Fatima Chapter 8 |1974: Shakes the Samurai

In those days lives, families and customs were differently crafted in society, and while they were doing the same things we do now, they did them differently.  Each generation is bound to this cycle.  The Chinese say that it is tradition to break tradition.  The forms of tradition and ritual are complex entities, they are weaved into collective and individual psyches, actions, reactions, processes and objects that surround us, driving us one way or another towards the four corners of our cages.  Members of south African prison gangs in this country call their world ‘die vier hoeke’ and we have similarly metaphoric corners that manufacture the various shapes and shadows of our experiences, while the themes remain the same; love, betrayal, status, jealousy, revenge, slavery, domination, and occasional redemption.   . 

Shakes was born into a large family, who were upper caste orthodox Muslims who had come to South Africa as ‘passenger Indians’.  These were Indians who had paid their own fare to South Africa and had emigrated specifically to start up businesses that could reap the benefits of a large newly settled population of indentured labourers from India, and the opportunities that a new land teeming with resources and activities afforded. 

His father presided over a large extended family and they all lived on the same street on the North Coast of Natal, in sugar cane country.  There were many brothers and sisters, and while little quarrels and differences occurred, they were part of everyday life and there was a middle-class, Victorian dignity about how conflicts were handled.  His father was a busy but kind and gentle man who handled the extended family affairs and was the residing patriarch of the family.  All decisions were passed through him, and he was the leader amongst the group of elders in the family.  He was an excellent role model to those around him and took a personal interest in each and every family member.  He was slow to disapprove and the children of the family loved him dearly while still holding a deep respect for him, which they learnt from the adults around them.

His mother was the love of his life.  She adored him as her youngest and he grew up in her company as a little boy always doted upon and loved by her.  He would sit on her lap as she cleaned dahl, beans or shelled peas on long childhood afternoons.  She was a saint to him; a simple woman with a graceful manner about her, never angering easily or prone to self-pity.  She accepted the path that life opened up for her with a grace and ease that few manage and was the image of charity, never acquiring more than she needed.  She always cleaned out her closet of an old item whenever a new item was acquired for her, leaving her closet always a reflection of her mind, uncluttered by owing too much excess and the proliferation of choice.  She lived simply, ate simply, loved simply and was imbued with a deep wisdom of things because she always stayed focussed on what was most important.  Maybe it was this quality that made Shakes such a good cricketer and batsmen in particular; the ability to stay calm and keep focussed on the task at hand is something he learnt by an osmosis of a kind, just from being around her so much. 

It left him with a kind of essential zen in his nature and this gave him a regal bearing.  It was this nature that most women found irresistible.  He was a calm, highly attractive guy who was a huge success and didn’t flaunt it around.  He treated everyone with the same good natured interest, and while he wasn’t a conversation maker he was always sincere in his interactions.  Sometimes he joked, and one would get a glimpse of the lightness in his mind and the softness of his nature.  It was the seventies and he was a player of sorts, whose philandering was as normal a role to play as his un-touted status as a sportsman.  He was a jock, but not a braggart, and this drew women to him in flocks and droves.  His good looks and high-caste notwithstanding, he was the model fantasy for a new generation of women both in South Africa and abroad.  South African Indian women viewed him as a Bollywood movie star is, lauded and cheered.  It did not sit comfortably with his modest inner nature, but he reaped the rewards of it anyway.  He was a samurai on the field and with women.  His cricket bat and his dick were instruments of desire where he found the deeper parts of himself, explored his creative impulses fully and became more known to himself through spontaneous invention through form.  He loved women; they gave him the comfort of his mother and eased the loneliness of travel, new cities and new faces.

There were many changes occurring in South Africa.  Forced removal had already taken place and the group areas act had already done a good job of separating races from each other physically, psychologically and spiritually. 

The churches had split, with the right wing Nederlandse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) taking the role of an active agent of apartheid, selling it as a spiritually inspired dream, and the Anglican and Catholic churches on the left, staying true to their original parishes of a mix of black and white citizens.  To the right wing NG Kerk, the Afrikaners were like the Jews, Gods chosen people in Africa who had once made a covenant with God.  The discourse in the other churches was too liberal, the Catholic Church even had communist bishops.  The bishop of Rio, Dom Helder Camara had once said, 

“When I feed the poor they call me a saint, when I ask why the poor are starving they call me a communist.” 

