  Even when furious strokes sent the ball sailing off into the wind and beyond the boundaries the movement of his clothes betrayed his lack of aggression.  He was not a man fuelled at the well of aggression or frustration.  Rather, he was motivated by a modest delight in executing perfect form.  He was a true academic of the sport, blessed with the quality of which she’d seen little of even in her short childhood years; inspiration.  So captivated was she by this scene that she very nearly failed to notice her father’s glee.  It was the way he slapped his thighs and let out a cry of booming delight.

‘Atchar! Look at that, what a fullah this one is! Dikrah, I’m telling you, that boy can go places one day.’

There were very few times that she saw her father taken by inspiration.  More often than not he seemed to draw out his feelings and ideas from the complex maze of his personality.  One was never quite sure what inspired him to think and say the things he did.  Mad genius or confused wandering, you could never quite discern where his motivation lay.  It was almost paradoxical that he drew so much pleasure out of so simple an activity; watching a game of cricket.  It’s just another one of those quirks of humanity that we are drawn to extremes to strengthen or weaken our condition.

To be fair to all the cricketers who played that test, people who came back the next day weren’t disappointed when Shakes declared his innings on 141 not out.  There were many other talents lurking on the field who were driven to new heights, inspired by Shakes’s performance.  Bowlers, batsmen and fielders alike took to the field with a quickened sense of reflex, energised and occasionally pumped with adrenaline.  The crowds would grow steadily from mid-morning till late afternoon and it wasn’t long before the Indian press were there, snapping away, writing furiously and interviewing Transvaal and Natal cricket union officials.  Even they were inspired for they began to make predictions of mixed sport, or at the very least inter-racial contact between the separate sports bodies.  It would be too much to say that this one match began a crusade for recognition of non-white sportsmen but in truth these were the very beginnings of what was to become a long battle, where compromises would be made, allegiance’s tested and sometimes broken.  Shakes would play his part, and to be fair to him he never lost sight of the simple inspiration that motivated his excellence.  He never regarded his talent as larger than himself or the people who surrounded him and would eventually never compromise his position; no integrated sporting body meant he would never play for his country in any capacity. 

He would give no timid answers when given the opportunity to play for his country in a lesser capacity, as an occasional exception to the rule, as part of experimental white teams who would allow in a few non-white players.  Rather, he would relish in integrating what was left of the countries displaced players.  But these were early days, and as he exited the field and he was completely unaware of the young girl seated on the grass ten metres away who would steal her way into his heart.

The newspapers began to collect in Fatima’s cupboard space.  Nobody quite noticed that she had begun a stockpile of them because she’d said she needed them to help her with her homework.  Her parents approved and the boys were too distracted by other things to care, but if anyone had cared to rifle through them they would have discovered that there seemed to be a consistency about the articles which were being cut out.  Only Safi knew Fatima’s little secret.  She would comment;

“Hey, he’s sooo cute Fathu.  Look, he’s smiling in this one, what nice teeth too.  Perfect for you, if only you were little bit older, but who knows; maybe luck will come your way.  If it’s meant to be then it will be; inshallah.”

Noticing those teeth, Fatima was unaware of the incident which would bring them together and thought privately that he did have beautifully perfect teeth indeed, not a flaw in their assembly.  Her own teeth overlapped slightly in certain places and she’d never really thought about her inadequacy before Safi’s comment.  Her admiration had made her somewhat self-aware.  She wondered if she would ever be beautiful enough for a man like him.

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