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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