African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441) (16 page)

F
ARIDA
K
ARODIA

Farida Karodia was born in 1942 in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. She taught in Johannesburg, Zambia, and Swaziland, but while she was teaching in Zambia in 1968, she learned that she had been exiled by the South African government and emigrated to Canada. In 1994, she was able to return to South Africa, and she currently divides her time between those two nations. In India, in 1993, she wrote and produced
Midnight Embers,
a half hour television drama that won awards at three international film festivals. Her novels include
Daughters of the Twilight
(1986) and
Boundaries
(2003).
Coming Home
(1988),
A Shattering of Silence
(1993),
Against an African Sky
(1997) and
Other Secrets
(2011) are collections of short stories.

Cardboard Mansions

(1988)

“C
hotoo! Eh Chotoo!”

“Ja, Dadi-Ma?” the boy cried from the far side of the yard.

“Don't ja Dadi-Ma me! Come here!” the old woman called from the stoep. Leaning over the low abutment wall, she craned to peer around the corner but her view was obstructed by a pile of rubbish. She stepped back, knocking over the chipped enamel pail which was normally kept beside her bed at night. The empty pail rolled out of reach, clattering against the wall.

She waited for the boy, pulling the end of the faded green cotton sari over her head. Her wide, flat heels hung over the back of the blue rubber thongs almost two sizes smaller than her feet.

Dadi-Ma looked much older than her seventy-three years. She was a tall, heavily built woman with slow, tired movements. Her dark brown eyes were set deep in a face scored and marked with age and hardship. The gap in the front of her mouth was relieved only by three stumps of rotted teeth, bloodily stained by betel-nut.

In her youth she had been much admired for her beauty, with her dark lustrous eyes like those of a young doe. But there was no one left to remember her as she'd been then. Sonny, the youngest of her sons, and her grandson, Chotoo, were the only surviving members of her family. Three of her sons and her husband, like so many of the men who had toiled in the sugarcane fields, had all died of tuberculosis.

And now the only ones left to her were her grandchild, Chotoo, and her friend Ratnadevi. Dadi-Ma in her old age was left to gaze upon the world with the patient endurance of the old water buffalo they had once owned in India.

The boy, Chotoo, took a long time coming. His grandmother waited, her broad, varicose-veined feet and legs planted astride. A rip in her sari revealed a discoloured slip, unadorned and frayed. Her dark eyes stared out from under thick brows, slowly gathering in impatience.

“Chotoo!” she called again and sat down on the step to wait.

 

* * *

The row of shanties was all connected. At one time they had served as a shed, but an enterprising landlord had used sheets of corrugated iron to divide the shed into stalls which he rented to the poor. All the dividing walls stopped at least twelve inches short of the ceiling.

On Saturday night when Frank Chetty beat his wife, Nirmala, her cries swirled over the heads of the other tenants. Some ignored them. Others were just grateful that they were not in Nirmala's shoes. Dadi-Ma's daughter-in-law, Neela, had once remarked to their neighbour, Urmila, that no matter what Sonny was guilty of, this was one thing that he had not yet stooped to.

“Just you wait and see,” Urmila said. “It'll happen when Sonny loses his job.”

But even when Sonny lost his job he never raised a hand to his wife. Chotoo, however, was not so lucky and in his short life had been slapped many times, often for no apparent reason. Despite this, Dadi-Ma's pride in her son remained undiminished. She could hold up her head and say that he had never lifted a hand to his wife or his mother.

It had come as a terrible blow to Dadi-Ma when Neela had died in childbirth three years ago, leaving Sonny with the boy, Chotoo. But Sonny was hardly ever around and everything had fallen on her shoulders. Somehow they managed. Even when Sonny lost his job they still managed. Dadi-Ma used many of the ideas she had picked up from Ratnadevi who had a real knack for making do.

But eventually Sonny had fallen in with a bad crowd and everything seemed to come apart. Now there was a new element in their struggle, one that caused Dadi-Ma a great deal of anxiety. As Sonny was jobless, there was not a penny coming in any more, yet all weekend long Sonny smoked dagga. Sometimes he drew the reefers through a broken bottleneck making himself so crazy that he'd end up running amok with a knife. At times like these Dadi-Ma and Chotoo had to hide from him until the effects of the dagga wore off.

