by Z. P. Dala
The small group of virginal nuns, guarded ferociously by a Superior with massive breasts and a very round face, brought Afroze a drooping bunch of blue-purple hydrangeas, a brown paper bag of peppermints from the local grocers, and a Bible. One pretty girl, whose starched, white habit did a very poor job of hiding a halo-shaped Afro, spent a long time telling Afroze how hydrangeas were sometimes blue and sometimes pink, depending on the acidity of the soil in which they grew. When she tried to explain the word acid to a five-year-old child, she struggled. Not her native language, English was known to her only in biblical terms. She finally settled on the synonym bite to explain what acid did. Acid equals bite.
The best hydrangeas, apparently, were the ones that were neither. They were the ones that were a mix of pink and blue, sometimes with different-colored petals on one large flower. To the rapt Afroze, this long parable of the horticulture of hydrangeas ended in her understanding but one thing: The best things are the ones that have walked on the fine line between having “bite” and having “nothing.”
The young nuns sang a hymn for Afroze, a song in accented English that they alone could barely understand, about fishing for Jesus with a Bible and a rod, and took turns marveling at her plaster cast. Only one of them could write. Her Zulu name had been abandoned when she had been given to the Lord. The nuns called her Rachel and she had stopped answering to the name Tombifuti—a name given to her by her mother who had wailed when yet another girl came out of her belly. Tombifuti, in English it meant “Yet Another Girl”! She was asked to sign Afroze’s plaster cast. She took the offered black felt-tip pen, scrawling an illegible barrage of curly “Jesus”es before signing off with a flourish, “Love you, T.”
Her T was shaped like a crucifix and she had embellished it with a few droplet shapes trailing down the cast toward Afroze’s itchy fingers. Droplets of blood, perhaps.
Afroze’s cast came off just in time for her sixth birthday. Her mother believed this was a present enough, a party in itself.
Sylvie was too distracted to bother about cake. So, it was no cake, just Musa the gardener sawing off the cast in the backyard with his ancient rusty hacksaw, her mother directing the entire process from afar, not even touching the terrified girl. Days later, her wrist still aching, she would be sent away. Many times when Afroze thought about those days that had led up to her banishment, her childhood imagination took her to a place where her Mother stood far away directing Musa to use his hacksaw to hack off Afroze’s head. In a warped unreality, Afroze believed that all her mother wanted was to see her dead.
Strangely, Afroze remembered grabbing the Bible from the mission nuns and stuffing it into one of her plastic bags, in lieu of any luggage. Her mother’s mad-rush-scramble to get her out of there, get rid of her as swiftly as possible.
Not bothering much about any type of God, her mother proclaimed to be a communist and an atheist, Afroze had taken the lovely little black book with her to the big big city, Cape Town, where a father who had never seen her awkwardly shook her hand and bundled her into his car, driving like a maniac to the Malay Quarter of town.
Her father’s wife, a sweet-tempered Malay woman, hugged the girl to her soft breasts. And later that night when she found the frightened child clutching the black Bible to her chest and shaking like a leaf, she clicked her tongue and prised the book from Afroze’s tight fists. Putting it to one side, she padded off in her bare feet, returning with another book.
“This is our book, my child. Not that one.”
Afroze looked at the book placed in her hands. She understood nothing of the curving script, the dots above and below, the beautiful calligraphy of the new language.
“Don’t worry, I will teach you,” the soft woman told her, and held her ’til she fell asleep. Rachel’s Bible went directly to the Salvation Army salvage bin the next day.
It astounded Afroze, reeling back to the present, how the simple shine of a red veranda could evoke buried memories. But this entire day had been one of memory. As it should be. She had returned to this place, after all. But nothing had prepared her for all that she had seen in a few short hours since arriving in this arid town. She knew her mother was dying. That was not the difficult part to accept. The incomprehensible things were all the details that made up the bizarre planet she felt she had landed on. It was all deeply incongruous to the woman she recalled. But then, thirty-six years is a very long time.
“May I?”
