by Shamim Sarif
“I haven’t even offered you tea,” Miriam said. “Or a cold drink?”
Amina shook her head. “I’m fine. But I have something to ask you. About the café. We’re doing well, but business has been a bit slow recently and we’re planning on starting up something new.”
She paused and took a breath, for seeing Miriam’s eyes fixed upon her always seemed to unsettle her.
“Anyway,” she continued. “We’re going to start serving Indian food. You know, maybe once or twice a week, just a couple of specials for lunch and dinner.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Miriam. “Indian men love to eat their own food, and when they can’t get home for lunch they can come to you.”
“Exactly what I was telling Jacob.”
“So?” asked Miriam
“So . . . we need a cook. But not just anyone, we need someone who cooks very well; better than usual.”
Miriam watched her, unable still to see the connection.
“I want you to cook for the café,” said Amina.
“Me?”
Amina smiled. “Yes.”
“But you don’t even know how I cook . . .”
“Yes, I do. I had lunch and dinner here, remember?”
“Daal! Potato curry!” exclaimed Miriam, appalled. “Peasant food.”
Amina raised an eyebrow and Miriam smiled. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s what we eat most days. It’s just that . . .”
“What?”
“Potato curry is nothing.”
“It’s not nothing, and it tasted wonderful,” replied Amina. Her earlier awkwardness had fallen away and she spoke decisively. For her part, Miriam felt an excitement at the idea of working at the café—at being away from the shop, and at doing something new and useful—but she was immediately filled with the certainty that she would not be able to take the job.
“I have to work in the shop . . .” she told Amina.
“We’d pay you well. Of course.”
“My children . . .”
“You’d only be at the café in the morning to cook.”
“My husband wouldn’t like it . . .”
“I’m offering the job to you, not your husband.”
Miriam shifted uneasily at this last remark, turning her head to the doorway that led to the house, and Amina realised that they were not alone after all.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Sleeping. He’ll be down soon. I can hear him.” She pointed vaguely to the ceiling and Amina looked up, aware now of the muffled sounds from upstairs that she had assumed came from Robert. She looked away, and Miriam watched her from the corner of her eye, not sure of what to say next.
“You surprise me,” Amina told her, after a moment. She had turned aside, and was looking once more at the rain. “I thought you had a fearless streak in you. I thought you had the inclination to fight the world if you had to.”
Miriam stared at her. “What are you talking about? How would you know if I am fearless or not?”
“I heard,” Amina said simply.
“What did you hear?” Miriam walked right up to the girl, trying to catch from her expression some idea of what she was trying to say.
“Wasn’t it you who went out in the middle of the night to help an African who had been hit by a car?”
Miriam was astounded. Amina looked at her and could not help but smile at her stunned expression. Miriam glanced back at the inner shop door, then turned again to Amina, her voice low.
“How could you possibly know about that? There are only two people who know—me and my husband.”
“Three.”
“What?”
“Three people.” She smiled at Miriam. “I know this government likes to tell us they’re savages, but the Africans can speak as well as we can.”
Amina expected her to look shocked again, but this time, Miriam just laughed. It was still unfathomable to her how the words of that particular African could have reached Amina Harjan, but she accepted it as a fact immediately, and she realised that the more she came to know this girl, the less she was surprised by anything she said or did.
Within moments, two customers ran in from the rain, startling both women. They were African workers from the Weston farm, sent for some bags of mealie corn, and so when Omar came into his shop a few moments later, he found his wife serving the two workers from behind the counter, and Amina Harjan sitting on the window sill, watching the rain. His wife did not look up at him, but seemed slightly flustered and his eyes moved back to Amina, to whom he nodded a curt greeting. He went to where Miriam stood and took over at the till, and once the purchases had been rung up and the men had left, he looked expectantly at his wife.
“Do you want some tea?” she asked him.
“Not now,” he said. “Was it busy?”
“No, not really.”
“Where’s Robert?”
“Cleaning upstairs,” she said. “Didn’t you see him?”
“Yes. I forgot.” He looked at Amina. “How are you?” he asked her, but what he meant was to ask what she was doing there, and she realised that at once, and decided to dispense with any small talk.
“I came to see if Miriam would cook for the café. Only now and then,” she added, for she knew she did not stand much chance against a man like this. Omar probably did not care whether or not his wife wanted to work, and he would definitely not wish people to think his wife had to work for a living—in that respect he was like so many of the men she knew.
Sure enough, Omar looked displeased, but refrained from refusing on his wife’s behalf at once.
“What did you say?” he asked Miriam.
“I said that there was the shop, and the children to look after, and that . . .” she paused and glanced at him, but avoided Amina’s gaze, “that you probably wouldn’t like it.”
Omar nodded, satisfied. “My wife understands me,” he said, almost smiling at Amina. “She doesn’t need to work. The shop is doing well and she has plenty to do here.”
Amina stood up. “It’s not a question of need,” she said, her tone cool beneath her politeness. “It’s a question of my finding an excellent cook.”
