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 Meer did not tolerate anyone else’s views and he ordered Moosa to read only the news to do with business and prices.
Chota Meer had a short temper and my father was often the butt of it. They clashed over many things. When the First World War broke out, my father applied to be enlisted in the Turkish army to liberate the caliphate held captive by the British. His letter of application fell in the hands of his uncle who forbade him from pursuing such nonsense.
My father was unhappy in this restricted environment but was particularly concerned that Ahmed was growing up without any education. He decided to leave his uncle’s home and he asked Ahmed to go with him and be educated. Ahmed enthusiastically opted to accompany my father, but wanted to say goodbye to his Uncle Chota Meer and to fetch his clothes. My father told him that the train was leaving for Dundee in an hour and there was no time so they boarded the train and arrived at the house of another uncle, Cassim Meer (the son of Suleiman, the only Meer brother who remained in Surat). My father enrolled Ahmed at the only school in Dundee, a Coloured school which went up to standard six. Ahmed continued at this school to standard six, while my father worked.
In 1916 my father found employment at the AM Kharwa & Son Car Wash in Ladysmith at a salary of £60 per annum. Working conditions were less restrictive than at Waschbank. My father had weekends off, his daily routine was much shorter, and he and Ahmed were able to spend more time together. They played soccer and cricket, and once a month they went to the cinema – my father apparently knew all about the films. During this time my father developed his love of books and reading and he started building a library of books, ordering them by mail – his favourite authors being Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas.
Around 1921 my father, then 24 years old, went back to Surat to marry his Uncle Mohamed’s thirteen-year-old daughter Khatija. Their first child, Ismail, was born in Surat in 1922. My father spent some three years in Surat as a gentleman journalist. He enjoyed the company of Monadi, the editor of the Muslim Gujarat, and he wrote a few columns for him, so discovering his talent in journalism. To Monadi, my father was an intellectual and to young Ahmed he was a physical giant – in different ways quite a romantic hero to each of them.
Mohamed Meer, a keen businessman, whose business sense had taken him from a peasant to a nawaab (prince), decided that my father, his new son-in-law, should either join his businesses in Burma or return to South Africa. My father chose the latter. So, bidding goodbye to his young wife whom he loved very much and his young son, the apple of his eye, he set off for South Africa to join his maternal uncle, Ahmed Mohamed Variawa, in Kimberley. His wife and son were to join him once he had established himself. His younger brother, Ahmed, already living and working with the Variawas had sent good reports of life there.
Khatija (our mother, Ma) described Raja Wadi, the palatial home her father had built in Surat, and the joys of her childhood to me:
“The bungalow is large, double storey, with porticoes embellished with flowers and leaves etched in gold. There are palm trees and fruit trees- bor, custard apple and annoos. On Eid day, swings were tied on their branches and we would paddle through the wind to reach the sky, and when the vendors came, we ran to Utawala Pir’s shrine and spent our Eid money on ice cream and sweets. In the afternoons when the sun was low and no longer beating on our heads, our coach would draw up at the entrance of our bungalow and we would go riding into the city.”
Oh how many tales Ma wove.
About Fatima Chachee, who came to teach them to embroider in gold thread. About the jewellers summoned by her father to fashion jewellery of their choice and how he would weigh the jewellery on completion to ensure that the gold was intact. About how her eldest brother had sat sobbing at the foot of the stairway on his wedding night because of his disappointment with his bride (they subsequently had five children) and about cream so thick that one could lift it up. About green wheat or ponk, and neera – the juice tapped from palm trees in the early morning before it fermented into toddy.
While we grew up on stories of Surat and Raja Wadi and of Ma’s early years, my mother, Amina Ma was a mystery in the Meer clan. Amina Ma never talked about her parents and siblings. It was as if she had no family. She just was.
All the other elders in the clan in which I grew up had parents and brothers and sisters. They were all rooted in the past. Amina Ma appeared to have nothing and perhaps I rejected her because I did not want to have nothing.
Had I known Amina Ma’s life prior to her marriage, I may well have had a closer, more positive relationship with her, but I did not know that life. It remained a family secret to me until after she died. The only person I knew from that life was her brother Lionel, who came to be known as Cassim, and who, after my mother died, sketched out the bare bones about her life. I tell what I remember from his account.
Amina Ma was of European descent. She was born in Kimberley in 1912 to Hannah Farrel, the eldest daughter of Charlie Farrel and Amelia van Vollenhoven. She was named Rachael Farrel.
The family tree of my mother, Amina Ma, born Rachael Farrel in 1912.
Charlie Farrel was originally a farmer who emigrated from Longford in Ireland to the United States of America and from there to South Africa. He had a sister (whose name is not known to me) and a brother, John Farrel. Amelia Van Vollenhoven’s family had emigrated from Holland and settled in the Cape.
Amina