It was the protestant churches that flourished under apartheid however, as they had played an active evangelical role in poorer communities which were isolated from main-stream South Africa and the economy.  These communities had a deep need for knowledge of their place in the world, and in a variety of ways the churches helped people escape the indignity of being brown.  If one was a Christian, one was somehow more acceptable in mainstream society, even though you were still a second class citizen you could still be ‘trusted’. 

Shakes was a Muslim raised in a family where spiritual virtue was paramount.  He didn’t flaunt his spirituality but it was always a strong part of who he was.  He learnt religion from his mother and father.  In Islam, the mothers are the main spiritual teachers to boys and girls.  There is thus a strong maternal influence in the essential spirituality and the love of God and one’s own mother are often intricately interwoven.  A betrayal to God is like a betrayal to one’s mother and vice versa.  The Koran teaches;

“Heaven lies beneath your mothers feet …”

Thus, wherever he was he ensured that his religious obligations as a Muslim were fulfilled through the noon prayer every Friday.  When his mother would die, much later in his life, this would become a deeper way of connecting with her again and he would pray more often.  His prayers ensured his mothers spirit would rest easily, and was his way of showing her his love, despite his greater knowledge of the limitations of a purely spiritual view on the world.  In his world, the secular and spiritual worlds had different junctions and intersections from others but he never missed Friday noon prayers at a Mosque.  To miss three Fridays was to denounce one’s membership to Islam and this was something he could never do, despite his knowledge of different ways of existence.  Even when his travels took him abroad, he found a way to observe this basic rite of piety.

Shakes would break with tradition in a number of ways though.  The first would be when he travelled abroad to play county cricket as a professional in England, refusing to bow to the South African race restrictions on sport that were encoded in law by Dr Verwoerd.  The second would be to marry a woman of lower caste than himself, who was also from a family much poorer than his own.  In Indian tradition, the girls’ family pays for the wedding. 

Being low caste but rich still ensured an acceptability of a kind amongst the higher castes here in South Africa, but a low caste person who was poor was still largely an ‘untouchable’, even amongst Muslims.  In the Muslim Indian community caste was still rife and the lower castes were generically termed ‘Heddroos’ (pronounced quickly as ‘hair-throoze’).  They were Urdu speaking Muslims who had originated from Hyderabad.  The ‘Soorties’ were the upper caste Gujarati speaking Muslims.  They had originated from Gujarat and had mainly arrived in South Africa as ‘passenger Indians’ and had started up their own businesses and bought their own land. 

It was fortunate that Fatima was both Muslim and had Gujarati speaking origins.  It was thanks to their joint faith, Islam, that he was able to bend and break some of the old Indian traditions.  He was a Muslim, and he maintained, was required only to marry another Muslim.  After all, all were equal in Islam.  This ensured the support of his family in his decision, and to his credit, it was their respect for him and not just his achievements that enabled him to get away with this unorthodox arrangement.

The one tradition he kept though, would create a number of unorthodox arrangements throughout his life.  His later philandering during marriage, although adequately discreet, would have a toll on his family that he would never envisage.

In England, there were many girls who took to him quickly, and at the end of the sixties it was still a sexually vibrant environment where sex was regarded as a normal part of dating and interacting with a potential partner.  His sword was always out for action in those days, and it was hard to retreat from battle, even after marriage.  His instincts were still alive, having been cultivated in an environment where the psychology of casual sex and free love were encouraged.  He found it hard to separate this part of himself from the person he would be required to be when married.  Indeed,

“Even Islam acknowledges that a man can have more than one wife.  Why is that?” he thought.

