joined by two additions to the family: I was born to Amina Ma on 12 August 1928 and a few months later Solly was born to Ma. I was a pleasant, healthy baby. Solly was sickly, and forever crying. Ma did not have sufficient milk for him so Amina Ma breastfed both Solly and me.
Amina Ma at fifteen was perhaps not yet ready to be a mother, perhaps not even really a wife yet, since Ma was the dominant wife, and she an intrusion. Amina Ma, younger than Ma by four years, did most of the household chores. She was probably accustomed to hard work, and to being ordered about.
One can but conjecture that she was vulnerable to exploitation since early childhood. Ma, on the other hand, had been brought up in relative luxury by her father. She had done very little work, and was used to being waited on. But this is speculation on my part – to place myself in the vortex of my clan and to understand my relationship with my mothers.
II
Bluer Than the Blue Sky
My Childhood
CHAPTER 3
Jeewa’s Building: 1928–1931
My early childhood sweeps through a number of houses. My earliest memories are of our flat in Jeewa’s Building at 137 Grey Street4 where my consciousness of self began. My first recollection of physical space is not of a house but of a floor, lino-covered in green with red roses under a bed screened off from the room by the crocheted edge of a quilt.
Jeewa’s building still stands today, little changed, thanks to the 1950 Groups Areas Act which froze all development for three decades in Durban’s Indian business area. There are shops on the ground floor and residences on the upper floor along a passage protected by a black cast iron railing.
One entered the residences through a large quadrangle and up a flight of steps. Our flat comprised of a small covered courtyard, at the entrance of which was the kitchen, the washroom and toilet. The entrance led to a front reception room and two bedrooms. All the rooms led to a wrap-around veranda which overlooked Victoria Street, named for the Empress of the British Empire, Grey Street, named after one of Her Majesty’s colonial governors, and Queen Street5. The British royal family thus encircled our quarters, but we remained oblivious of that family.
We lived in this accommodation for a number of years – our unusual family with two mothers, Ma and Amina Ma, and one father, our Papa. In my earliest memories there were my three brothers (Ismail, Solly, Ahmed) and myself. Ultimately there would be nine children – six brothers and three sisters. Ma’s Ismail, Solly, Ahmed and Gorie and Amina Ma’s which included me, Mahomed, Siddiek, Farouk and Razia. My family called me “Behn” meaning sister.
My family: Our Papa Moosa, our two mothers Khatija (Ma) and Amina Ma and their nine children.
As the years went by and the children multiplied, Ma and Amina Ma grew very close. Ma organised the household, which included extended family members – our aunts, uncles and their children. She also sewed all the clothes for the family. Amina Ma did most of the daily household chores and attended to the raising of the babies. Our mothers never went out onto the street, never walked on the pavements or crossed the road. If they stepped out of the flat and went down the stairway, it was into an enclosed rickshaw. My brother Ismail, six years older than me, did the small shopping, our father the big. Most of the shopping was small and so Ismail did the bulk of it, purchasing lentils and the small quantities of meat almost daily from the grocer and butcher downstairs. He was also sent on errands to my father at his work at the printing press across the road in Grey Street.
My early images are of Amina Ma forever punishing me and Ma and Papa rescuing me from her anger. While most times I did not know why I was being punished, the first time Amina Ma raised her hand on me I knew exactly why.
My two younger brothers – Solly, a few months younger than me, and Ahmed, two years younger – had been newly bathed, powdered, fed and left in their pram outside the kitchen door. I found the wheels and the anticipation of mobility too tempting to resist. I reached out to the handles and began pushing the pram. I had almost reached the landing when I was stopped by Amina Ma’s angry voice and soon she was upon me, snatching the handles from my hands and slapping me. I was crying, fully aware of my misconduct and overcome by the sense of the imminent danger my mother had stopped. I had learnt my lesson and knew that my punishment was fully deserved.
Our mothers were very good disciples of the dictum ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. The rod though came down all that harder on Ismail who often got slapped and cuffed. I think our mothers had the impression he was already spoiling. When Solly and I were about two and Ahmed not yet one, Ismail, then about eight, had made a castle of matchsticks and set it ablaze in a darkened room for our entertainment. His fingers were smacked. “Can’t you see how dangerous that is? You could have set the house alight!”
I remember, Ismail as a very good older brother. He went to school close by. I think it was the Surat Hindu School. On special school days he took me with him and I felt his pride in me.
The ultimate authority in our home was Papa. He was always just and fair, rarely punishing us – either physically or with words. We loved him unreservedly. I was safe with Papa. When he returned from work, he rested in bed on the veranda and I cuddled up next to him. Probably all three of us did, but I recall just myself. It was Papa and I as we lay on that double bed on the veranda in Victoria Street, with its bustle intruding into our privacy. At night the aroma of freshly cooking food from a mobile café parked below our balcony tantalised our taste buds. Papa would tell me many things about the world we lived in, in the form of stories.
I never heard or saw Papa raise his voice or his hand to any one of us children. We thought the world of him and we believed everything he said. We regarded him as the dearest man in the world, and a veritable genius. I was indifferent to my mothers, but my father was as God and the thought of his disapproval and disappointment numbed me into a silence from which I could not be withdrawn.
Ma, Papa and Amina Ma.
Consciously, I always saw Ma as my mother. I was Ma’s baby. When I could talk, I reacted with great hurt and anger when the odd person would ask Ma, “Is this your daughter or Amina’s?” Ma would be obliged to admit I was Amina’s daughter. I recall clearly even today, some 79 years later, that on one occasion I screamed and ran out of the room because Ma had said I was Amina’s.
Ma indulged me. She took me everywhere with her. She developed an image of me that I took on. “Our Behn will not eat dhall and rice and she won’t eat fish,” she declared. So I did not eat these foods and when they were cooked she would produce something special for me.
Ma was most attentive to all my moods. She somehow knew when I had bad nightmares just after sehri during Ramadan (the meal before dawn during the fast). Going back to bed immediately after eating a full meal brought the nightmares on and I would feel as if somebody was throttling me. I would try to call out, but there would be no voice. Ma would come running to me, awaken me and put me out of my nightmarish misery. As far as Ma was concerned, I could do no wrong and if anyone dared say anything against me, she would shout them out of order. It was Ma who would save me from Amina Ma’s beatings. “Are you gone mad?” she would say and take me into her arms and console me and still my sobbing.
My
