Shelley had first described me. (And I got a push-up bra pronto.)
But in my old Eden, I am not just who I am. It’s like that TV show where the regulars in the bar think they know everything about each other. The Cheers song swirled in my head as I passed Paarden Eiland. Of course my old Eden Road Walmer Estate hasn’t got a bar. There it’s a mosque and some houses and so many regulars who think they know everything about me. There it’s all about the people. And they know my name, all right. But it wouldn’t be happy hour when I got there. No cheers at all.
It was past eleven when I crossed the bridge over the M5 into Walmer Estate. Same hills, so steep it’s as if you are driving right into the mountain, although my Mini automatic means no more hill starts, at least. But the same narrow roads with cars squeezed in tight, same corner shops locked up for the night. It was a bit like going back to high school. Everything looks more or less the same, and you sort of know how to get everywhere. But some things were different enough to know it was not the same at all. New one-way streets for a start. Bigger cars squashed on the side. Do the same people still live in the same houses? Surely not. I knew there would be some people at the house. They would come and pray through the night. It’s like that if the person dies at night. God. Would they know it’s me? That’s all I could think.
I went so damn slowly down Eden Road, all the time thinking how bad it would be if I bumped someone’s car or one of the men standing around talking in the street. Not the entrance I needed to make. But as slow as I went I still drove right past our house – number 12. Drove right past before I realised it was our house. The rose pink one-storey house I’d lived in for twenty-one years had grown up into a sleek white triple-storey glass-fronted monster. Garages at ground level where the garden used to be. Double front door.
The door was standing open to the road, with men in keffiyehs standing in front. All the lights were on, and from the road I could see the gold-framed Allahus on the wall in a front room. Just about all the houses in the road seemed to have grown up, but if you looked closely you could see how they’d started out. Except for Rafiq’s house, all the way down Eden Road, which was where I ended up parking. Yes, karma, she is a bitch. His house was still the same. Brown facebrick with a stoep, the front garden still full of the flowers Rafiq’s mother liked to grow. The same flowers he would pick for me when she wasn’t watching. I never knew what they were but they looked like the flowers you saw on old lady swimming caps. Geraniums, I found out later. I squashed more thoughts of Rafiq from my head. Now wasn’t the time. I was back for Ouma, not for him. But still I couldn’t help myself. I checked the stoep to see if he was there, like I always used to. Get on with it, I imagined Di saying to me. And just when I did, a woman in head-to-toe black closed the front door and walked down that garden path towards me. She stopped and looked at me.
“Karima? Is that you? Oh my word. It is you!”
Crap. The scarf is still in my bag, is what I thought. I relaxed when the streetlight showed Shireen’s face, round and pale, looking out at me from her black burka. Rounder than I remembered, but inside that burka and under that abaya was my brother’s wife. I’d met Shireen when I was fifteen and she was twenty-one, and when she married Dhanyal I got the sister I had always wanted. Earlier today Shireen would’ve been only a soft thought, but tonight she stood real in front of me. Ouma always said death has a way of suddenly changing everything. Right she was about that too. Tonight Shireen hugged me for a long time, the soft of her cloak with its wide sleeves around me like a blanket. Somewhere underneath I could feel her firm round body. After, our faces wet, we stood close on the street, our backs to the yellow city lights spread out behind us. In the beginning, I had struggled with life away from those lights; now I ignored them as I struggled to hear what she was saying.
“It was so fast, Karima. Ouma was sitting there in her chair at the TV when she said she wanted to go and sleep. ‘My head feels funny,’ she said. I didn’t think it would be the last thing she said to me. I didn’t really think anything, you know. I was also tired and I was glad she wanted to go to bed. She was anyways never the same since . . .” Shireen’s words trailed, as if they were trying to catch up with her thoughts “. . . since that thing happened with you, but even when she couldn’t think so lekker any more her body was still strong, you know.”
Shireen stopped. I waited. I had nothing else to do in the dark.
“Yes, she was strong for eighty-five. I didn’t think anything so I helped her get up and then she sommer fell over. Right there, right in front of the TV. She didn’t even shout or anything.”
She stopped again. I was quiet, but all the time I was thinking I didn’t even know which chair was Ouma’s favourite these days, which TV shows she liked to watch now. Was her bedroom still in the same place?
Shireen finally let all her words out in a stream.
“Your mama was upstairs saying shahada with the girls in their rooms, so I just screamed and screamed. I couldn’t think. Your mama got such a shock with me screaming, and she came running down the stairs so fast that she fell. Right down the flippin’ stairs, Karima. So there I was screaming and the two old ladies were lying at the bottom of the stairs, and Alia and Sara ran out their room and they were also screaming. Them at the top of the stairs, me at the bottom. It was mad, but you know your mama – her mind is strong. She shouted at me and the girls to stop screaming. She said I must phone Dhanyal. I got my mind together when your mama started shouting at the girls. She never shouts at the girls. That’s when I phoned Dhanyal.” She stopped to catch her breath. “I had to phone five times before he answered.” Shireen looked at me as if this part of the story would shock me the most. “Five times, I’m telling you!” she said, flicking up her left hand showing me her fingers, her yellow gold wedding band flashing. “I never phone him – he could have picked up this one time. When he did answer, he was so cross, said I should have called an ambulance. He came quick after that, Karima. But it was still too late. It was too late.”
Shireen had talked without waiting for me to answer. It was as if all she wanted was to get the words out of her own head.
“Can you believe it? One minute we’re watching TV, the next Ouma is dead. Dhanyal says he thinks it wasn’t only a heart attack, says it must have been a sudden cardiac arrest ’cause then there is no time. Your heart gets like a giant shock and you can sommer die straight away.” Still passing on the medical details, the inviolable right of the doctor’s-receptionist-turned-doctor’s-wife. I wondered if I could tease Shireen about it like I used to. And now she was a mother too – with daughters old enough to pray and say shahada at night.
I was someone’s aunty. Twice.
But I had nothing to say. My stomach was lurching with leftover champagne, leftover red wine. I could still smell faint puke, though that couldn’t really be. First Dirk. And now Ouma. I couldn’t begin to imagine how it had happened. I didn’t know about Ouma’s funny head. I couldn’t even picture the inside of the house, where it had happened. But before I could force myself to put words together, the rest of me seemed to come into focus for Shireen.
“Karima, you need a scarf. You can’t go in there kaalkop – all the people are already there. I came here to leave the girls with Gigi; they are too upset to be at home. But I’m sure Gigi will have something you can wear, just wait here.” Shireen turned back up the path to Rafiq’s house and disappeared behind the old wooden door.
Gigi and Rafiq?
I was still half-thinking about this news when Shireen came back out with a black burka and abaya identical to hers. “Ouma gave me and Gigi the same set when she and Dhanyal went to Mecca, but Gigi isn’t wearing hers now, so I asked her if you can wear it tonight.” She held them out to me. “Gigi didn’t really want to give it but I said Ouma would have liked you to wear it,” she added when I didn’t