Nobody responded. Omar walked over to the radio and switched it off. Amina watched him and considered whether to make one last attempt.
“It would only be one or two mornings a week,” she said, rapidly reorganising her weekly menu in her head. “And it’s a quick drive to Pretoria from here.”
“No,” he said, sharply, and Miriam burned with embarrassment. Omar regretted the slip into heavy-handedness and tried at once to mask the authoritative manner of his refusal.
“Unfortunately, my wife doesn’t drive. I’ve told her time and again to take lessons, but she never wanted to. If only she had . . .” he said with a casual shrug of his shoulders.
Miriam listened to his poor excuses and felt sick. She watched the floor, and wished that Amina would leave so that she would not have to face her any more.
“Oh, that’s great,” said Amina cheerfully. “I teach driving myself.”
“Since when?” asked Omar, frowning.
Amina waved a dismissive hand. “For years. I’ve taught several people. Listen,” she said, working swiftly, for she knew when to cut her losses, “forget the cooking job—if it’s not possible, it’s not possible. But if you want to learn to drive, I’ll be happy to come up once a week and teach you for a couple of hours.” She looked at Miriam kindly.
Miriam was stunned, and inwardly pleased at the way Amina had circled Omar to get to this compromise, but her awareness of the stiff attitude of her husband kept her from smiling. On the other hand, she did not want to appear so weak before Amina again.
“Okay,” Miriam said at once, looking squarely at Amina for the first time since Omar had come into the shop. “Okay, thank you.” She hesitated for only a moment before delivering the final shot.
“My husband has been telling me to learn for ages,” she said. Omar cl
eared his throat but could think of nothing to say. His eyes remained fixed on the paperwork that lay before him, and Miriam felt the silence from him, and knew that his anger ran very deep. She did not let herself think of the possible consequences now, though, but waited patiently as Amina prepared to leave.
“Then it’s settled,” Amina said, and she stood up and began buttoning up her jacket. “I’m taxi-driving next week,” she said, “but I’ll see you after that?”
Miriam nodded and Amina said goodbye to them both, before looking out at the rain once more.
“Do you want to wait until it stops?” asked Miriam courteously.
Amina grinned and looked at the sky. “I think I’d have to move in here for quite a while,” she said. She ran down the steps and got into her truck. Wiping at the condensation on the windscreen, she thought about what she had just done; the lengths she had gone to just to see Miriam on a regular basis. Under pretence of wiping the glass, she covertly watched the woman who stood in the doorway, wishing that it would not have to be nearly two weeks before they met again. She also knew that she should not be allowing herself to feel that way. The elation she had felt in sidling past Omar’s subtle bullying gave way slowly to a sense of misgiving, and even despair. She turned over the engine, frowning at these thoughts of hers, and with much spinning of wheels, she drove slowly away.
Chapter Nineteen
Amina had spent a long hour trying to correct the rattle on the exhaust of the car she was to drive to Cape Town, and nothing she tried seemed to help. She ducked into the driver’s seat to switch the engine on once more, and stepped on the gas pedal, only to hear a familiar metallic rumbling from the rear of the car.
“It’s definitely rattling less,” Jacob called encouragingly. He was watching her from where he stood, leaning against the open front door of the café. Amina heard him but continued to watch the exhaust, then wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and walked slowly to the front of the car where she leaned inside the window and turned off the engine. There were few vehicles around at this time on a Sunday morning, and they could hear birds piping in the laburnum trees behind the café. Amina sighed and fixed the exhaust pipe with a black stare. Then she swung back her leg, and kicked it. She kicked it with huge force, as though the frustrations of the entire world were pent up in her foot, and Jacob winced at the sound. She gave no sign of being in pain, but her lip trembled slightly, and she would not look up.
For three days now she had been in a strange mood. Jacob felt he knew Amina better than most people, and he could honestly say that his business partner was not herself. He had seen her upset before—but her bouts of sorrow or anger had never lasted for this long. Of more concern to him was the fact that this latest mood of hers had arrived without any obvious cause. He had tried to raise her spirits by talking over the new Indian menu, but such conversations did not seem to help. In fact, she seemed to have lost her enthusiasm for the idea, even as Jacob was deciding it was just what they needed. He lingered on the steps of the cafe, unwilling to leave her and go back inside, yet unable to think of anything helpful to say. Still she stared at the car and would not look at him. She raised her hand to push back her hair, but the hand stopped slightly on the way down. This running of her hand through the tangle of curls was such a characteristic and frequent gesture that the slightest change in the angle of her arm was noticeable to Jacob, and he realised by the unusual jerk of her hand, and the poorly disguised lingering of that hand by her face, that she was crying and trying covertly to wipe away her tears.
Jacob stepped down and walked towards her, nodding a greeting to an incoming customer as he went.
“Hey,” he said softly, as he reached Amina’s shoulder. “Maybe you should postpone this trip. Take the next job that comes up . . .”