His first trip to the UK had come during his courtship with Fatima.  She had been patient, still at school, awaiting the return of her great love with yearning.  She wrote him regularly and it fed a secret part of him while he was away.  He knew that he didn’t love her less because he had relations with other women as well.  She knew that he probably enjoyed the attention of other women but never entertained herself with the tortuous thought that he may find someone else.  Whenever she received a letter from him she would burst with joy at the slightest affections he wrote down.  Every declaration of love to her and allusions to their future married life together would restore her to her centre, making her stable and secure in his love.  As long as he loved her, she could take on the world – he would be her house built on rock.  He would be the four corners of her existence, providing her with meaning to her boundaries and enduring, constant love and support.  Unfortunately, he didn’t think that being faithful was necessary.  It is understandable why.

By the time he’d laid eyes on her he’d already been abroad and lived in the UK.  This was during the late 60s and he’d been thoroughly exposed to the principles of free love and casual relationships.  It was a changing world ideology and he’d been exposed to it at every level and felt a part of the socio-political winds of change that were sweeping the first world.  He knew that being a man or a woman in this society would mean something different in future, and he strayed from the example set for him by his own parents.  His father and his uncle had married two sisters.  It had been an arranged marriage, and the closeness of each of the siblings to each other guaranteed that they would always be there for each other, and they were to the very end of their days inseparable from each other as a family.  It was their tandem marriage that ensured the survival of the extended family unit, and formed the hub around which the other families revolved.  They brought everyone together.  Much later, when the older generation had begun to die out the extended family would become fragmented and while they were not completely apart, were never really together as they were in the old days. 

Co-location is the key to the success of extended family hierarchies.  When this was later savaged by the various apartheid relocations and removal schemes these family structures fell apart, and with them, their hierarchies and influence over each other decreased.  It increased a feeling of having to be sustainable within ones nuclear family units, rather than depend too greatly upon the extended network.  It wasn’t there every day in your face to remind you of its function in a real and meaningful way.  After all, clans and tribes are like any animal community, they stay together in order to reaffirm collectivist bonds and instincts.  Even sports teams are the same.  Face to face contact is important to maintain normal human relations and intuitions.  Shakes would find himself growing older in a world where his responsibilities were rapidly increasing, family bonds weakening and his cricketing career indelibly tied to the anti-apartheid struggle of the time with all its dilemmas, conflicts, surprises and forgotten promises.  The parts of the family that had managed to remain together would have to become a more dominant priority in his life.  The moment Nadia had been born he had ended his cricketing career and retired from professional sport.  

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Fatima Chapter 7 |1973: Two Mothers to a Mother

Mariam was Fatima’s mother until the age of seventeen.  That was the year she married and moved to Durban, where she lived with Shakes’ extended family.  Until that point, her only real role model as a woman had been her own mother but in Durban she found a new woman to act as her role model into woman-hood.  Shakes’ mother would become her own, but her example was not an easy one for a young woman, who was also soon pregnant, to follow.  At the age of eighteen she would have her first child.

At first, the shock of entering an upper caste household at such a young age was trying.  She was young and had been raised in a much bigger city than Durban and their provinciality often irritated her.  They thought the entire world should live by their rules and going out to parties and discos or dressing less modestly than stipulated by Muslim traditions was frowned upon.  Shakes managed to bend rules where he could but by and large they had to respect the rules of the household and the extended family.  He had already gone against his mother’s wishes to marry Fatima.  A cousin had already been chosen for him but he had broken with family tradition and chosen his own bride.

Shakes’ mother was named Hanifa but Fatima never thought of her by name.  She always thought of her as ‘Shakes’ mother.  He trusted this woman more than anybody and it intrigued Fatima.  There were many reasons why Fatima adopted the new example set for her in the Ahmed household by Shakes mother.  Most of all, her own idealism, inspired by her father, led her to recognise the deep virtues in the non-materialistic wisdom of Shakes’ mother.  She saw how, despite their riches, she had no desire to be known for that.  She would rather be good to people and be remembered by her respect for other people.  This Fatima found truly admirable, and the deep sincerity of Shakes’ mother touched her.  She found a person who could live her beliefs, without the need for her father’s constant remonstrations, analyses, rationalisations and justifications.  It was the example that would become hers, but the constant remonstrations, analyses, rationalisations and justifications of her father would never leave her. 

