by Z. P. Dala
Finally taking up his long-awaited knighthood, dapper Sathie stood, accepting the scepter borne unto him. Now was the time for a man to stand between these two women. Time to take control of this war. A woman at war is a marvelous thing to behold. He had been waiting for a moment like this for most of his life.
“Rosie, dear Rosie. Stop now. Just hold on there for one minute, you hellcat you.”
“Sathie, what do you want?” Afroze was fuming now. For a fraction of a second, Sathie lost some nerve, but composed himself very quickly. Honor was at stake. Manly honor, dash of stirred loins, an old man awakened. Vivid life enters into his world. He laps it up like the dog he is. It’s all a bit wild now, animalistic. The lionesses are fighting. Can you smell the heady smell of pheromones?
Sathie knew he was a cowardly man, and had been one for his entire life. He thrived on his handsome face but was always the first man to hide under a table in a bar fight. Haranguing women frightened him. He had been brought up by harpies, made it an educated existence to avoid a crazy-mad woman. And he knew that the day would come when his smiles would fail the situation. And this day seemed to have come.
Sathie realized that the arrival of this daughter into Sylvie’s life probably signaled an ending of his world of creature comforts, but as a man, he also felt a longing inside him just by looking at Afroze. He knew he should not, but he did. He had always been a man who sensed attraction in the air and could tell by just one look that conquering a woman would be easy. When he had seen Afroze bossily instructing him not to touch her car, he had suddenly felt awakened from a dormant state. It had been many years since he had felt such stirrings. Something about the unattainable air that emanated from Afroze intrigued him. He knew he was aging, and the headiness of conquering this unreachable beauty made him desire his youth again. His life with Sylvie held no passion; it never could. But seeing her daughter made curiosity flare into something greater. Sathie braved the possibility that Afroze could destroy his pampered peace, and advanced a way to make her remain in Brighton for just a little longer. Purely to indulge an attraction that he needed to feel alive again.
“Rosie, Rosie . . . come now, girl. Just stay on for only an hour more. I have something very important I want to speak to you about. We . . . have. Sylvie and I . . . both.”
Sylvie shot Sathie a dark look. A confused look that also smacked of lifeline.
The knight had cast his lance and one piece of wall came crashing down.
Afroze again pursed her lips without realizing she was doing it. “Okay. Fine.” She returned to sit at the table. This time, Sylvie looked down at her plate. Her heart was beating a little too fast.
“Madam Architect,” Sathie announced and swept low to the ground, bowing in flourish to the perplexed Afroze.
She shot him a rolled eye and lifted an eyebrow. No time for melodrama when she had just enacted her own.
“You are an architect? Yes?”
“Yes,” she responded.
“You will help us build.”
“Build what?”
“Your mother desires to build something, anything. With her name on its doors. A school is what she is thinking of. But it could be a clinic, a crèche, even a little community center for women to come and sew and do things that busy women do. It’s not about the building, Rosie. It is about the name on its door. How wonderful, is it not, my Sylvie?”
Sylvie hesitated. Things had taken a sudden turn. In all her life she had never hesitated, but in her dotage, something was shaking inside her bones.
“Oh, my dear, Sylvie is just overwhelmed with the possibility that her plans will now come to fruition. But I know my beloved Sylvie better than anyone. Her deepest desire is to demolish the khaya, and to turn that place into a school.”
Afroze looked out to the old, crumbling building at the edge of the backyard. The khaya.
Khaya, the Zulu word for “home.”
CHAPTER FOUR
In the dead of midnight the child could not sleep. The night owls and the frogs ignored her when she attempted to join them. She lay very still on a coverlet embroidered with butterflies; she had never seen a real one yet in her life. She moved toward the window. In the light that only darkness could give, she bunched up balled fists, her palms holding thickly onto thin lace. The curtains were not shields. They were created for beauty, something feminine for a bedroom of a child. This lace, these butterflies, were a display that a little girl slept here. A hope that if she lay her head upon a pink pillow with a butterfly motif, then her girl-childness would be acknowledged in a world not made for her. Despite the attempts, the hardness of the room reflected the hard world in which the child walked. A few butterflies and a smattering of lace did not do their jobs. She had to live a difficult, little life.
Her shoulders sat near her ears. They always did. Telltale signs of an anxious child. Easily she startled. Easily she welled up. Sensitive to smells—she could never bear them well. She knew emotions and events by the many smells that brought them into her life. In the dead of midnight, in the dead of every midnight, she listened and sniffed. She knew long beforehand when something was happening. Something always smelled like it was happening.
The adults had tried to be careful. They hadn’t realized her secret power. They, like all adults, believed that if they whispered, she would not know. But she smelled what was on their breaths even when she heard no voices. Just scratching sounds, the sounds that raspy whispers made when they echoed against walls. Others might have easily thought it was just mice, scratching their mice claws against the hardness of wooden floors. But she knew it was not the mice that skulked. She knew it was the people that skulked.
How silly they were! They had placed her little bed against a window. They did not know how she would awaken from a sleep that was never really there and move the lace aside. The lace that smelled forever of crying. She knew that tears have smells. Everyone’s tears smelled the same. Some just lingered longer.