She did not look up, only cleared her throat. “A trip away is just what I need right now,” she said abruptly. He waited for further explanation, but none came. Instead, she touched his arm by way of acknowledging his concern and then turned and walked back to her room.
The people she was driving to Cape Town were two Afrikaaner businessmen. They seemed surprised and intrigued at being driven by a young Indian girl, but from the start Amina did not encourage much talk between them. She was polite, but nothing more. Originally, she used to take these driving jobs because she often became restless in one place, because she liked to see the countryside, and because she liked to meet new people. This time, however, she did not care much about the drive, or the job, or the businessmen who sat passively in the back seat. She met them with the same lack of interest that had marked her experience of everything in her world for the last several days. It was a form of mental and emotional lethargy she had never experienced before, but one that she found had descended on her like a summer shower, lightly, and without announcement. In the very back of her mind she was wholly aware that there was one person other than herself who had contributed most to her mood, and over the passing hours she had let herself consider more and more the future options that might be open to her. This introspection had only worsened her temper however, because the more she had considered the situation, the more she was coming to realise the impossibility of the route her heart was choosing for her.
They began the drive early on a Monday morning, and although the day was clear and fresh, their progress was slower than usual because the smaller roads had been affected by the recent heavy rain. Amina did not look out from her side windows often and when she did, she noticed very little. Occasionally she slowed down and pointed out to her passengers some landmark that had been deemed significant by someone else long before her; the men looked and thanked her and perhaps asked a question or two which she answered as well as she could. The rest of the time, she drove in silence, her mind dark and drawn in.
By the evening of the first day she found that several hours had passed by without her noticing. She had been so immersed in thought that she had not noticed the road flying past, or even the route they had taken. More and more she was being held to physical reality only by the few mechanical motions that she had to go through as a driver. She changed gears, looked into mirrors, avoided the odd pothole which had appeared after the rain. And whenever the men asked her to, she stopped at a café or restaurant for lunch or dinner. At these stops, they did not ask her to join them, even to buy a sandwich, for her countenance was not open and her eyes did not meet theirs. In any event, such a lunch, with all three of them around a table would not be possible in this time of segregation. Amina had no appetite at all, but ate at irregular intervals because she knew she should. At these times, she was forced to find which part of a room she might sit in to eat, or at which counter she would be served as a non-White. She had mistakenly sat down at lunchtime at a table marked as “Whites Only” and had been asked to move by the waitress. She had looked at the woman’s expression, which was polite and slightly embarrassed, and it had taken her a moment to realise what she meant. The waitress was saying something, which Amina did not hear, but she followed the woman’s hand with her eyes and saw a shiny new notice on the alcove above her, thoughtfully written in both Afrikaans and English, that barred her from that area of the restaurant. Amina had nodded and stood up and walked outside, and had not bothered any further with trying to get some lunch.
When they stopped again at dusk, they were only about four hours away from the city. Amina was directed by her passengers to stop at a small restaurant that stood pale and luminous in a tiny town made up of one dusty street. The restaurant was built in the Cape Dutch style, with a thatched roof, and it advertised traditional cooking: Home-Cooked Breedies and Boboeties Served Here! As she looked at the whitewashed café and the lush green landscapes that surrounded it, Amina felt as though she were in another country, a land far removed from the brown, dusty surroundings of Pretoria, and she felt simultaneously relieved and homesick. The men went inside to eat and Amina sat for a minute in the car and then went around to the side door of th
e restaurant, where a few Africans, who looked as though they worked in the kitchens, sat on the steps, talking together. She nodded to them and asked where she could get some food.
“You can go inside, lady,” offered one of the Africans. He looked her up and down. “They serve Indians.”
“I don’t want to eat inside,” Amina said. “I just want a sandwich or something.”
The man shrugged. “You want a plate of breedie, lady?”
“Yes, thank you.”
He got up and disappeared inside and Amina waited, lingering near the others. A White woman, evidently the owner, appeared in the doorway.
“Come on,” she said to the workers. “What do you think this is? There are customers waiting inside.” They all jumped up and moved back in through the door, edging past the woman. She paused in the doorway and looked at Amina for a moment.
“Are you looking for work?” she asked pleasantly.
“No,” Amina said and turned away.
She was wondering whether the African worker had forgotten her now that there were two White customers in the restaurant but within a couple of minutes the man appeared at the kitchen door and handed her a large platter of food.
“Thank you,” she said, and now that she caught the aroma of the stew, she realised how hungry she was. “How much do I owe you?”
Once she had paid, she walked away with her plate and looked for somewhere quiet to sit. It was a warm night, but the late evening heat was stirred now and then by passing breaths of wind. There was a wide porch on the opposite side of the road that belonged to a drugstore that had long since closed for the day. Here she sat and balanced the plate on her knees, looking about her in an effort to keep her mind from straying once more to the mistress of the only shop in Delhof. There were some children playing down the road—they had paused briefly to watch her as she crossed their path, but they had now returned to their game, tossing a ball back and forth, even though the twilight was deepening and they must have been barely able to see it.