She knew how much Shakes respected and loved his mother.  Secretly she wished she would enjoy the same love and respect he gave her.  She knew he wanted his children to be mothered in the same way he was and she desperately wanted to please him.  However, she was always unsure of herself.  She was young and the changes in her world had taken a toll on her.  While he would grow to love her more deeply over time she would not be the mother she’d wished to be to her first child. 

The relationship between mother and child starts before birth.  There are many who believe that it is not only flesh that grows within the womb.  The emotional and psychological states from which a child originates are formed in the womb, absorbed from the mother.  Fatima was still being mothered while becoming a mother.  A child born from a young mother, herself struggling to grasp the rules and boundaries of her new environment and her own role in it, would experience the fears and insecurities of her mother too.  She’d been extremely rebellious upon first arrival into Shakes’ house and had returned heavily pregnant and moody from England to give birth to their first child Nadia.  She found herself in constant conflict with those around her in this new household.

Nadia, the first of two girls, was born with a deep fear of an un-accepting world, the origins of which she would never quite understand herself.  She, like Fatima, would look to Shakes’ mother for instruction.  Her relationship with her own mother would be much more complex.  Fatima was still discovering who she was in a world of new people, new rules and new experiences.  Her anchors were few in this more orthodox upper caste world and her fear of rejection had riled her in many ways so at first she was oversensitive even to the slightest comment.  Most of all, deep within her she could not acknowledge her own worth fully at that stage and felt that she was not good enough for a man of Shakes’ stature.  However, the girl in her believed that their union was destiny.  It was a fragile belief that was often tested by her suspicions of his philandering and drove her to fits of jealous anger which found no tolerated outlet in his extended family household. 

Emotions need to be vented, and these emotions became invested in her child whenever her inadequacies assailed her.  She would later pick fights with a teenage Nadia when Shake’s was away on ‘golf-holidays’ and ‘business-trips’.  She couldn’t find a way to share this deep shame that she thought was her own and it burst to the surface whenever she perceived mild transgressions in Nadia.  It was as if Nadia’s own actions would define her herself, and she found her father’s rage spouting over into her relationship with her child.  It vexed her greatly but she was trapped in an emotional well which flooded regularly, hurting her child.  It was as if by hurting her child she was hurting herself more, keeping the pain bounded between them, so that at least someone could understand her deepest pain. 

Nadia’s quick development as a child masked her emotional confusion with adults.  It seemed they had a dark side, difficult to understand or predict.  Nadia was never sure whether she was going to end up in trouble.  Moreover, she was an intelligent child with a penchant for testing boundaries and it increased her chances of angering her mother and sometimes even her grandmother.  Once, at the age of thirteen she loudly pronounced that she would be married in a church!

“Thoba, thoba!” her grandmother had shouted.  She hadn’t heard her paternal grandmother use that expression liberally and knew she had unseated her considerably with the statement. 

“Don’t say that or it will come true!” her grandmother shouted after her. 

Fatima knew where that streak in her child originated and it shamed her.  It was her own quality in her child.  Perhaps her genes would betray her caste through the behaviour of the child.  Besides, she didn’t want her child to suffer the same disgraces her own adolescent outbursts had betrayed.  It revealed a lack of good breeding, an inability to deal with the world as it is, a weakness in a world where a woman’s reality is hard to accept if you spend too much time on dreams. 

Ironically, this made the fantasy world of the women more unreal and far-reaching than most could imagine.  When one’s only escape to oneself is through fantasy and is only allowed in fantasy, the fantasies are more abstracted to the ideal.  Like Bollywood movies, it becomes a place where reality is completely suspended and it is only the soap-opera’d version of reality that is cast onto the big screen of the mind.  Like the abstraction of mathematics it becomes a world of symbols and features that help explain a landscape of concepts.  Sometimes, just like mathematics, it can be amazingly wondrous but fail to connect with the world as we know it in any meaningful way, until we discover a way to use it.  That is why her grandmother reacted so strongly to what she had said.  Words bring about reality and reflect the world of fantasy going on in our minds.  If you listen closely enough to the words we speak the fantasies we hold become apparent, and too much talking up of a fantasy often brings it into reality.  It is bad to covet, but even worse to let it be revealed and realised.  Nothing good came of it.