Sathie had held out a rattan chair with a bright turquoise Hawaiian-print cushion and bowed lightly, offering her the seat.
“That is Bibi’s chair, Sathie. Don’t you know this?” Sylvie growled.
Afroze was startled out of her trancelike state, induced by fatigue, hunger, and the strange act of her mother waving a piece of meat in the air.
Halaima had indeed set a table for three, but Afroze saw the three did not include her. Two chairs were soft loungers, cushions to soothe aching bones. A hard-back wrought-iron one placed opposite would have been her seat, had little Bibi not taken it, proceeding to precociously rap the plate with a fork and swing her gangly legs.
“Bibi, my sweet child. You are eating with us? I forgot that it is still school holidays.” Sathie said, showing surprise, patting her head again. He needed to recover his slight, not wanting to anger the doctor, or the bubbling Halaima, who could spill out vitriol and secrets at any moment. His frantic patting of the child’s head continued, rhythmically, too rhythmically. Bibi pulled away from his hands, complaining loudly, “Mister Sathie, you will open my braids. Stop.”
He stopped abruptly, and began smiling and cooing his apologies. He had done it many times before. With a quick glance at Sylvie, he noticed with relief that she had ignored the entire mistake and was distracted with her meal. For now.
“Halaima, get a stool for Rosie, will you,” her mother grumbled in annoyance.
Even Halaima joined in the remonstration, treating her as if her very presence had caused the greatest inconvenience. Halaima tutted and reluctantly brought the most rickety stool she could find along with a plate and slapped them down. Afroze silently sat down. Sickened by the smell of the meat impaled on a fork, still being waved around by her mother, who was making sure Afroze’s nose almost touched the flesh.
“Here, take a bite, Rosie,” her mother said, and Afroze looked at the piece of sausage almost shoved down her throat.
She shook her head, her eyes tearing up from the meaty, oily smell of the morsel and more so from the knowledge of what her mother was trying to feed her.
“Best pork sausages in the province,” her mother said, “from our neighboring town of Estcourt. I get all my meat there.”
Afroze swallowed dry sandpaper; she turned her head away and willed herself not to cry. The cruelty of that food from her mother’s own hand, the first meal a mother could offer a long-lost child and it was food that both knew was forbidden.
“Oh, get over it, Rosie. It’s only a sausage. It appears your father and his hausvrau have claimed your soul for their perfumed gardens,” her mother said, the vulgar peacock blue of her painted-on eyeshadow swimming in Afroze’s churning brain. The caustic mention of her stepmother brought stinging tears to her eyes. The gentle soul of the Malay woman who had borne a frightened stick-child to her ample bosom needed no insult.
Such a dreadful burlesque show, a scene from the sulfurs of Faust—the 70-year-old painted harlot in scarlet satin, drenched in French perfume that smelled like shit, the grotesque grin of a leering lover with a phallic cane, and the little reed of a child in a yellow sunflower-print dress, humming a nursery rhyme and swinging her legs. The images warped and marbled around her tired brain. She felt faint.
“Mother, I need to lie down.” Afroze stood up and her unsteady thighs rattled the crockery. Sathie’s full cup of very sweet, very milky tea spilled over. Bibi took the opportunity, as she often did, to stifle a shocked gasp.
“Oh, Halaima. Get her out of here. Look, she has upset Bibi. Let
her lie down in the spare bedroom.”
Halaima took Afroze’s elbow, ushering her as wardens usher prisoners, marching her away from destroying the lovely breakfast.
“I want sausage,” Bibi moaned in her loud, high-pitched voice.
“Oh, my little fairy, don’t worry. Here, I told your mama to make you the lamb sausages she got from the Muslim butchery.”
The last thing Afroze mulled over as she lay on the bed in the darkened room was Bibi’s mouth opening wide and pink, taking the piece of unforbidden sausage being offered to her.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sleep took Afroze away into the waiting embrace of the woman who had been a mother to her for over thirty years. The woman who had replaced this doctor who had thrown her away.
