by Shamim Sarif
Chapter Nine
Miriam felt that she had been sleeping for only a few moments when she awoke and lay wide-eyed in her bed, straining to make out what it was that had roused her. The silence, perhaps? The rain had ceased, there was no longer any trace of it in the quiet that reigned. She sat up and listened for the baby, but there was no sound from the children.
Wide awake now, she lay in her bed for ten minutes more before she got up and slipped quietly down the stairs to the kitchen. She felt like some tea, but the stove was barely warm. She pulled a chair close to it, lit an oil lamp, and opened the book that Amina had given her. The pages fell open at a poem by John Keats. Miriam had seen nothing of his before, and began reading, slowly, pausing to savour each word, as though she were tentatively tasting a new kind of food, one that was unfamiliar but exquisite:
“My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense . . .”
Within moments she felt someone watching her. Instinctively she looked at the window, but John was pacing at the other end of the stoep; there was something else out there, though. She peered into the glass and saw a woman, insubstantial, suspended in the pane, and it took her a moment to realise that it was Amina’s reflection. Miriam turned her head and saw the girl standing at the foot of the stairs.
“You scared me!” Miriam said.
“Sorry. I heard you come downstairs, and I just thought I’d check everything was okay.”
Miriam pulled out another chair. “Everything is fine.”
“Do you often have trouble sleeping?” Amina asked.
“No,” replied Miriam. “I woke up when the rain stopped, I think.” She turned the oil lamp up further but the warm light could not illuminate much more than the small circle in which they stood, leaving the rest of the kitchen in a cold, blue darkness.
“Me too. But I don’t feel sleepy any more.”
“Good, then we can talk. I can ask you things.” Miriam put the sentence out into the cool air before she lost her nerve.
Amina sat down, a half-smile on her face. “What do you want to ask me?”
“So much. About your business, about your life.”
“What about your life?” Amina asked her.
“It’s not as interesting as yours.”
“It is to me,” the girl replied. “I already know all about my life.” She held her hands out to the poor warmth of the stove. “When did you come to South Africa?”
Miriam shut the poetry book and studied the cover.
“Just approximately,” added Amina, encouragingly.
“It would have been 1946. Just after I got married.”
Amina nodded. “Me too. January.”
“June,” said Miriam.
“So you saw the Indian Congress protests?” Amina asked, excited.
“Yes, did you?”
“I was there. Protesting the ghetto Bill. I’d sneaked off with some friends. My mother thought we were visiting their aunt in Durban. She never even read the newspaper, or she would have known.” She sat back and smiled. “It was an incredible time. My god, I was seventeen. A new country, a new world, and these terrible new laws—I thought we could overthrow the government in two weeks. I sat there every night, with the rest of the crowd, and wished they would choose me next to occupy that piece of land.”
“Umbilo road,” said Miriam. “I just stood and watched. I didn’t even know the significance of what was happening. It was our first evening off the boat from India. I was so tired and homesick and it seemed very frightening to me. That the government had just decided to take back land from people just because they were Indian and not White. And then all the police. The guns.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t imagine why my husband had brought me to such a place.”
“I suppose it was frightening, but I was young and it seemed exciting too. It’s only now, years later, that I look back and realise how much worse things have become.” Amina sighed slightly. “Are your parents still in India?”
“My mother is. My father died when I was a girl.”
“Were you close to him?”
Miriam’s face darkened. “Yes. More than with my mother anyway. He was a good man. He made sure I had a good education, even though we were not a very well-to-do family. He always said that girls should learn as well as boys, so as to be able to teach their own children. I appreciated that—my mother alone would not have done it.” She turned the book over in her hands.
“Do you miss India?” Amina asked.
“Not any more. I used to. I felt very alone and isolated when we came here.”
“Delhof is a small place,” Amina commented, but Miriam shook her head.
“Even before Delhof. Even when we lived in Pretoria with my in-laws.”
“That was when we met first, when you came to the café that day.”
“Exactly. Even then, I felt lonely. There was no one to talk to and everything was new to me. My husband was always out working and anyway, he does not like to talk much.”
“Your bhabhi?”
Miriam shook her head.
“So who do you talk to now?” Amina asked.
Miriam laughed. “I talk to you.”
“Tonight, maybe!” said Amina, smiling. “But otherwise?”
“My husband is around the shop all day. And my children are here too. Anyway,” Miriam said, shifting a little in her seat, “It’s different now. I’m used to it. I like it here. What about you?” she asked quickly.
“I love it here,” said Amina. “I left school when I was sixteen, and soon after that we came to Springs. My mother was born in South Africa, actually, but her mother brought her back to India when she was a baby.”
Miriam looked surprised. “So you have more family here?”
“Probably,” replied Amina. “But we don’t see them. Nor do they want to see us.”
“Why not?”
Amina looked at Miriam carefully. “My grandmother, Begum, was sent back to India to her family. They disowned her and my mother. You must have heard somebody’s version of it.”
Miriam hesitated.“I saw your grandmother’s picture in the café . . . I mean, there’s always the gossip, but I don’t like to hear it.”
Amina looked to the stove, as Miriam watched her. Was she looking for a way out of the conversation?