 

Fantasy of this kind could be dangerous if the mind dwelt on it too long, making desires grow and dreams flourish.  The role of a woman was carefully worked out in this society and too much fantasy could harm a growing mind.  It needed to be rooted firmly in the reality of its immediate surroundings in order to be able to perform the role required of women.  You see, fantasy is the domain of the child.  It is learnt in childhood.  A child explores the world through a mixture of fantasy and reality.  That is why learning is often a painful process; the fantasized will of the child often goes against the reality we establish for them and disappointment and suffering are learnt.  Fantasy is where a child can be free, in the imagination.  How can one dream without fantasy? 

Nadia, the child would be free to develop in a world not imagined by her parents or grandparents, and would be able to dream more and fantasize in worlds they’d never dreamt of.  This would bring her into constant conflict with the narrow reality she would be confronted with in a community where too much dreaming can be dangerous.  Perhaps, the generations preceding ours, with their shorter childhoods, had less time to develop the fantasy enough to imagine a new reality.  Maybe their dreams were limited by a world that looked harshly upon them in a variety of ways. 

If one does not experience fantasy in childhood, then the ability to play is also lost to a considerable degree. Play is central to learning.  Without the essence of play, failures are absolute and not an opportunity to learn and successes mask insecurity.  Without humour, learning can be painful.  Safi, Fatima’s next door neighbour and childhood role model had known how to ‘play’ with life and its varying situations.  She was thus extremely socially skilled and knew that learning involved failure and humour turned failure into a setback.  ‘Play’ enables us not to take ourselves too seriously, as even issues of identity are more flexible with an attitude of play.  The generations before us had identity imposed upon them through a long colonial history which led them into the world wars, only to be welcomed by the rigorous classification schemes of Apartheid soon after they ended.  They weren’t allowed to play too long, especially with identity.  Identities were well worked out in the days of old.  This next generation would begin a change, having had a taste of the concept of ‘play’, just enough to liberate them from reality and enable them to dream and fantasize a new way of doing things.  They were not sure what the new way was and how it would work, but they were sure if they played with it long enough it would all work out in the end.

There was another issue which weighed heavily on Fatima’s mind.  She always felt like she’d abandoned her own mother Mariam, to an unhappy life with her father, who was becoming more unreasonable in his later years.  Furthermore, she’d adopted a new role model for motherhood when she herself had, had a child and this made her feel her own mother’s inadequacies more acutely, as she abandoned behaviours she’d learnt from her mother.  Mostly though, she wished she could help them see better ways of living and relating to each other but felt guilty that her wishes were an elitist manifestation of her new-found life.

Her father was another issue.  If she felt sympathy for her mother she felt only a painful cocktail of anger, pity and occasional disgust for her father.  He had become a man she struggled to respect, and the distance between them had ceased to be just physical.  She had been glad to leave her home because of him, his abusive tirades towards his mother and Tiks and his inevitable alcoholic misadventures.  A doctor had once told him that ‘two vodkas a day’ would prevent illness.  He was always open to different theories and he’d decided he liked this one.  He didn’t really drink to a point where he was drunk and disorderly, but in a Muslim household alcohol is viewed as a poison to the soul and a person’s humanity is suspect when he is under the influence.  In a world where alcohol is seldom seen and used, when it does appear it is viewed with deep suspicion. 

Her mother Mariam viewed his alcohol use as a dangerous sign.  She knew his temperament as one that is already volatile.  She never considered that it may calm him, only that it may make him more prone to depression or anger.  Her own mother had died during her birth, and her father had remarried and raised another family.  She had been left to her aunt’s guardianship and had been raised by her.  Her aunt had regarded men with suspicion, died a spinster and had never even lost her virginity.  To her, men were crude and unpredictable.  She never quite understood men and was quite happy to never have married.  To her, a man who drank alcohol was akin to a beast; an animal fired up by lusts, anger, depression or glazed-eyed happiness devoid of real joy.  Besides, alcohol was always portrayed as a destructive agent to love, family and religion in all the Hindi movies that they watched.