Her mother could not help but rustle. It was her calling card. The child would forever know her mother by the sound of rustling leaves. Always this way and that, in and out of rooms, down passageways, into the yard, away and about and all the way around. No footsteps. Just whispery, crackly, swishy, swooshy. Skirts and fabric. The child once lifted her mother’s chiffon sari to answer a plaguing question: Did this mother have feet? The child received a little shove with a foot in response.
“What are you doing under there?”
“Get out from under my skirts.”
“Such an odd child.”
But her mother sailed onward and forward. She sailed on footless steps during the day. And she hurried in harried steps at night. She came alive then. In the dead part of midnight. Never a sound, but busy and with her greatest purpose. Only in the darkest of nights. The child smelled gasoline and smoke. Always the same broken-down old car. Always the same hushed whispers.
A moaning mound of blankets, told a million times to shut up.
“Quiet! Be quiet, you hear, or I am going to knock you out cold.”
“Just shut this one up, will you, or my child will wake up. And this place is so silent, everyone will hear.”
“Ay, wena. You . . . I’m telling you now. You shut up. You hear me?”
“Look, he’s going to scream when we move him. I’m knocking him cold. Told you to give him all that brandy. What? You went and drank it all, huh?”
“No, missus. I promise, missus, I didn’t touch the brandy. I give him all. It not working.”
“Oh, for bloody hell’s sake, here. Go inside and fetch me the bottle on the table. I’m going to make him pass out. I have a child here. He’s got to shut up.”
“Yes, missus. I go fetch it, missus.”
“Don’t you touch a single drop, you hear, or I swear I will cut you straight like a pig, up your gut.”
“Ayyy, missus. Not a pig, missus. No, missus. Yes, missus.”
A peeping child. The blanket is gray and it writhe
d and moaned. Her mother took the bottle that was much fuller than when she herself had drawn from it earlier. The man’s gait told on him, that he has drunk of the bottle too. The child had seen this man many times before. But in daylight he didn’t talk to the child or the mother. He filled their tank with gasoline and chewed a matchstick, stinking to the heavens of fuel. Then in night’s veil, he fluttered around the doctor, clearly drunk but still, was all the doctor had for help. This drunk would have to do.
Both poured the liquid into the blanket mound, maybe there was a mouth there, inside. They waited, they breathed, sometimes he said things like:
“There’s three more to come to you, Doctor.”
“One was taken away last night, Doctor. We lost one.”
“No hope left, Doctor. We are losing too many.”
And she said things to him in return.
“Okay, bring.”
He brought mounds of moaning blankets, lying down and writhing on the back seat of the car. This one had taken an entire bottle of brandy. Sickly sweet amber brandy that they could barely afford. They both prodded the blanket mound. No moans.
Like a man, the woman doctor with arms of steel and a frame made of solid, straight rods carried the bundle into the khaya. Like a man, the strong woman lifted and lugged a heavy body into the dark rooms. She was no shrinking violet.
They did not know, or had the time to realize, that the little child was awake and watching them through a tiny crack in the lace curtains at the window. The child blocked her ears. And her nose.
She easily smelled blood, and she easily heard muffled screams.
Maybe they should have made the curtains thicker.
The child was left to conjure up ideas of what went on among the adults in her home. Having being kept from the facts, she created her own reasons. They were reasons of childhood horror tales, melded with childhood fairytales into a frightening explanation.
The child finally found sleep, marveling at how her mother, the doctor, never failed to keep her beautiful chiffon saris pinned so firmly and secure. Despite it all.
The child kept cheap bars of rose-scented soap under her pillow, and throughout the night, awakened to moaning sounds, and quickly placed the rose scent under her nose. The smell lulled the restless child into a restless sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sathie walked away from the doctor and her daughter, two women breathing sparks at each other. He took the long route to his rented room in town, a building behind a big house halfway between a Hindu temple and a mosque. Well placed. When he entered his neat room, he immediately fell onto the piano standing dark and beautiful against the only window. His fingers tingled with anticipation, he stroked out some bars of music he had tried to forget. But then he thought of the one tiny glance cast at him from the doctor’s daughter, and he wanted to play long ballads again.
Oh, I did not notice it then but I notice it now. This woman is a goddess. A beautiful piece of the moon in that perfect place where all women someday find themselves. That magical age, when awkward youth is a discarded skin and sagging skin is an awkward garment. The best time of a woman, that ending of spring, so softly leaving, dropping crushed flowers at the feet of lovers, knowing that autumn will arrive and bring deeper colors. But it has not arrived just yet. She is still a blazing flower garden, the dew still drips from her petals, but they drip with knowledge.
She knows her own power now, in this season of her world, she throws aside all fear with a wave and a nod. She knows so much. She has known first love, she has known first stabs, she has tasted deep lust, she has coveted, she has flaunted, she has asked, she has pleaded; she has finished her allocation of tears. She has stopped hating her lumpy, bumpy soul. This is the season in which she should be picked. Pick her. This is when she tastes the sweetest.
