Fatima Meer. Fatima Meer
their padkos which we found delicious. Our usual fare was curries with a lot of watery gravy. The padkos were rare treats such as fried or grilled meats, fried fish, samoosas and so on. We children made a party of it, orchestrated by the oldest of us. We placed the ‘offerings’ in the centre and danced round and round them. There was a joyousness about it that came not simply from the delicacies we were about to relish, but from being together, the younger children with the older, and most important of all, the younger accepted by the older as having the same rights, the same claims, though dependant on them for protection if it came to that.
One morning I awoke to Ismail’s screams. He and our cousin Unus were caught smoking cigarettes in the toilet. Their sin though was suspected to be more than smoking. What that suspicion was, we couldn’t imagine and never came to know. Years later Unus confided to us: “All we were doing there was smoking. They wanted us to confess to something else and we never knew what that something else was.” They were both punished severely.
On summer evenings, the whole family, all the elders and their children, walked up the heavily forested hill to the lighthouse. We made quite a group, three sets of parents and their children. We watched the light circle the sea, illuminating the path of ships and far beyond we could see the lights of Durban. It was also an occasion for our parents to tell us about shipwrecks and sea rescues. Some days we would be taken to nearby Salisbury Island into the mangrove swamps, where the forest warded off the light. We lost each other in the sinister darkness and our hearts pounding, we called out to each other.
Our greatest pleasure though was Sunday picnics at Brighton Beach. This was our beach, since no one else appeared to use it. We would all pack into our car, parents, uncles, aunts and children, and spend the whole day on the beach. We would run down the dunes to the sea and run up again at the end of the day, and if a child could not make the climb, a father would sweep him or her up onto his robust shoulders.
Our uncles would lie on the sand and encourage us to bury them until only their heads could be seen. We would struggle to bury them and then dig them out again, and they would erupt out of their graves, and stand up, giant-like, shaking off the sand.
We didn’t have bathing suits. We children swam in our briefs and vests, our mothers fully dressed. They would stand at the water’s edge, allowing the waves to do their will and the waves would soon lash them and fling them and pull them down and they would be thoroughly wet from head to toe.
I would run from Choti Khala for she was invariably after me and I knew why, and I trembled in delicious suspense of being caught and hurled into the sea, and then frightened to death as the waves whirled around my ears and into my nose and I gasped for breath, and panicked at the feeling of being washed out to sea, of never seeing the shore again and then come up spluttering and crying from the shock of it all. But Choti Khala would be laughing, and Amina Ma would chide me for being such a crybaby, and I would realise that what had seemed to me to be an eternity of being lost in the waves was only a moment in time.
We were not often taken to town, so I remember clearly one Sunday when we were all put into our best clothes and Papa took us. For some inexplicable reason I was dressed like a boy in my brother’s clothes. We were taken to Mitchell Park to ride on Nellie the elephant. That was the first time I realised that we belonged to a group called non-Europeans7. I sat on a bench and the park ranger was promptly on to me, shooing me off the bench. My father came as quickly to my rescue. He whisked me off the bench and distracted my attention away from something he resented deeply, but did not think I was ready to understand. He was determined not to have our day spoilt. He bought us ice creams and settled us on the grass to enjoy these and then we had our rides on Nellie. A year later I visited Nellie’s birthday with my brothers and cousins and we received gifts of handkerchiefs and balloons and buns.
I was a little more than five years old. Sleep had not quite left me when Ma, excited to give me the news, awakened me and told me I had a little brother.
“Brother!”, I cried, “I don’t want a brother. I want a sister. Where did the brother come from? Let him go away.”
My curiosity was however roused and I followed Ma. I saw Amina Ma lying on the floor. Dai Ma, the traditional midwife, was beside her and there was blood. It was a fearful sight and I retreated into my bed and lay there quietly until Papa came and picked me up and took me to see my little brother who was lying in Ma’s lap. Ma smiled at me and said, “Come and see your beautiful brother”. I looked at him but remained pouting. If they had to bring a new baby to our home, why could they not have brought a girl? There were so many boys in our house and I was the only girl. I needed a girl to play with. What would I do with the boy?
The new brother was laid to sleep in the jhorie, a cradle made of cloth suspended from a red and green cradle stand. Dai Ma looked after him, sitting nearby, getting on with other chores like cleaning the vegetables for cooking while she rocked the jhorie by pulling the twine attached to the cradle with her big toe. I have an image of myself bending into the jhorie in an attempt to see my baby brother and nearly falling on top of him as Dai Ma screamed and Amina Ma rushed in to arrest an imminent catastrophe.
As baby Mahomed, who we called Bhai, grew, I came to love him and showered him with kisses. Ma could not restrain herself from teasing me.
“You didn’t want this brother, now why do you smother him with kisses?”
I protested, “He is my brother!”
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