by Shamim Sarif
“She’ll be back soon, lady,” he said, using the deferent form of address common to the Cape Coloured community. He smiled encouragingly at the worried mother. “She always comes back soon. Always.”
Although she did arrive back soon, she did not arrive back in time, and so the old lady was picked up by her son alone; not the effusive, crowded family welcome that she had spent her long and often sickening voyage imagining. Mr Harjan was a worn, transparent-looking man, whose gaunt frame looked almost emaciated in his baggy work clothes. He met the train slightly late, and found his mother rooted to the end of the platform, surveying the dusty station and the milling Africans with distaste. He greeted her without much enthusiasm, as though he had just seen her the day before, and installing her in his rattling car, drove back to his house without expression, and with little awareness of his enormous mother’s discomfort, as though he had just picked up a package of no consequence. Her repeated listing of her ailments passed over his head like a cloud of gnats, irritating, but of little ultimate concern.
During that first day, the old lady claimed her place in the household, effacing any remaining trace of her son and daughter-in-laws’ personalities, and firmly imposing her own. She sat in the small parlour, in her son’s armchair, as if sitting in state, and began to receive all her family and neighbours—graciously, but not without ensuring they understood the favour she bestowed by meeting them. Her concern at the absence of her granddaughter had been considerable, but her enquiries as to her whereabouts were met with such vague uncertainty from the parents that she had contented herself with a short lecture and left it at that. Two days later, Amina arrived.
The old lady heard an engine cut out abruptly outside the front door, and from her seat near the window, she pulled back the greying net curtain that hung limply over the pane and looked out. She could not make out much, but something made her stare hard at the girl who jumped down from the small pick-up truck that stood outside, and she watched as the mother hurried out of the back door, and whispered urgently to her daughter and gestured to the house. She saw Amina nod and smile and watched her unload something—it looked like bags of flour—from the car and hand them to the maid, rosemary, who came out smiling to greet her. Amina then handed Mrs Harjan two dresses, holding them out against her mother, who folded them quickly over her arm. The old lady frowned—what did she need new dresses for? She sat back in her armchair, a frown of consternation upon her round face, as Amina strode up to the house, and through the screen door. She walked in and her grandmother saw that she wore what appeared to be a pair of her father’s old work trousers, some braces and a collarless shirt. She wore also a wide-brimmed hat, pushed back on her high forehead so that it held back most of the long, black curls that otherwise tended to fall about her face. She looked like one of the Boer farmers who came to her father’s filling station to buy petrol for their trucks.
“God forgive us,” the old lady whispered to herself. The girl had never looked entirely demure or docile in India, but this was something else. The mask of horror hardened over her face, so that when Amina entered the room, tall and smiling, she stopped short, appalled at her grandmother’s expression. She followed the woman’s gaze and immediately understood, of course, that the offence lay in her clothing, her attitude, her way of carrying herself. Amina had spent the last six years of her life in this place living in accordance with her own wishes, and her parents seemed, if not understanding, then at least accepting of their only daughter’s wish for freedom. They had been worn down over a period of years, their best efforts to contain Amina having come to nothing even when she was a child. As a toddler in India, her mother would lose her at least once or twice a day. The house would be searched, the maid and the nanny would be questioned, the small garden scoured, and eventually the child would be found, exploring some new place, smiling and nodding her curly head at the relieved women who surrounded her. Only one maid, a young bright girl of nineteen, who shimmered with as much energy as the toddler, could ever keep up with her. But she had only stayed with the Harjans for a year, before eloping with a neighbouring house-boy, and after that, no-one could control Amina. She was not a naughty child—any sense of deviousness or guile was alien to her; but her energy and curiosity were insatiable, and her quiet parents seemed slowly to fade away under the questioning mind and irrepressible movement of their growing daughter.
“You should have been born a boy,” her mother had told her wearily, more than once, and this comment had puzzled the girl, and hurt her. She thought deeply about it, as she thought about everything. She liked to play sports with the boys at school, and she was good at her schoolwork—when it held her attention—and she wanted to work at a business or a trade when she grew up. Why were these attributes only fit for a boy? Finishing school in order to get married made no sense to her, nor did it hold much appeal, and as ingrained as it was into the consciousness of everyone around her, it was still almost beyond her comprehension. She felt at times that she was living in a different universe, breathing a different atmosphere from other people, and as she grew up she found her refuge in work and in books. She would do any odd jobs that she could find, though only within her parent’s house—there was no scope for her to take on manual work elsewhere—and when the house and garden were in perfect condition, she read. Tattered old novels, poetry and biographies followed each other on a dancing course through her consciousness and imagination, and with each one her awareness of the world and its variety and breadth increased.