In her life, whenever Afroze had been in any distress—as a growing young girl, as an awkward teenager, and into the turbulent waters of her adulthood—she would comfort herself with the simple presence of her stepmother. She called her Moomi. Maybe because her name was Moomina, but maybe because she ached to call her Mommy and this was the closest she could come. Her father, Ismail, had taken her from the tiny town in the middle of a dustbowl into the metropolis of Cape Town. No one had bothered to explain to Afroze why she was being sent away.
She had to play guessing games with shadows on the wall and became an expert at eavesdropping on adults’ words. Afroze never slept. It was probably because she had trained herself to lay awake at nights, even when she lived in Brighton with her mother. She had always known that this was the time of answers. Stolen answers that she would grasp close to her chest from behind doors that never fully closed. The habit of listening in, of trying to find her place in a torrent of words spoken by adults, became a habit that she would never break.
Even now, in adulthood, sleep was never easy to come by. And even when it did come, it brought with it a barrage of memories and dreams. As she lay spent and ravenously hungry on the single bed in the fairy cottage of her childhood, relegated now to the spare bedroom, the one they used to store things they would never use, Afroze drifted between worlds. Cape Town and its beauty became a magnificent backdrop for a stirring dream, in which she vividly recalled the day she had left to return to Brighton.
Afroze dreamed of how she had crouched low beside the crumbling precast fence. The morning revealed the bright colors of the houses in the Malay Quarter in the steepest of hills in Cape Town. The Malay people, brought as slaves from Malaysia by the Dutch, had suffered badly, but their redemption had been ownership of the best view in all of Cape Town. They could see everything. Everywhere. Their bright, lovely homes, in all the hues and colors of the rainbow, were crumbling, old, and small. But at least they could sit in their rocky yards listening to the muezzin intone the evening call to prayer, and they could enjoy the most beautiful sunsets in Cape Town.
Sometimes, photographers from places like Europe and Australia came up the long hill to the Malay Quarter, sometimes many at a time. And with the sunset dancing for them in all her beauty, they would be so entranced that they forgot their cameras, and just looked and looked. Afroze remembered them, their photographer uniforms of flapper jackets and khaki shorts, their feet shod only in flip-flops, baring their toes even in harsh Cape winters. There was a spot, a rocky shelf carpeted with the local eclectic foliage called fynbos, a viewpoint that gifted anyone who stood there with sunsets that made you believe in God.
The photographers competed with one another for the prime position. The local Malay women, seeing the possibility of business, began setting up tea stalls and informal eateries all around. They sold the most delicious confectionary, a deep-fried plaited donut laced with cinnamon and nutmeg that dotted puffy dough with little speckles of the exotic Spice Islands that the Malay people held close as their heritage. This mouth-watering, sickly sweet donut had started a war in kitchens all across the country. The Dutch women claimed to own it, because they had named it koeksister. The Malay women claimed to have embellished what was just a simple deep-fried dough ball into a plait, drenched it in lemony syrup and delicately decorated it with toasted coconut. It retained its Afrikaans name, which translated into “cake sister” from rough Dutch. But Dutch was a language that inverted itself upon itself, and it actually translated formally into “sister’s cake.”
The Malay men would guffaw and laugh at this moniker, poking each other in the ribs, using that spicy amalgam of English and Afrikaans for which they were famous. “Sister’s cake” sounded too rude, too much like a reference to the most private part of anybody’s sister, but the women insisted that the delicious confectionary’s name meant anything else but that.
The foreign photographers and other tourists who came to the Malay Quarter would return to their homelands, the taste of this delight lingering always on their tongues. They would never be able to replicate its delicate flavor. And they always wondered why Malay women went red in the face when asked what the English translation meant.
