Fatima Meer. Fatima Meer
In 1922, Mohamed returned to Waschbank to dissolve the partnership with his brother. Amid tense meetings, mediated by their respective advisors (their maternal cousins, the Amins and the Karodias), a bitter settlement was reached. Chota Meer bought over Mohamed Meer’s interest in the business for £10 800. Of this, £6 000 was paid in cash and the balance paid in monthly bills of £100.
In Surat, Mohamed purchased a princely estate – Raja Wadi – part of the local Raja’s estate. He pulled down the purana bangla (old bungalow) that had stood on it and replaced it with a palatial residence that cost 39 000 rupees – a fortune in those days – thereby changing the family’s lifestyle.
Mohamed encouraged his sons to go to Burma (now Myanmar) and they set up businesses there. These businesses, however, did not prosper and within two years his youngest son, Essop, returned to Surat. Moosa, the eldest, however, remained and married a young Burmese woman, despite the fact that he had a wife and several children in Surat. Moosa’s descendants through his second wife continue to live in Burma, so there are Burmese Meers with whom we South African Meers have no contact.
Raja Wadi – the palatial residence built by Mohamed Meer in Surat
Mohamed’s wife, Fatima Amin, died in 1921, at the age of 52. He never remarried. He cared for his children personally, building close bonds with them. At the time of Fatima’s death, Moosa, the eldest, was 23 years old and the youngest, Ansoo, was six. Fatima had lived to see the marriage of only her eldest son, Moosa.
Mohamed Meer died in Surat in 1938 at the age of 73 when I was about ten years old. I recall my mother’s grief when she learnt of her father’s death. It was my first experience of death and the grief death evokes. Ma’s heart had hankered for her father and for her childhood. We knew her father and her Surat home, Raja Wadi, from the stories she told us. Ever since her return to South Africa as a young married woman, she had hoped to visit her father, but she had never returned to Surat.
Chota Meer’s businesses were hit hard by the depression and by 1930 he was forced to sell. His two eldest sons had left the failing business some time before and his daughters were by then married and living in their marital homes. It was their youngest child, twelve-year-old Ismail, who was left with his parents, trying to make ends meet. As Ismail, who was to become my husband, related, he was born a prince but he left Waschbank a pauper.
The family’s last possession was a rooster and Ismail took the fowl from house to house to try fruitlessly to sell it. He took a job in the shop previously owned by his father, but left this to work in a bakery in Waschbank so he could be closer to his parents. Until the day in 1931 when his brother AC arrived to take Ismail and his parents to live with him in Durban. AC was living with his in-laws and had started a cut-make-and-trim shirt-making home ‘factory’. He wanted Ismail to help in the business, sewing button holes, and so Ismail and his parents moved to Durban.
Chota Meer and his two youngest children – Ismail and Ayesha.
Chota Meer died in Durban around 1935, aged around 61 years old. I have dim recollections of visiting AC’s flat in Pine Street as a child. Chota Meer comes to view the clearest, lying on his bed, parting the segments of a peeled orange and giving this to me with a mischievous look in his eyes. Ismail treasured this image of his father when I recalled it during our marriage.
CHAPTER 2
My Parents
My father’s greatest admirer was his younger brother Ahmed. Ahmed’s adoration of his big brother is quite clear from his testimony about their early life together. Growing up, I was witness to the wonderful bond that existed between the brothers. Ahmed (who I called Gora Papa) related some of their early experiences to me after my father’s death and it is from his handwritten record that I draw this picture of my father’s early life.
My father, Moosa Meer, was born in Surat in 1897 at a time when the citizens of the town were returning to their homes after having been evacuated due to an outbreak of plague. His birth date was considered auspicious because it coincided with the day water came through the city taps for the first time. My father’s father, Ismail Meer, was in Natal at the time of my father’s birth and my grandmother, Khatija, joined him in Natal when my father was an infant. Since she was of failing health, my grandmother returned to Surat, and my father and his younger brother Ahmed spent their early years moving between their father in Natal and their mother in Surat.
As children in Surat, Moosa and Ahmed played cricket, soccer and participated in jujitsu and wrestling. My father was a very good wrestler and accepted challenges from professionals, at times even beating them. Ahmed boasted that his big brother could take on five men at a time. He also boasted that my father was a champion kite flyer. Once a year there was an annual kite festival in Surat. Competing teams of kite flyers vied to bring the others’ kites down. My father’s kite was never brought down. Ahmed recalled one competition in which my father’s team emerged victorious, rousing the anger of a vanquished team, whose members tried to rough his brother up. They were real toughies but my father had them running.
My father often talked about his enjoyment of the tranquil life on the banks of the river Tapti that flowed through Surat. He reminisced about watching the fishermen, each with a bamboo across his shoulder, with baskets at either end of the bamboo in which the fish were carried.
Around 1909, when my father was about twelve years old, my grandmother Khatija died in Surat. A few months before her death, my grandfather and my father had both left Surat for South Africa. While in South Africa they received word that my grandmother was very ill. They immediately left for India by boat. From Bombay, father and son took the train, arriving at their house in Surat at midnight. My grandfather told my father to call out to his mother – it would surprise her and make her very happy he said, since he was her favourite. But it was my father’s grandmother who came to the door to inform them of his mother’s death. She had passed away when they were midway on their journey, on the first day of Ramadan.
This event remained firmly marked in the memory of both my father and Ahmed. The young Ahmed said he never felt as alone in his life as when his mother died in the absence of his father and elder brother.
A few months after his mother’s death, my father left again for Natal in the company of family friends while my grandfather and Ahmed remained in Surat. In Durban my father lived with a family friend, AC Angalia, and was enrolled at school but a few months later, at age thirteen, he left school to take up work as a shop assistant in Pietermaritzburg.
From Pietermaritzburg, my father moved to Thornhill Junction at the invitation of a shopkeeper known only as Vanker in Ahmed’s testament. He was paid £3 a month to assist in the shop. According to Ahmed, my father was happy at Thornhill Junction. He worked there for about eight months, leaving to join his maternal uncle Ahmed Mohamed Variawa in one of his shops in Kimberley. My father spent somewhere between one to two years in Kimberley. Ahmed Mohamed Variawa, a remarkable personality, was something of a leading figure in Indian politics and sport, and he had a positive influence on my father.
For a short while in early 1914, my father, grandfather and Ahmed moved to Winters Rush, an area in the Barclay West district of the Cape inhabited by Afrikaner diamond diggers. They subsequently returned to Waschbank and later that year (in July 1914) my grandfather died, leaving twelve-year-old Ahmed in the care of their Uncle Chota Meer.
My father, seventeen years old at the time, started working in Chota Meer’s shop. He worked there for a number of years under harsh conditions, thirteen hours a day – from 6 am to 7 pm – seven days a week. He did all the manual work and, even though he had only passed standard two at school, he was able to keep the books, and tutor his cousins and young brother. One of his duties was to read the English language newspaper, the Natal Witness, to his Uncle Chota Meer each morning as his uncle could not read English. My father, though, angered his uncle since he not only read the news but also analysed it. Chota