She had finally left school at the age of sixteen, because her father had decided to emigrate. For years, he had heard stories from other families of the great opportunities in South Africa, but even as he worked at a poor accounting job he despised, he dared not bring up the idea of moving there, not while his mother-in-law was alive. He knew well that she still carried the scars of her time there, in the misshapen, bruised bones of her body, and in the brutal, battered memories of her mind. Amina had learned much from Begum, most of it knowledge or advice that few other women of her grandmother’s age had dared to even learn themselves, much less impart to an impressionable young girl. Her maternal grandmother spoke to her of pride, of self-reliance, and of courage. These were the things to cultivate, she had told her granddaughter, and not a slavish attitude to duties and traditions that were built on subservience and pain and fear.
Amina knew this advice to be good, for it appealed to her natural sense of integrity and justice, but her admiration was as yet abstract, for she had never experienced the horrors of which her grandmother spoke. So, a few months after Begum’s death, when her father decided that they should leave for South Africa, Amina felt no particular excitement at the idea, nor was she unhappy. The misery that her grandmother had endured was something she respected, but Amina knew that she could not hate a whole country on someone else’s behalf, even Begum’s. At the age of seventeen, the distant future was no more than six months ahead, and in six months all she knew was that she would be halfway through an ocean voyage to Africa with her parents.
On the morning that they had docked she had stood almost alone on the upper deck at daybreak, and had watched the coastline rise up from nowhere, out of the ocean, as clean and as bright as the edges of a map, and she smiled to see it. She could make out little then except the golden rim of the beaches, but they seemed to be unending, and at once she had felt at home, released, able to breath, and her innate confidence had combined with this immediate empathy for the country they were now approaching, and had given her a strength of purpose that nobody could contain. Her parents had very soon stopped trying. The cursory, half-hearted attempts they had made in India to try to make their daughter conform to accepted conventions fell away completely in South Africa. The family went directly from Durban to Pretoria, but they did not remain among their own people in the Asiatic Bazaar; instead they chose a house and a business—a garage and gas station—outside Pretoria, in Springs, where the pressures of conformity w
ere largely removed from Amina’s father. Her mother was thrown into a life harder than they had been used to in India. Her weekly housekeeping money had to be carefully counted now, and there were no live-in maids—only rosemary, the daily help who would not always work as she should. And Amina, instead of helping her mother in the kitchen, usually ended up working with her father in the garage. Mrs Harjan could do nothing but watch worriedly as her daughter pumped gasoline, cleaned windshields, and generally fell into her own life in this new place. This untried and often wild country fitted Amina like a well-cut suit of clothes, and it was this ease and confidence of hers, that had by now been built up over a period of years, that so disturbed the grandmother who now sat before her. Amina was entirely lacking in any semblance of the expected attributes of docility and of self-effacement—and although her grandmother understood none of this, and thought that it was the trousers and braces that appalled her, it was really her granddaughter’s attitude and bearing that affronted her most.
The old lady did not actually faint, however. In fact, she recovered very quickly, with the main points of her lecture to her son and his wife (whom was mostly to blame, she was sure) already taking shape in her head. Right at that moment, though, before she could say anything at all to Amina, the girl extricated herself. She was, by now, quite used to these kinds of reactions, particularly from her elders, and her methods of dealing with them had gradually eased from anger and self-defence, until they had reached the kind of polite removal that she now effected.
Amina immediately took a step back, removed her hat, and welcomed her grandmother with a few formal and correct Gujerati words of greeting. Then her hat was back upon her head, and before the old lady could even respond, she was closing the screen door behind her.
“God forgive us,” her grandmother breathed again, as though exorcising a horrible spectre. She stood up uncertainly and moved as quickly as she was able to the curtain over the door. By the time she had pulled it aside and peered through the hazy glass, her granddaughter was gone, and all that remained of her was a set of tyre tracks and a whirl of dust that sat for a moment in the air and then fell slowly to the earth.
Delhof
During that first year in the countryside, when she lay in bed at night, Miriam’s head would ache with the silence. It was so large, and it seemed to come sweeping down from the sky, like something cold and solid. Especially now, in the winter. No insects or crickets to scrape even a hollow hole in the wall of quiet. Then Miriam would close her eyes tightly, and force herself to listen to Omar’s breathing, to the deep, fierce sleep of the man lying beside her. The slow rasp, the sliding of a head on a pillow—in the long night she fell upon these sounds like a beggar on a shower of coins.
At five or five thirty she would rise from the bed, often awake before the early morning light or the insistent crow of the cockerel on the farm next to them. She had always woken early as a girl in India, but this pre-dawn habit had only formed after she had married and come to live with her in-laws in Pretoria. Although Omar’s strong self-assurance meant that he generally took charge of his family, his brother Sadru was older, and so Farah, his wife, took precedence over Miriam in the subtle hierarchy of women in the house. Omar’s sister would have been above them both, but she was slow-witted and sick, and Farah easily controlled her by slapping and hitting. Miriam disliked Farah’s bossy attitude and lazy ways, but she had had no choice but to accept them and to make up for her bahbhi’s shortcomings by working even harder in the kitchen. Every morning she was forced out of bed at five o’clock to start preparing the dough for the breakfast rotlis. With a shake of her head Miriam put aside the recollection and slipped out of bed.