The mountain with or without tablecloth, the harbor with its twinkling lights, the city with its hints of decadence. The most beautiful city in the whole wide world. And the Malays who came as slaves now stood over the neighborhood as lords. They possessed what German and French property moguls had coveted but failed to capture. The Germans took Camps Bay, but it had no sweeping view. The English took Sea Point. It was artsy and charming, but it showed no mountain. The French took Hout Bay, which afforded the astounding charms of crystal clear air, happy whales, and perfect breezes. Bantry Bay in lush expanse became the politicians’ hideaway. Movie stars tended toward the Cape Winelands district to the east.
But no one had the unlikely gift the happy Malay people had. They had a perch. They were eagles who watched everything that Cape Town could offer. The only drawback was the steeper-than-steep hills over which their homes sat perched. Buses stopped at the bottoms of the hills. And the Malay women had grown good, solid thighs and calves.
Afroze, crouching low, had watched the play of light on the blue, orange, and bright turquoise house fronts. She enjoyed the Matisselike brush strokes on the little patches of God-light. No one had begun their day, cocooned away in autumn sleep; even newborn babies did not yet stir. Afroze breathed the frigid Cape Town wind into lungs that burned, running her cold hands along the thick vine that hid the cracks and the fissures of the wall.
The ice-cold southeaster blew in from the Atlantic Ocean, sparing nothing as it tossed people, rubbish, and rubbishy people in all directions. She blew on her hands and looked up at a sky that refused to turn to full light, despite the ending of dawn. It was always a little bit muddled. But perhaps that was just her vision today.
Her eyes settled on the dark space that was the mountain. For a long while, her eyes didn’t stray from its blackness, cast up into the sky. A throbbing energy seemed to radiate from the block of stone, the one satellite that no Capetonian could ever escape, the compass that became due north for beggar and rich man alike. A deep cold emanated from the mountain mass, its dark outline always visible, even in the deepest midnight. You always knew it was there. Like a watcher, a power source, a custodian. The Supreme Witness. In every part of the beautiful city, in every hovel and every ostentatious mansion, no one awoke in the morning without feeling the presence of this mountain. Sometimes residents hated it, for witnessing everything, for keeping so silent and watchful. Sometimes they loved it for the raw energy it seemed to leach into their blood.
Hearing a car engine struggling to turn over, wheezing, Afroze ducked again, despite knowing that there was not really much point in hiding. No one could see anything in these murky waters.
The orange-amber lights of the city twinkled with life, far down below, and slowly as the sky began to turn into purple and then a mild orange, the lights sent messages to one another to turn themselves off. The car in the driveway finally spluttered to a start.
Her father was leaving home, heading for the mosque for early-morning prayer and then to his dubious businesses in
the center of town. She knew his routine well. He preferred to stay away from the home he shared with Moomina, grown old now and losing her prettiness.
Afroze knew he would come home only after dusk. And that gave her plenty of time to do what she had been doing for a year now: skulking into his home like a thief, just to spend time with yet another mother she had been wrenched from.
But Moomi was a mother who had not abandoned Afroze.
CHAPTER FIVE
Moomi carried a basket. It was an ugly old basket. But it was also the most beautiful basket in the world. She could not remember a time when she did not carry a basket. From the soft hand of her mother’s mother, it was passed into the reluctant hand of a daughter who did not want to bear grass baskets. Moomi’s mother dreamed of days when she would carry better things. But her dreams did not break her grip from the woven handle, and she bore it with obvious distaste. Too soon, when Moomi was a pretty girl who had only turned 13, her mother left the basket at the foot of her bed. Transference of a legacy Moomina would never escape.
Each morning when she awakened, Moomi picked up the handle, her palm fitting neatly into the smooth groove that had been shaped by the palms that had chafed before hers. And perhaps it had been a day when the sun had been shining so sweetly that soft Moomi had come into this world, for she did not mind the bearing of this burden. She was a girl born of acceptance and complete trusting love. She found a love for her basket; she connected with all that was within and all that was without. Moomi understood that it was this basket that had fed mouths, and it was this basket that would bring joy into the world.
For within folds of rough calico cloth, in the depths of this vessel, the women in Moomi’s family carried food. Food was such a beautiful thing. Food could heal broken souls. Food sustained their men, and their little babies.
