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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