The World Unseen

by Shamim Sarif

  “His parent’s are dead,” she had told her. “That will make your life easier, because no mother is ever happy with the girl her son marries. Go to South Africa with him and be thankful that no mother-in-law will ever make you work like a slave.”

  No mother-in-law, perhaps, but Farah had worked hard at making her life miserable. At least John and Robert smiled at her now. Miriam watched the milk as it heated and recalled the time in Pretoria when no one had smiled at her for ten whole days.

  Pretoria

  September 1951

  She had known it was ten days because she had been counting in her head. The last person to smile at her had been the halal butcher when she had gone to his shop the previous Thursday. She had been back since then, and had hoped that the butcher would break the run of days that she had counted, but the man had been busy hacking at a fresh lamb carcass, and had barely acknowledged her.

  Farah smiled now and then, but never, it seemed, with pure pleasure. There was inevitably some sense of superiority or a hint of triumph in her face whenever she smiled that made Miriam discount any show of teeth from her bhabhi.

  “What are you doing with that meat? There won’t be anything left.”

  Farah’s voice cut into her reverie and brought Miriam’s attention back to the pile of cubed mutton that lay before her. With deft strokes and pokes of her knife, Miriam was cutting away the edges of fat and removing all traces of sinew.

  “My husband likes the meat to be clean,” Miriam replied. She had been scolded the previous week for leaving too much fat on the pieces of lamb that went into the curry.

  “My husband likes it clean!” mimicked Farah. “Well, my husband likes to eat all the meat that he has paid for, and not to have it all cut up so there is nothing left.”

  Miriam immediately put down her knife and began to pile the meat into a large bowl to be washed, before it was added to the onions that were already browning on the stove.

  “Don’t worry,” she said quietly. “There will be enough for them.”

  “Yes, but what about you and me?” asked her bhabhi.

  Miriam rinsed the meat. She knew that Farah had never gone without her portion of anything, and that if there were a shortage, it would be Miriam herself who missed out.

  “Maybe,” Miriam said quietly, “we should buy more meat and more flour for the rotlis . . .”

  “We don’t have money for anything more,” Farah said. “It’s amazing that I manage to put enough food on the table at all with what they give me.”

  Miriam began to skin and chop the rotting tomatoes which Sadru brought back from the markets, and which were too soft for anything but cooking. She knew that Farah was lying and that she took part of each week’s housekeeping money to buy clothes and trinkets for herself and her children, but there was no way for Miriam to protest. Omar had refused to give his wife their share of the money—it was Farah that ran the house, he told her, and he did not want to cause problems.

  Later that evening, while the men sat down to eat together at the table, Miriam quickly rolled out balls of loose, elastic dough into perfect circles. She picked them up lightly, passing them back and forth between her open palms, and placed them onto the hot cast iron pan. She waited patiently as they cooked, shifting from foot to foot to try and ease the pain behind her knees. She had been standing up since five thirty that morning. Only her few trips to the bathroom had given her a moment to sit down. She turned the rotlis now and then with fingertips that had long ago become accustomed to the heat of the stove’s flames. As soon as brown patches began to form and spread across the surface, the bread was removed from the pan, placed onto a plate, and the surface rubbed with butter. Whenever two or three were ready, she would carry them in, still hot, to the men, and to Farah, who had by now joined them.

  “Come and eat,” Omar told her. Miriam nodded slightly, but before she could sit down, Jehan began calling out from her room. She screamed loudly, long delirious streams of words. The men looked up, but Farah continued eating.

  “Have you fed her?” Omar asked. Miriam nodded, and went to see what hallucinations or dreams had disturbed her husband’s elder sister.

  Jehan was easily placated for once. Miriam stayed with her for ten minutes, stroking her forehead and murmuring vague replies to the nonsense that she spoke. When she returned to the kitchen, Farah had already placed the empty dishes in the sink for washing. The serving plates were empty, so Miriam stood at the pot, and wiped the remaining sauce from the sides with a cold rotli and ate. Once again, nobody had smiled at her; not Omar when he arrived home from work—not even Sadru, who had a kind streak beneath his large, uncouth exterior, and who was often the most deferent to her. She pressed the aching lower part of her back. She had carried her son too much today, but he had been scared of Farah’s girl, older and tougher than he. She dreaded having to bring up Sam and Alisha amongst her sister-in-law’s badly behaved children, but she saw little way out. She had learned, though, through listening to the talk of other women, and from Farah herself, that there were ways to stop becoming pregnant, at least for a while. Omar’s demands on her had lessened as they both became more and more exhausted, but nevertheless she had been trying these since her second child had been born.

