Thursday, April 28, 2016

Fatima Chapter 5 |1970: Newspaper Cuttings

 

She had a favourite picture of him, a newspaper cutting, which she carried in her school blazer pocket for two years until it fell out one day making her secret known to Safi.  It didn’t matter by then though, for every second girl in her school had a picture of him hidden away somewhere, and it didn’t seem at all abnormal.  It seemed quite healthy for a teenage girl to be smitten by an idol in contemporary culture.  By then, her love had grown to epic proportions.  She was one of the few girls she knew who actually had contact with him, and her personality had begun to blossom outwards from the status that brought her within the peer group.  Suleimans occupation had ensured her the opportunity of having regular contact (albeit innocent at this stage) with Shakes.

She was fifteen when he made his intentions known by starting to pay courtship visits to her home.  Who could disapprove?  He was the decent type;

“Could have any girl he wanted.”

What was it that attracted him to her?  Was it her sense of duty or her teenage infatuation and her excitability at the very sight of him, which she would never lose throughout her life.  Maybe it was all these things or maybe it was a simple desire on his part to have a girl whom he felt he could mould into a woman and thus ensure that she embodied all the characteristics he desired.  It’s not easy to tell.  History and memories can be muddled by our need to preserve what is contemporary.  Sometimes we’d rather not know the truth because it makes the present impossible to bear.  Too much history weights us down because our tools of analysis are too plain to give justice to experience.  To miss the experience is to miss it forever.  No amount of digging can reveal more than possible motivations for an action and his actions made sense in the time they occurred.  There can be no doubt that love had taken hold, and no rational explanations need be given to explain that.

There are some who believe that we never truly love more than we project affections that we have an intrinsic need to share, into somebody else.  We elevate them and invest them with qualities we wish we could enjoy forever.  When love fails, it is our failure to realise these qualities that hurt most.  We have needs, powerful needs that drive us to the limits of sanity in order to satisfy them.

Fatima had strong needs.  She’d inherited her father’s idealism.  It reflected in her need to order the world around her.  She had an expert feel for creating an ordered environment.  Everything had its place.  Strangely, this would manifest itself through her life in many ways, the ultimate of which would be her need to find a place into which she could fit herself.  It would be as if the need for order around her had actually been a need to define herself constantly, so that she could be secure and sure of the constancy of things.  This had a profound effect on the way she loved.  She invested the object of her affections with the qualities she most desired in order to preserve her need for constancy and security.  He became the ideal man.  He could do no wrong, Shakes was everything in her life.  He would be all she would need.  It was truly a naïve teenage love, and reality was still being painted into the years of her life.

She looked forward to her moments alone with him.  They were mostly supervised.  He was careful to preserve the authority of her parents, obeying the traditional manner of courtship to an admirable degree.  There was no doubting his intentions or his sincerity and he was admired by all in her family.  There were impressed by his mixture of humility and quiet charm and it was evident in his success that his quiet strength ran deep.  They were grateful of his demeanour and he soon became a guest in their home.

She adored him, doted on him, yet in her girlish way she teased him; trying here and there to provoke a response from his seemingly immovable calm.  It would be a constant theme in their love.  His contentment with himself – as if he was an individual without a need for anyone else - would always provide her with a challenge of sorts; she would always have to extract affection from him.  This was new to her, her family had always openly displayed affection and hugs and kisses were exchanged between the sexes without hesitation.  For him though, affection wasn’t for open display.  It was something that came in small doses and was dealt out in private. 

“He was almost displaced in his nature sometimes,” she thought. 

His reserve was always intact.  It was an immovable veneer which never left him, even when he angered.  This was the ultimate source of stability and security in her life; that he was immovable in this way.  It also made her feel somehow disconnected to him though, and this would be a constant source of tension for her, the oscillating desire for stability and the need to be closer to his being would drive her to behave like a girl more than a woman later in their marriage life.  Knowing him and loving him from such a young age would leave her knowing no other way to love.  He knew this, and it increased his responsibility towards her and he became, in a sense, a father to her.  It was only through this that she could trust him to be a father to her children. 




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