He’d been a drinker from a young age but told her he was a social drinker when he met her.  He was 35 then, many years her senior, and seemed to be a man of the world.  She’d first seen him in his pride and joy of the time – a red two door Ford Mustang convertible.  He looked so confident and secure, like a real man, and she’d been drawn to his sense of knowing.  Years later he would seem a shell of this young, bold man full of thoughts, ideas and opinions and he would become a bit like a caged animal – once proud, now lashing out against a world that had overcome him, knowing that the end was near.  Perhaps it was this spirit that would eventually keep him alive longer than her, his reactions to the world keeping him bound to it, like binary stars in an eternal cosmic dance bound to each other by gravity’s laws.

He had begun drinking as a teenager.  By then he’d had no family around him to root him adequately.   He knew his parents had sent him here for a better future but also felt like they had to get rid of him due to their poverty.  His experience of family started to fade, and unable to voice this pain it started to build up a space between him and the world.  He found it hard to share emotions with anyone honestly.  It was only after a few drinks that he would get more emotional, romantic and sometimes happy. 

When he’d first started courting girls there were times he would sit with their families, attempting to fit in and to ‘be’ one of the family as best he could imagine, showing respect to everyone and speaking decently.  However, whenever they would start arguing or bickering the way families do, he would become extremely uncomfortable.  The roof would feel lower and he would feel a claustrophobia of the soul overtake him.  He couldn’t handle the emotional world.  He didn’t know that this is how families ‘play’.  They don’t have to like each other to love each other and play can sometimes become nasty, but the injuries are there for learning.  Never having had an opportunity to play within a family himself, he had constructed a fantasy of family life that was too abstract.  Even when we are taught not to fantasize we still do.  The fantasies are just more abstract and removed from reality because the fantasy has had no interaction with any reality, and has remained untested.  Family life was not the perfection he’d imagined he missed, but yet more emotional tangles and webs, dramas and soap operas.  He felt vulnerable when exposed to emotional conflict.  This made him try to appear more aloof.  He could only really open up a bit more of his tortured soul when he’d had a few drinks in him.  This often proved disastrous in itself.

He had been married twice before meeting her.  His first marriage had been to a coloured woman, with whom he’d had two children.  His second had been to a woman who couldn’t bear children.  He’d divorced her, married Mariam and started a family with her.  He seemed to know exactly what he wanted and knew how to make decisions clearly.  It was this that drew her to him.  It was also what Fatima believed at a young age, that her father knew exactly what to do in each situation.  It was only when she would become an adult herself that she would realise how he flailed about as a parent, struggling constantly to provide leadership in an uncertain world.  Her other parent, Shakes’ mother, would be her way of mediating her first two role models in the world and provide her with a simple set of beliefs that impressed her. 

It was her mother's skills, however, which had helped save her father from a history of business explosions and implosions.  Her ability to sew beautiful and reliable garments had secured her a small reputation in the neighbourhood when he hit upon an idea.  He would make overalls, reliable clothing worth their price and wear.  It would later be chorused under the phrase,

“Dikrah, working clothes for the working man!”

There was an ideological satisfaction to it.  His industry, far from exploiting the working man, merely sought to better equip him to work safely and confidently.  He would sleep well at night knowing that his customers were people of the working class who were glad to have garments made at much lower expense, by his wife.  With a small amount of capital he’d managed to borrow he established a small business in his back yard which soon became the sole breadwinning avenue of income for the family.  Soon, the careful, attentive manner in which Mariam made her garments became more widely known in Lenz and a long list of richer women had settled upon her as a seamstress of choice.  She made extra income preparing garments for special occasions, weddings and religious festivals.  Suleiman was not quite sure how to handle this unexpected outcome except to say he was glad of the income.  With six mouths to feed including his own he would have to be prepared to compromise on certain issues.  He reasoned;

“As long as the main business remains devoted to the working man and is not the exclusive preserve of the rich fullahs then it remains something that I as a Muslim can be proud of.”