“Would you like some tea?” Miriam asked.
Amina nodded, reaching for the matches. Miriam moved to get up but a touch of Amina’s hand on her own stopped her. Her voice was soft and serious in the darkness.
“No, I’ll make the tea. I’ll make the tea for you. For Miriam, who is always making the tea for everyone else.” She struck the match, a dramatic hiss and burst of light in the dark. Leaning down, she applied it to the back of the stove. “Tell me, who looks after you, Miriam?”
Miriam’s head spun with the intimacy of the question, with its pure, direct pertinence. Disconcerted, her mind reeling, she looked down at her hands, still gripping the book of poems. Nothing could induce her to look up until she had recovered herself, at least a little. Beside her, the sound of Amina’s step, the grating noise of the kettle being placed on the iron stove top, the scrape of the chair as Amina sat down again—these were her focus. And then, the house was silent, except for the slow internal creaks of its wooden frame, and the occasional clink of an unseen pipe. She knew Amina was watching her.
“I’d like to tell you about my grandmother,” Amina said gently. “I think you’d understand why she is so important to me.”
“Is she still alive?” Miriam asked, able to glance up now.
Amina shook her head. “She died when I was sixteen. Cancer. She was tough about it though. She was already used to terrible pain, all through her life, in her back and legs, so when the cancer came, she didn’t even complain.”
“In the photo she seemed to be leaning on a chair,” Miriam said. “Did she have back problems?”
“Not till she was nineteen,” Amina replied.
“What
happened then?”
“The beatings.”
“Beatings?” Miriam shook her head. “But why?”
Amina passed her hands over her eyes. “I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you the story the way my grandmother told it to me when I was fifteen years old. And it begins with the beatings.”
Pretoria,
1892
Begum had ceased to feel anything at all after the eleventh or twelfth blow to her back. She lay sprawled on the floor, her body flat against the flagstones, where she had fallen after her knees had buckled finally against the cracks of the birch wood. After a while, all she could feel was the coldness of the stones against her stomach, which was pressed against them, exposed, her long blouse having ridden up at some point during the violence that had preceded this whipping.
Eventually she realised that she could not hear anything either, except that, when her mind drifted from the pain that shocked her body in a steady rhythm of beating, she could hear a gushing, liquid sound—but one that came from inside her head. She couldn’t hear their curses anymore; that much at least was a blessing. The words that had come from the mouths of her mother-in-law and her family had shocked her even more than the first blow they had cracked against the thin bones of her back as she turned away from them to attend to her new-born daughter. Slut, slut, whore, bitch, they had chanted as they moved in on her, taunting and angry. She had watched their gaping mouths forming the words and seen the glint of her mother-in-law’s gold fillings, and had moved back open-mouthed and frightened, her hands spread before her to protect her new baby.
It was the child that had started all the problems. She had given birth two weeks before in the upstairs room, with her mother-in-law and an African midwife in attendance. Neither had seemed much interested in the birth, and they had sat near her bed, their bodies listless in the humid evening, watching her as though she were a particularly unexciting exhibit in the zoo. Pushing and straining in the heat of the October night, she was only four hours into her labour when she had unexpectedly felt the slide of the baby’s head at the neck of her womb. The midwife had disappeared from her view, had pushed Begum’s knees farther apart, and seemed alert for the first time. She had pushed again, hard, an almighty effort that had almost made her pass out. When she had recovered she could hear the bawling of her new baby and she had seen the two women leaning over the child and looking. Her mother-in-law had frowned and left the room without a word, and she knew then that she had had a girl. She herself was happy. A girl was what she had wanted, and she lay there catching breaths and waiting, listening while the African woman wiped the child off with an old piece of sheet, and then she took into her hands the baby that was offered to her. The little girl was quiet now, and wrinkled, and her eyes were wide and dark with long lashes, like her mother’s. It was only later, when the afterbirth was washed fully from the child that Begum noticed the hair, dark and thick and curly. In a family of Indians, all of whom had thick, but irretrievably straight hair, a child with curly hair was an oddity. Begum’s stomach had turned when she noticed this, and she held the baby closer to her for a few minutes, her eyes closed, refusing to think about what the reason for this curly hair might be. Then, with sudden resolution, she had held the baby away from her and examined her carefully. The baby’s complexion seemed dark, too, darker than her own or her husband’s. One of the main reasons that Begum had married so well at the age of fifteen before being sent to South Africa with her new husband was that her skin was so fair. A prized asset, to look so white. A good thing to pass on to one’s children. She was nineteen now, and had produced her second child. The first-born had been a son, and they had all been happy about that. But her husband disliked the idea of daughters and had told her early on that he wished to have only boys. It was a good sign to have boys, and he was working here in a new country and he needed help from his children in the future. She had nodded to his beard—so as to be respectful she very rarely looked him directly in the eyes—and she wondered privately what she could possibly do to arrange such a thing. Her mother-in-law had prayed over her swollen stomach during both pregnancies, but it seemed that the second time, the heavens had not been listening.