  The following day, the oppressive atmosphere of the windowless bathroom was making Miriam feel nauseous again, as she moved over the floor with a scrubbing brush, her knees cold against the tiled floor. She worked quickly, and was almost at the door when it burst open, nearly hitting her in the face. She looked up. Farah’s eyes were wide, and her hands clapped together as she spoke.

  “They said we can go! To the Bazaar café. For lunch!”

  “Both of us?” Miriam asked, hardly daring to believe that she could be included in such a piece of good luck.

  “All of us,” Farah replied, rolling her eyes. “They made me promise to take that lunatic. They want to give her an outing.” She turned to leave, stopping to glance back at Miriam once more.

  “Hurry up!” she said. “Go and get her ready. I want to change.”

  While Miriam dressed Jehan, she sang her a tune, a Hindi song from a film that had been popular years ago in Bombay. She smiled when she was finished, and Jehan laughed too, sensing a lightness of spirit that had not been felt in the house for months. For it was the first time since she had arrived in South Africa that Miriam would be eating a meal that she had not had a hand in preparing herself. She would be outside, without having to go shopping, or listen to the gossip of the women who were Farah’s friends and neighbours. And she would finally see Amina Harjan, the subject of so much of that gossip, for herself.

  Miriam knew of her, of course; everybody did. For despite her lack of conformity, she was still Indian, still a very young unmarried girl, and her seemingly unlimited freedom and lack of concern for propriety was of great concern to everyone in the Asiatic Bazaar. Her way of dressing, the fact that she had just opened up her own business (“with a Coloured man”), even Begum’s photograph hanging proudly in the café—all these facts only fed the interest of those around her. They were appalled and horrified and shocked, but many began to patronise her café because they liked the food, they liked the atmosphere, and they liked the prices.

  Miriam’s general attitude to Amina that day was one of curiosity, with an underlying sense of disapproval. For Farah’s friends came to the house at least twice a week to gossip. They would bring with them boxes of hard-skinned, green mangoes to cut up for pickles, or a week’s worth of dry garlic bulbs for peeling, and over their work they would talk. Looking down at her own heap of peeled cloves, Miriam had seen only the smart flashing of ten or twelve blades in the still air around her as they chopped and scored, and she had listened as they had made thorough work of blaming Amina’s dead grandmother for the sins of her granddaughter.

  “She steered that girl wrong from the start. Taught her to be too proud and above herself. Where does it get you?”

  “But Begum had a
hard life . . .”

  “If you mess with the blacks, you can expect a hard life . . .”

  “She didn’t even feel any shame. Imagine. No shame. And this girl is exactly the same. Her poor mother!”

  Miriam finished dressing Jehan and together they waited for Farah to appear. Her bhabhi, almost sick with the excitement of eating out, had dressed as though for a wedding, in a fiercely pink shalwaar kameez, while Miriam herself wore a simple printed skirt and blouse. At first, Jehan could not be persuaded to come out of her room, and chattered continuously while Farah shouted and cajoled and finally slapped the girl to stop the flow of meaningless talk. At the sting of the hand on her face, Jehan was silent suddenly, and then she laughed, loud and long, as though sharing a private joke with her attacker. This unexpected laughter had long ago ceased to surprise Miriam, but it’s incongruous nature, the way that it spilled out without reason or warning still chilled her. She had heard it first on the night that she and Omar had arrived in South Africa. She had entered her new brother-in-law’s house, nervous and shy, a little way behind her husband, with her head down and her heart pounding, and she had found herself in the middle of a screaming argument.