He’d long since been forging the links between the tenets of Islam and ideas of equality and socialism.  Socialism and equality were being espoused in Russia, a country which he knew consisted one Muslim out of every three people.  Indeed, in India, Islam had offered up an escape from some of the caste injustices thrust upon them by the ruling castes.  Perhaps Islam and socialism, while differing in some admittedly irreconcilable ways were of the same fundamental ilk when it came to how its tenets on people should be treated.  Stalin had supported the Boers in what he saw as a ‘war against imperialism’ and saw them, quite rightly, as champions of resistance to empire, the colonial masters.  The colonists had built their considerable economies on nothing but slavery and looting on a world scale, and finally, in Stalin’s view, even the settlers were now taking power back from the puppet-masters.  He had little way of knowing the twists and turns of fate that would unfold in the South African arena so Suleiman forgave him his naivety.  It was clear though that the socialists stood against the bastard imperialists who’d raped the world and offered up a vision of a world where every man deserved the humanitarian reward of dignity, a dignity most often stripped by poverty more than anything else.  He had observed how many people who in India would be regarded of low caste, but had elevated themselves and their family names to positions of status and respect in the community.  There was a new feeling of how to do things here and he felt that as a Muslim, this was the kind of vision he could believe in.  

Mariam was the best Suleiman could possibly have done in choosing a wife.  She was the epitome of calm and acceptance, while his juggling mind was a constant source of anxiety and denial.  He was outward where she was inward, and somehow they both felt protected by this about each other.  They could never stray too far into themselves with each other around.  They kept each other alive with the cycle of creation and destruction between them, each bound in an orbit of opposites … establishing another more subtle cycle.  They felt their marriage worked because they were able to hold each other in check to some degree and that this was made possible by their essential differences in nature.  This is not always true, but they came to believe it, which gradually enforced the reality around them.  Thus, even in the subtler models of governance imposed by The Leader there were reminiscences of this approach.  Tiks’s effeminacy could only be countered by gross masculine punishment, tears and painful feelings were met with shouts of indignation and recrimination, sympathy was for the weak.  Only in his moments alone with Mariam and Fatima did he allow a hidden tenderness to show, and it showed more outdoors.

Mariams nature was what enabled her to work so hard while still rearing and nurturing a family.  Her role was a very demanding one and Suleiman often appeared unsympathetic, expecting her to work hard at sewing and also to attend to household duties.  It was not unlike most men of the time and even their mothers would have shuddered to see them make a cup of tea for themselves.  What then, would be the role of women?  In their world, men and women had very clearly defined roles.  She spent the day in small outbuilding in the back yard sewing labourers’ clothes, finishing up the odd jobs she did for the neighbourhood’s wealthier women and had a quiet dignity about how she carried herself.  She was also very thrifty and knew poverty intimately.  She never wasted and had a sense of duty about making full use of things before getting rid of anything.  She even kept the various off-cuts from the variety of beautiful fabrics that would have been brought along to her by her wealthier customers.  Various colours and textures of fabrics from the furthest corners of India made its way into her little outbuilding in the back yard and her collection would find a unique purpose. 

Fatima learnt how to sew from an early age too, and played a strong part in the family business as soon as she was old enough to do so.  Suleiman was careful, to his credit, never to let her work so hard as to neglect her studies and always held a vision for his daughter; she needed an education – she would be an equal too.  She developed into an adept dress-maker under her mother’s instruction and soon learnt to sew her own garments for herself.  She had an eye and feel for quality that seemed innate, and she took an equal pleasure as her mother did from the feel and texture of cloth, of making form from the formlessness of uncut fabric.  This would turn out to be a role that would benefit her far more than her education did, and work to the advantage of her husband as much as her mother's sewing had her father.  Being exposed to real work also gave Fatima an opportunity to grow up quicker through the myriad of experiences that everyday business offers up.  She saw how her mother treated people, and how much it was her father’s role to handle what her mother would naturally be uncomfortable with.  Negotiations etc. were best left to him.  Fatima had decided that she would need both their strengths in future and endeavoured to deal with business in a diplomatic firm manner which conveyed respect but no weakness.

