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, precariously, and for that reason all the more joyously, sucking one sugar mango after another, until I fell off and bruised my knee and arm and got a scolding from Amina Ma for doing so.
The excitement of us children heightened when visitors arrived to stay. They usually had leftovers from 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