  Two small children sat silent and scared on the floor beneath the table, and watched as their parents, Miriam’s new in-laws, screamed at each other. Or rather, Omar’s brother shouted—Farah attacked pointedly and venomously with a sarcastic comment now and then. Omar had turned and glanced at Miriam briefly, with eyes filled with embarrassment, and then he had shouted to his brother to be quiet, he was here, and what kind of a way was this to behave? The room was silenced, and her new sister-in-law had turned at once to look at Miriam, and at the same time she had smiled, a sly smile of triumph directed at her silenced husband. He was incensed, and had shouted at her again, “So you think this is funny? Now you laugh at me?” Miriam had watched appalled from beneath lowered lids as he continued to shout, with a voice that kept catching, that nobody would ever laugh at him, he wouldn’t allow it, there was nothing funny, nothing to laugh about, did she understand? And it was then Miriam had heard it first, that long, low laughter, maniacal and strange, issuing from a back room somewhere, with impeccable timing, in the middle of Sadru’s warning speech.

  It was her first introduction to Omar’s elder sister, Jehan, the one whose inherent mental slowness had been partnered with a kind of madness after a bout of syphilis some years before. The word ‘syphilis’ was whispered with a significant nod by Farah, but the word and all its associations were alien to Miriam; she thought perhaps it was a peculiarly African disease, though she could not grasp how it was contracted, and she prayed privately that she would never catch it.

  Holding Jehan between them, Miriam and Farah left the children with a neighbour, and then walked the several blocks to the café, beneath purple-blossomed laburnum trees and past the leaning rows of houses, from whose windows a few people waved at them as they passed. Jehan waved back with much windmilling of her arms, chattering all the while, and Farah walked a few paces ahead of them, itching with irritation.

  When they entered the café, they were supremely self-conscious, but few people seemed to show any particular interest in their arrival. Jacob Williams waited behind the counter for a few moments while the three women arranged themselves in one of the booths that ran along the walls. Then he walked slowly over to the table, one leg a little stiff from the arthritis that was slowly invading his body, and nodding politely, he placed down three menus.

  “We have mutton stew today, and fresh keoksisters,” he said. Jehan clapped her hands in approval. “Koeksisters, koeksisters, koeksisters,” she said.

  “Shhh!” said Farah.

  “What are koeksisters?” stumbled Miriam, half to Jacob, half to her bhabhi.

  “Here, try for yourself,” said a voice by her side, and she looked up to see a long fork held before her. A small golden fried doughnut sprinkled with coconut was impaled upon it, and Amina Harjan held the other end.

  “See if you like it,” she suggested again, and shyly, Miriam took the koeksister from the fork. Breaking it in two, she passed one piece to Jehan and placed the other in her mouth. The warm, sweet doughnut tasted ripely of yeast and melted away in Miriam’s mouth.

  “Do you like it?” asked Amina, smiling

  “It’s delicious,” said Miriam.

  “We’ll have some,” said Farah.

  “KOEKSISTERS!” screamed Jehan, and Miriam blushed crimson.

  Everyone in the cafe, it seemed, had turned to look at their table. In the sudden silence, Jehan shouted out again, an unintelligible word this time, and from the table behind them came a snort of laughter, a derisive, mocking sound. Amina looked around, and stood watching the occupants of the table for a long moment. When she finally asked Miriam and Farah what else they might like to eat, she was still watching, and she turned away only to nod briefly to Jacob. He nodded back, and by the time Amina had walked back to the kitchen with the new lunch order, he had given those customers their bill, taken part of their money, and the people were leaving. That they had not yet finished their lunch seemed to be irrelevant, and Miriam marvelled at the power this young girl, younger even than she, seemed to wield over those around her.

  The three women sat, without speaking, and waited for their food. Over the murmurs of the other diners, they could hear from the kitchen the sound of Amina’s voice, and that of the cook, and the sizzle of hot oil, and then the bounce and scratch of a record being placed upon the old gramophone behind the counter. The straining strings started up, wavered and then righted themselves to form the opening bars of “Night and Day”. This was not a song Miriam had ever heard before. She listened to the radio often in the kitchen at home, and she knew many of Cole Porter’s and other American melodies by heart, though she could not really put a name to any of them. Miriam looked over at the record sleeve propped up on the counter. It was hard for her to make out the details from where she sat, but she could see the outline of a man’s face. The cover was lifted away as she peered at it, and she realised that it was being brought towards her, under the arm of Jacob Williams. He stopped at the table and deposited a bowl of steaming mutton stew, a platter of baked pumpkin, and a plate of bread yellow with corn grains. Then he removed the record sleeve from under his arm and offered it to Miriam.