There were many different people who would frequent the outbuilding in the back and Fatima had observed their various gestures and mannerisms.  All people were respected in the way that they showed it, and she quickly learnt little mannerisms which showed respect; like not accepting payment or paying change with the left hand and used various greetings in a variety of languages to service the wide range of customers.  As she grew older and desired more knowledge of how to behave appropriately as a woman she would observe the female customers who arrived.  The wealthier Muslim women carried themselves with a dignity and grace that betrayed great strength.  Often, she would find herself imitating and repeating a new phrase or attitude she’d observed at work, sometimes to the delight of Safi who would exclaim with delight;

“He’ey where you learnt that – you growing up fast neh?”

People react differently to news of marriage or news of a first child, and both Mariam and Suleiman would react in two telling ways to each event.  Suleiman’s would be an outburst of affection and love, while hers would be a more subtle intimate contribution.  When Suleiman first saw Nadia’s face he also recognised a look that he hadn’t seen in 18 years; that on the face of Fatima.  It was himself, he acknowledged, in the child.  It couldn’t be the father or the grandmother – they were far too calm – it had to be his genes, his inheritance.  His emotions churned; the little girl had much of his qualities and would be trapped by the daughter he rose.  He saw how the daughter he fathered had inevitably become a mother to him and he glimpsed a vision of the great order of things.  He saw the balance of things in the universe with God; the juggler relinquished himself to the laws of give and take,

“What goes up dikrah, must come down!”

The next day he went out and bought a large pram.  It had huge, multi-spoked wheels, an elaborate overhang which served the dual purpose of sunshade and rain-cover.  The overhang could be drawn back in an elaborate combination of lever pulls which left the effect of a convertible sedan. 

“Dikrah, if my first car was a convertible then this child’s first pram will be one too.”

It was important to Suleiman in his world of symbolism.  He knew, from the outset that this child would appreciate being able to have an open sky above her.  She would be an equal from the start too.  He knew secretly that she was already his.  She would go on to construct her own spaces, in her mind and in the world, where yet more buildings and skylines would change at the command of her pen.  Unlike Suleiman, she would attempt to sketch and draw the world she juggled in her head instead of explain it through words.  She would still however, prefer the freedom of the open sky, even though it clashed with her freckled face.  As her mother would constantly remind her,

“Stay out of the sun baby, they join hands!”

The pram made a proud showing in three provinces of South Africa, sometimes to applause of onlookers.  It was indeed a rare item and had a kind of largeness that finds more appropriate placement in the American dream.  Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, years later, it seemed to have disappeared from memory.  The babies were all grown up and the old pram seemed to have been mislaid somewhere during their many movements as a family.  Fatima was never certain where it had been mislaid but was quite sure it was somewhere with someone they knew and that it was probably best where it was, as it may find some use.  From both her mothers, old and new, she had inherited and reinforced a practise of not hoarding things which could be used by others.  Her only secret hoard remained her growing collection of newspaper cuttings.

Mariam made a less obvious but equally symbolic contribution to her daughter.  When she knew that Fatima would be married she consulted her collection of off-cuts.  It was a wondrous mosaic of fabrics, by now a considerable by-collection of the various dress-making projects she’d taken on for the neighbourhoods’ wealthy women.  She had eyed them with a look of concern, rather than awe – she needed to make something beautiful for her daughter to wear when she entered her in-laws home.  She knew that she would be looked upon as an outsider in a wealthy home, and would have to rely on her character rather than her wealth to find acceptance, but still wished she could make her a dress that highlighted her beauty and character. 

She proceeded to weave a masterpiece of quilt-work, producing a garment of simple but obvious beauty.  It had the love of a master in it, and was almost a costume constructed in her mind long before she had attempted it, like she’d been thinking about how to weave these beautiful lonely pieces of fabric into something that reflected a greater whole.  The patchwork quilt costume would indeed be a powerful symbol of which Fatima would be extremely conscious, and she had first arrived at Shakes’ house wearing it because it reminded her of who she was.  It represented her character, her ‘costume’ as she called it, the costume we players in the world theatre all wear.  It was something patched together from the various people she interacted with and admired.  In a world of diverse experiences she learnt different things from different people and would have to continue to do so in her new life.  The true diversity of experiences she would be faced with would render her childhood role models inadequate and she would have to learn from others, patching little pieces of behaviour onto herself where she found them useful, like little tools that helped her along in a life journey that would far exceed her expectations.

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