I am a man who loves women. They have burned their bosoms into my chest. Followed my body, back to when I was a lithe, naughty child who hid behind Father Timothy’s piano at the posh Catholic school, learning by his pumping feet about the power of music. Not his hands. His feet.
Back to my beginnings.
I take you to a perfectly vegetarian household, the most uppity-up Brahmin family living most uppity-up-up in the penthouse of an apartment on Beatrice Street, Durban. What is this boy supposed to do all day, surrounded by praying women? His men have died, and their pyres have been pure. This pure boy, this high-born, priestly caste, handsome little male issue where there have only been disappointing female issue, let us send him to school.
His grandfather was a barrister, London trained. His father too. Pity they had to go and die. It is agreed, he will learn his Vedic mantras and fulfill the karmic obligations of this high-caste family. Come now, the child is bored sitting and watching us women churn ghee.
I refuse.
M’lord.
I refuse.
My high-caste grandson will not go to that filthy coolie school filled with the stinking bottoms of cane cutters’ children, mingling with beef bottoms of Mohammedans, but if I recall, I do love the Catholic boys, so clean, so neat, such sweet singing-singing darlings. St. Anthony’s Catholic School. Nice place. Let him go. Never mind the Christ Holy Ghost boys; he must always keep his sacred thread tied around his chest, and when they start their singing, he must say our Vedic scriptures inside his head.
Father Timothy with the missing teeth feels his toes are itching, Durban so hot, too hot. Festering ground for itches and toe sores. Dearest Father stops pumping his feet on an organ, reaches down to scratch a toe and scratches my head instead.
Oh, have my toes grown hairs? Is it not supposed to be the palms rather? Oh my, oh my.
Boy, what is the meaning of sitting at my feet? We Catholics don’t do things like that, you know. You Hindus and your feet touching. No need, boy. No need.
Father, I am in angelic beatification of the heavenly beauty of your organ.
Oh, look now, boy, I know we seem to have gotten some reputation about these things but no no no no, not me, we don’t encourage that sort of thing here. I don’t care what you have heard.
Father. What I’m saying is I love your piano.
Right. Oh, yes. Indeed. My thoughts exactly.
I lie to the pure women, my grandmother and aunties, who line the walls and floors of the penthouse on Beatrice Street, panting and puffing with worry, wondering if I had perhaps run off to play cricket with beef eaters or if I was perhaps learning to play fah-fee with laborer Indians.
But I am Indian, Grandmother.
Spit! You spit now. You wash that mouth. You are a Brahmin boy, from the proudest Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu. You spit now. Never call yourself Indian, you hear me? Here in this Durban, that is like calling yourself the excreta of donkey monkey dog frog.
Spit.
Where do you go to after school, beautiful boy-child?
Oh, aunties and grannies. What to say? Father Timothy says I must learn to say the proper English. You see, these H’s have become a bit of h-an hinconvenience. If I want to be a barrister one day and h-all.
Oh, of course my child. H-elocution is so important in this world. You take all the time in the world. We fully support a Tamil boy who is learning where and when to pick and drop his hetches.
Now who would have ever thought that our devoted son of the Church, dearest Father Timothy, nurtured a supreme love and skill for the music called jazz?
Who knew?
You want piano. Sit. Sit, Brahmin boy. Now I show you real music.
I sucked it all up, like marrow from bones. Jazz tunes. The greats. Here, Brahmin boy, come listen to this. Scratchy gramophone record, smuggled into this town. This, dear boy, is music.
Well, said the fat man, the owner of the Jazz Lounge, who happened to be strolling through the Catholic school on his annual donation run, where he expended large sums of his money on scholarhips for the bright, young boys of his community. He stopped dead in his tracks, hearing the strains of the piano deftly played by Sathie�
��s young hands, accompanying the boy’s voice that rang out as if he had been born crooning, and he could not believe his ears. Here, in this dowdy Catholic school, lay a talent such as this. The owner of the Jazz Lounge knew music and he knew skill, and it wouldn’t take long to train that voice and musical flair, good enough for the stage. God darn it, Father, where have you been hiding this talent? This boy can sing. Voice like satin.
Get on that stage, Satin Boy. And for hell’s sake, remove that darn string from around your chest. You’re a grown man now, open up that shirt and show them your sweat, the women are going to lose their minds.
Ladies and Gentleman, may I present the latest singing sensation, from our very own streets, the handsome, the debonair, the Voice!
Satin is born. Sathie is gone.
Watch the ladies, they lose their senses, how they fall to the floor as Satin croons. During the day, they wear no gloves; their hands are filthy from sewing-machine oil, their hair matted from baking flour, their skin sallow dark from vegetable selling. At night, they enter Satin’s dreams, skirts and stockings, beauties they become.
They were nothing girls until Satin opened his mouth. Now, they faint away, they knock little pretty knocks in white gloves on secret doors—naked in his presence, but they never take the gloves away. Lest he hate their working-girl hands.
I love women. I adore them. I worship them as the deities, these Kalis, these Sarasvatis, these gold-laden Lakshmis. I croon their names; they forget their men, who work in fields, shops, and factories. I carry their broken little Durban dreams into the very stars of the night. Beneath me, even a cabbage seller is a queen.
Zenzi.