Fatima Meer. Fatima Meer
to the Durban station and had promptly continued my sleep in the car. When we arrived at the station, Uncle Cas (Amina Ma’s brother), had draped me on his shoulder and I lay there, a dead weight, while he carried me all the way from the car. I was roused from my sleep when the train steamed in, in time to welcome my new uncle, my father’s brother.
I saw my new uncle and aunt and my two boy cousins, Unus and Abbasi, through sleepy eyes. In fact, I think my sleepy eyes saw only my uncle. I more than saw him, I felt him, for he immediately took me from my Uncle Cas. I snuggled against him, spontaneously claiming him as my own as he claimed me his own.
My cousin Unus was the elder of Gora Papa’s two sons. My first recollection of Unus was that he spoke words that were foreign to us – he spoke Afrikaans. My eldest brother Ismail led the way in laughing at him and we all followed. Abbasi, the younger of Gora Papa’s sons, was a Down syndrome baby. He lay inert in his cot or pram, unable to move. There were few things that made him laugh. He was helpless, harmless and always pleasant.
I had always complained that I had no one to play with since I had no sister. When Gora Mamoo’s family came to stay with us I expected his daughter, Zohra, to fill that vacuum, but she, like my cousin Unus, was eight years old, and closer in age to my brother Ismail than to me. Zohra, Unus and Ismail went to school together. They were the big children and I was in a hurry to be part of their bigness. They were our older siblings and we, the younger lot, who were not yet at school, my two younger brothers Solly and Ahmed and I followed them whenever allowed to do so. When they returned from school we particularly enjoyed eating their leftover sandwiches. It was most fortunate for us that we had our elder siblings for they made it possible for us to go places we would never have ventured on our own.
The clearest memory I have of Zohra at Wentworth is going to the toilet with her at night. The toilet, a bucket enclosed in a tin shed, was some distance from the house in the bush. We had to take a hurricane lamp to light our way, and we kept each other very good company as we took turns on the bucket and chatted away. We were never in a hurry to leave the toilet.
I also remember spending some nights at Uncle AC’s flat with Zohra. Her father, Gora Mamoo, would make shadow animals on the wall and tell us stories about Shaka and Dingaan and how a seer predicted that once they quarrelled and lost their unity a white man would take over and they would be enslaved. It was from him that I heard my first political statement. I was sufficiently impressed by it to remember it as an adult.
I met Choti Khala (Ayesha), when I was five years old and I fell instantly in love with her. She was much older, in her late teens. I had never known anyone like her. She was so vivacious, so pretty and so fashionable. Choti Khala wore her long headscarf as a decoration piece, as part of her dress. She swirled her scarf under her arm, brought it across her breast and pinned it on her shoulder with a glittering brooch. With my mothers, scarves were a sort of nuisance cloth that got in the way when they worked, something they respectfully and hurriedly draped over their heads when visitors came. I had the impression that they would be rid of most of them if they could, save the going-out long scarves that were trimmed with gold braids.
Choti Khala was a gifted reciter of the life of the Prophet and she was invited to recite at public mouloods (celebrations of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad). Ma would take me to these and Choti Khala would sit with the other reciters, three or four young women like herself, in front of a row of pillows, beautifully embroidered with gold beads, alongside vases of flowers and incense sticks. At the end of the event the reciters would be given presents. I was so proud of Choti Khala on these occasions.
Choti Khala spellbound me. I followed her around like a little puppy. I slept with her at night. I was mesmerised by her dainty movements as she applied her creams and powders, and when she settled down to tell me stories, I was sold to her forever. Yet all the while I got this insidious message from my mothers and from Gorie Apa, married to Choti Khala’s eldest brother Gora Mamoo, that she was “bad”. They frowned on her use of cosmetics: Who was she preening herself for? They did not say it in words, it was implied in their attitudes.
Ma spoke disparagingly of people who were too free. Could one be too free? Was Choti Khala too free? Such questions began forming in my mind and I answered them by drawing unreservedly closer to Choti Khala. My mothers could really do nothing about it, for their disapproval of her remained unspoken. What was there to speak about? As I was to learn much, much later Choti Khala was, at the end of it all, guilty of no more than escaping her unhappiness which began with her marriage at the age of seven.
When she joined our household Choti Khala must have been seventeen, but she had already been married ten years. Although married at seven years old, she had joined her husband’s home when she was thirteen. She had not taken to her equally youthful husband. She had found him clumsy and crude and rumour had it that she did not allow him in her bed. Her mother-in-law did not stand for that and so the little girl’s life became hell. Choti Khala would not knuckle down to her marriage and there was continual friction between her and her husband and between her and her mother-in-law.
As my mothers and the women of the family saw it, the mother-in-law, Bhabie, was a terror, but then which mother-in-law was not? It was the lot of daughters-in-law to be punched and slapped. In their eyes Bhabie’s treatment of Choti Khala was not exceptional, but Choti Khala’s treatment of her husband YC, was shocking to them.
“How could a wife behave like that towards her husband?” they said. “She did not want her husband. So who did she want? She is a loose cannon.”
As far as they were concerned, she was the worst kind of role model a young impressionable girl could have, and my mothers were afraid for me. Choti Khala was a free soul who had taken charge of her life by leaving her husband, and it was this freedom that my mothers and her cousins resented. It was this freedom that they sought to stifle. Choti Khala had no right to that freedom since they had no right to it.
We children were far more mobile in Wentworth than we ever were in Grey Street, largely because we were older, the environment outside the house was safer and because there were more of us in Wentworth than there had been at Grey Street. Our parents felt more comfortable when we went around together, conscious of both safety and pleasure in numbers.
We would go on errands together. The butcher shop was at quite some distance and we broke our journey midway, sitting on the grassy bank, dawdling. Sometimes my brother Ismail produced a sausage or two which we shared, eating them raw, relishing the meat squeezed out of the membrane. My mothers never bought sausages – that was too much of a luxury. Dried beans and lentils cooked in a substantial soup was our usual fare. What with sixteen mouths to feed, they never bought more than a pound or so of the cheaper cuts of meat and this had to go a long way. Ismail said the butcher had given him the sausages, but in retrospect I suspect he had just helped himself to a few. However, he came by them though, we enjoyed them.
We went into the bushes, gathering berries and sweet-sour (khati mithie) herbs and weeds. There was a kind of unproclaimed competition over who would collect the most herbs. On one occasion I displayed a huge pile, outstripping all. “Look at Behn, she’s got the most,” my big brother Ismail called out in praise. I was inflated with pride, but was as quickly deflated when Zohra examined my pile and said, “That’s not khatie mithie. That’s just weeds!”
I had no idea what I was picking. It was all the same to me. The praise had come as a surprise, the disappointment was an unbearable shame. I had let myself down; I had let the others down. I felt so ashamed and wondered whether I would ever be admired again, for to me, at that age, praise and love was one and the same thing. To be loved, one had to be praised and to be praised, one had to be loved. That was my understanding of a good child.
Our herbs and blackberries gathered, we stored them away for after supper when we put them out on a white sheet, danced around them, and then sat down and relished them. Our parents came nowhere near us and appeared to be quite oblivious to our goings-on. It was our great luck that we didn’t collect any poisonous herbs.
When mango season arrived, our parents bought the ripe juicy round sugar mangoes in large dishfuls and left them under the bed to take on that rosy red colour that brought out all their sweetness. I walked on the veranda ledge,