She had to make no effort to be quiet—she was naturally light in her movements. Anyway, it was time for her husband to get up, and he knew this, and slowly reconciled himself to the subtle shifts of his wife’s movements through the room, out into the cold bathroom and back through the hallway again, when he would hear her stop at the door of the children’s room, before she descended the stairs. In the early morning gloom of the kitchen, she could see that Robert, the boy whom Omar had hired to help in the shop, was already loading with coal the fire that would burn throughout the day in the stove. Robert looked around with a smile, the hessian sack of fuel still in his arms. It was mined nearby in Witbank, and was plentiful and cheap. Miriam wished him “good morning” quietly, and not without some self-consciousness. She had been used to having help in her mother’s house while she was growing up, but that had been somehow different. Omar’s attitude to the Africans was always a little patronising, and often harsh. Giving sharp orders did not come naturally to Miriam, but he had told her to be firm with them, and she felt she must try.
The back door opened then and the night watchman came in. They had soon discovered that here in the country, just as in parts of Pretoria, a guard was necessary at night.
“The kaffirs,” Omar had said. “They would steal anything.”
So each evening, just as the shop was closing for the night, John would arrive, tall, heavy, his close shaved hair almost completely grey. She would see him approaching the shop twenty minutes before he actually arrived, having appeared over the horizon from some unknown place where she knew all the African people lived together. He would help Omar pull the display tables back into the shop from the porch, and his long, lean arms, though much older than her husband’s, made lighter work of securing the various padlocks. He would nod with deference at Miriam, but he was always consistent in politely turning down her shy offers of a drink or some food, until she came to see that she should not ask any more. He would settle down for the night then in his chair, on the edge of the stoep, before an old corrugated tin cylinder, in which several coals burned in an effort to stop him from freezing. Sometimes, if she was up late, sitting before the kitchen range sewing, Miriam would watch John as he paced before the window, and she would see the red of the coals, which hissed and spat now and then, especially if the wind blew. At intervals during the night, John would unwrap a cloth parcel, and take out a portion of mealies, the ground corn which she had found was as much a staple here as rice was back home. This he would turn slowly over the heat before eating it.
“How are you, John?” she asked.
“I am fine, madam, fine.” He watched Robert load the stove with the air of an interested uncle, and once he seemed satisfied that the boy was doing the job correctly, he turned to open the back door.
“I see you tonight, madam,” he said, and Miriam raised her hand goodbye.
Robert stirred at the coal for a moment more, before shutting the heavy black door.
“Shall I fetch the flour, Madam?”
She turned to him. He was fifteen years old, with a slight limp from some accident in his early childhood—when she had asked him about it, she had not been able to understand much of his English, accented in a different way to hers, and the details had been lost to her. He was a little smaller in height than she and had very shiny white teeth. She nodded and watched from the corner of her eye as he bent to the sack and measured out two cupfuls, and she marvelled again at the fiercely tight curl of his hair and the deep coffee colour of his skin, such a different shade to the ink black of John’s. She had never seen a black person in the first twenty years of her life.
“You must not be friendly with them,” her husband had told her. “If they think you are soft, they will take advantage. Make them work. That is what they are there for.” She had listened, and had had a hundred questions about “them” that she had not dared to ask her new husband, and so she had only nodded and agreed with him. Upstairs, she could hear the occasional creak of a floorboard and she knew that Omar was up, and that his unthinking, heavy steps would wake the children.
At least it was better than it had been in Pretoria. There had been no quietness there, early in the morning—or at anytime. At the very least, her bhabhi would be up with her, and the sound of her neighbours’ talk and th
eir childrens’ wailing would penetrate the thin walls and come up from the streets outside. And then she had to feed and wash Omar’s sister Jehan, whose manic chatter and laughing always seemed to begin before any of them had fully woken.
She took the flour from Robert gratefully. At the front door, the boy found the milk which Mr Morris, the Coloured farmer whose smallholding was nearest to them, left there each morning. It sat in the darkness of the early morning, foaming and still a little warm. Robert carried in the big urn, with small quick steps, struggling beneath its weight. The milk smelt fresh, not sour, like the stale bottles they had shared in Pretoria. One of Miriam’s last tasks each night, after cooking, serving and clearing away the evening meal, after putting her children to bed, and after ironing Omar’s shirts, had been to make Jehan drink a glass of milk. Her brother-in-law had asked her to do it, in his blundering, well-meaning way, for he believed it would settle his sister’s mind before sleep, and his own wife rarely bothered to do as he wished. But Farah would always pour out the old dregs for Jehan, and Miriam had learned not to protest, or her own children would also be slipped the stale milk when she wasn’t looking. The smell of that milk, in Jehan’s darkened, stuffy room used to make Miriam feel sick. At those times, nauseous from lack of sleep and light-headed with hunger, she would remember what her mother had said when Miriam had been hesitant about Omar’s proposal of marriage.