With gentle fingers, she touched her daughter’s curls and began to cry silently. She had buried away this possibility nine months ago, when it had happened. She had buried it so deeply that in her mind it was almost as though it hadn’t occurred; it had become to her a terrible story that she might have heard in relation to a stranger. But she knew that she had changed, or rather that she had been altered by the incident. She had become nervous all the time, more afraid of the dark and of being outside, even during the day. She even had nightmares sometimes; they were unclear and relived nothing obvious, but sometimes when she woke from them, intermingled with the taste of relief in her mouth was the acrid, sweet taste of that rough skin against her gums. He had pressed the heel of his hand hard into her mouth so she would not scream, and then he had pulled up her clothing with quick, violent movements. He had been working in the yards of her husband’s new warehouse, picking up the huge crates of hardware and loading them with his trolley, and sometimes he helped with painting and cleaning and other odd jobs. That was all she knew, for she had never noticed this African employee of her husband’s more than any of the others, until he was suddenly there upon her in the corner of the deserted warehouse, with his muscled arm against her ribs and throat so that she could hardly breathe. She had felt him fumbling with his trousers and then pushing into her. He need not have even bothered to cover her mouth—she was too shocked to speak, to say a word. Her struggling body was pressed back against something—piles of sacking she had thought afterwards—and her limbs strained uselessly under his weight.
She had cried continuously afterwards, not hysterical, but helpless. There was nothing she could do, and no one she could tell. Even if they believed she had been raped, she would be worthless to her husband now, a damaged thing, and she would be sent back to India. Perhaps they would want to keep her son as well. She could not speak of it, and so she spent the night blocking the thing that had happened from her mind, and wondering if there was some way she could ask her husband to fire the African. As it turned out, she did not have to—the next day he did not come to work, or the day after, and after five days her husband hired another man, cursing under his breath the unreliability of kaffirs.
As her young, coltish body began to fill out again, she worked hard to keep the rape and the possible consequences from entering her mind. But now she sat in her bedroom with a child that did not look like her husband, and she rocked herself back and forth, and pulled at the baby’s hair with gentle fingers praying that they would not notice.
They did notice, within the space of a fortnight. Her confinement was over, and she was up and around in the kitchen when she heard her husband and brothers upstairs, talking together in undertones, and she knew instinctively that she was the subject of their discussion. They said nothing to her that night, and although her husband hit her once, he did not directly accuse her of anything. But the accusations came quickly the following day and she defended herself as best she could; she swore to them that two of her grandparents had had curly hair, that the child was his, how else could it be? They did not listen, only cursed her and told her she would have to go back to her own family and then the beating began.
So it was that she came to be lying face down on the floor of the kitchen, with the pain of the sticks no longer felt. She rolled her eyes, looking up at the wall before her, and then she used them to look down at the stone floor beneath her, simply to feel that some part of her body were still within her own control, even if it were only her eyeballs. She felt her mouth opening, and words coming out, a weak protest perhaps, a pleading to stop, and then she felt a wave of tension leave her body and she realised, helplessly, but with some relief, that she was about to pass out.
When she had stopped moving altogether, they stopped hitting and
looked at the inert girl lying on the floor and thought for the first time that they might have in fact killed her.
“She’s strong,” said her mother-in-law, spitting onto the floor. “She will get up.”
They all accepted this remark as a kind of absolution, and they left the kitchen, passing her husband, who came in from the dining room where he had been sitting, motionless, for the last twenty minutes. He looked down at his wife’s beaten body. She was only nineteen years old, and now more than ever looked like a child, curled motionless on the floor. He made a half-hearted gesture to the young maid, who acknowledged him with a slight nod, waiting while he followed his family back out.
Once they were alone, the maid knelt beside the girl and tentatively touched her forehead. She could hear her mistress breathing still, and was relieved. She did not know what to do—calling a doctor without the permission of her master was out of the question—so she just knelt there and waited, stroking the head of the injured woman and murmuring softly into her ear.
Four weeks later, Begum sat on the edge of the bed, with some difficulty because of the pain in her back and ribs, and regarded her suitcase without much feeling. She had always known that her personal possessions were few, but she was still shocked that everything that could rightfully be considered her own after four years in South Africa could fit easily into one medium-sized case. Her children, thank god, were hers. For them she had fought tooth and nail in the last month, while her husband’s family had refused, and then argued and then bargained with her. She had watched them make her travel arrangements back to India, had watched them pack up her things, and she had become almost deranged from fatigue and from the unending pain in her back and stomach. She wondered continually what parts of her body they had broken with their sticks, and whether she would ever be free of the throbbing pain that consumed her nights and days. Through it all, however, she had fought against them and she had sworn on her own mother’s life that she would not leave if she were not allowed to take her children with her. They offered her the curly-haired girl at once—it was only her son that they wanted—but she refused to leave him, and did not listen to their shouts and arguments that she had no right to refuse. She continued to resist, until her mother-in-law gave in to her one day with surprising grace, confirming that she could take both of her children, but stipulating that she must go back to India without further delay or further demands. She agreed, relieved at the outcome, for she knew that she had no real rights under the religious laws that governed her marriage, and she had prayed hard that night for the first time in two years, a prayer of thanks to god for letting her keep her children.