  “Amina says you might be interested to see this, ma’am,” he said, and Miriam thanked him and took it. Farah stared and raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “Why did he bring this?” she asked, putting a piece of bread before Jehan, who ate hungrily.

  Miriam shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they saw I was looking at it.”

  “Maybe she likes you,” she said, but without any kindness, and with a laugh that Miriam could not read. She ignored Farah and looked down at the record cover. It was, as she had thought, a portrait of Cole Porter. Miriam listened to the record as it skipped along. “In the roaring traffic’s boom, in the silence of my lonely room, I think of you, night and day . . .” even that name, Cole Porter, seemed to be invested with such glamour, and such a sense of the debonair. The picture was black and white and grainy, but there he sat, hair slicked back with Brylcreem, leaning in towards his piano, eyebrows raised at the camera, a slightly sardonic expression on his face.

  When Miriam looked up, Farah was still watching her. But for once, Miriam did not care. Her ten days of counting, of watching for some sign of concern or pleasure or kindness, had finally been ended with the smile Amina Harjan had given her.

  Chapter Three

  Delhof

  November 1952

  The last day of each month was pay-day for the scores of Africans who worked on the farms that surrounded the shop, and the day that the overseers, or occasionally the owners themselves, would drive their workers to the shop, clutching their small amounts of tattered cash, so that they could buy whatever dry supplies and clothes they might need for the following month. They started to arrive early, usually jus
t after Sam and Alisha had left on the bus for school in Springs, and it was always the busiest day of the month for the shop. As usual, they had all been preparing since very early that morning. There was plenty of fruit, enough bags of mealies, and the dark wooden counters were clear. Omar stood checking his stock and making the occasional scratch with his pencil on the pad of paper that lay next to the till. He looked up for his wife. Squinting through the sun that glanced off the windowpanes, he could see her outside, hanging washing out to dry.

  Everything she was clipping to the line was white. He could see Sam’s tiny vests and his own bright, white shirts, almost blue under the unrelenting light of the sun. He shut his eyes against the glow, and for a moment the shop ceased to exist. He was not here, out in the African wilderness; he was not the father of two small children; he was not a struggling shopkeeper; he was not married to a woman he hardly spoke to. In his mind, he was transported. He was in Bombay for a visit, young, eager, fresh from South Africa, feted by his uncle and aunt. He saw himself, as though he were watching a documentary film, standing out on his uncle’s tiny balcony, smoking a cigarillo, and listening to an unknown girl chatting on the balcony above. His curiosity had risen so high that he had leaned forward and looked up. That had been his first glance of his future wife. Then, as now, she had been hanging out a basket of washing, a waving line of pure white against the white-washed walls and the sun bleached sky. His eyes had swum with red outlines for a moment, and when he recovered he had to squint to see her. She had also been wearing white, as though she were part of the conspiracy of light that glowed against him. But she was attractive—he had seen more beautiful, more conventionally pretty girls, but this one was tall and lithe and laughing, and he had liked her.

  “Shall I make some tea?” Miriam asked, her voice small in the large, quiet space of the shop. He looked up and nodded, and she went into the kitchen. At the range, she stopped abruptly and gripped the cold edge of the stove, and waited while a surge of dizziness passed over her. She closed her eyes for a few moments, and then looked out through the window for the first trucks. There was no sign of them yet, but she could see Robert walking slowly towards the shop from the store room, carrying a huge squash in each arm. At the back door he bent very slowly at the knees, so that his bony legs almost buckled, and lowered the vegetables gently onto the ground. He had dropped one earlier, and Omar had shouted at him not to be so clumsy—who did he think would buy a bruised squash? Robert had not been able to think of anyone who would, and had therefore accepted his admonishment with good grace, and now he carried the squashes with utmost care, cradling them in each of his thin sinewy arms as delicately as if they were chubby children. His boss shouted at him frequently, and although there were often times when he was sure he had not done the thing he had been accused of, he bore all the shouting in silence and apologised where necessary. It had never occurred to him that he might defend himself—it was not his place.