Without means to pay the rent there was constant friction between himself and the landlord. Sonny, desperate and irritable, pleaded with the landlord until they reached a state of open hostility. The tenants were all drawn into this conflict, all except Dadi-Ma. She alone remained aloof and detached. Sitting on the concrete step in front of their room, she listened in silence to the two men arguing when the landlord came to collect the rent. Sonny's response was always wild and abusive. Although she was afraid that he would harm the landlord, she remained impassive.

The landlord, Mr. Naidoo, grew to resent the old woman. He thought that her silence was a way of showing contempt for him. Who was she to judge him, a man of means and property? He often wondered as he drove off in his Mercedes why it was that she never said anything. What thoughts crossed her mind as she sat there, implacable as a stone Buddha? In the end he grew to hate the old woman.

Then one day the inevitable happened: Sonny got into a drunken brawl and stabbed someone. He was arrested, sentenced and thrown into jail. Mr. Naidoo saw his opportunity to evict the old woman, but he hesitated, fearing censure from the other tenants, some of whom had contributed to help Dadi-Ma with her rent. He knew, though, that this situation could not continue indefinitely. Those who had supported her were themselves experiencing difficulty. So he bided his time.

It happened that a few months later the old woman fell so far behind with her rent that the others could no longer assist her. Now at last Mr. Naidoo could exercise his rights; he gave Dadi-Ma her notice.

She was devastated. She had tried so hard to keep the roof over their heads. There was nothing for her to do now but pack their few possessions. They would have to move, but where to? she fretted. Dadi-Ma's concern was more for her grandson than for herself. She did not have many more years left, but what would happen to this boy who was only starting out in life?

* * *

“What took you so long, hey?” Dadi-Ma demanded, feigning severity when the boy finally joined her.

He shrugged, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, emulating the cockiness of the older boys who hung out in the alley. She tousled his hair and he sat down on the step beside her, pressing close to her side where he felt safe and secure.

For a time they sat like this in silence, the boy content with this closeness while his grandmother brooded about the past and the problems which were driving them into the unknown. Her mind moved slowly and ponderously, like an ox picking its way over the stones, lingering on the good times.

Lately her thoughts had started returning to those happy years—to Ratnadevi and Stanger. The two women had shared a friendship that went back a long way. They had arrived on the same boat from India to marry two indentured labourers on the sugarcane fields in Natal. They had lived in the same compound, as close as sisters, sharing in each other's joys and tragedies.

“Why you like the skollies?” the old woman asked the boy, adjusting the sari over her head. “They no good.”

“Why you say that, Dadi-Ma?” he asked. His enormous brown eyes turned up to her questioningly.

He was so young, she thought, how could he understand that she wanted him to make something of his life? How could he understand that if he didn't try, this was all he had to look forward to?

“Because they bad. They smoke dagga. You best go to school so you can be something, hey?” she said in her broken English.

“We don't do nothing wrong, Dadi-Ma, we just sit out there bullshitting.”

The old woman shook her head wearily.

“They say old man Naidoo going to throw us out. Where we going to go, Dadi-Ma?”

Dadi-Ma felt a deep attachment to her grandson. She had been drawn to him from the moment he was born. It had been Dadi-Ma who took care of him right from that first day, not his mother who was too tired and sickly to care. From Chotoo came the only warmth and caring that life still apportioned to her. All that the boy had known of love and tenderness came from her; not from his mother, whom he could not remember. It was a bond that neither had words for. The only expression Dadi-Ma ever gave her grandson of her feelings was a rare and awkward pat on his cheek, or the tousling of his hair with her arthritic fingers.

The boy, undernourished and small for his age, with eyes as large and expressive as hers had once been, was conscious of his grandmother's love. The others, like his parents, had deserted him. But not her. She was the fulcrum in his fragile existence.

“I was thinking, Chotoo, maybe you and me, we go to Stanger. It will be a good place for us. This place is no good,” she muttered.

“Where is Stanger, Dadi-Ma?” he asked, his voice catching in breathless excitement.

“It's not so far away.”

“How will we go . . . by car, by train?” he asked, in his shrill little voice.

She nodded, smiling down at him. “We go by train.”

Dadi-Ma had saved some money for just such an emergency. The money, fifty rands, was what she had amassed in her long lifetime. Money that she had artfully secreted. Many times the money had gone for some other emergency but somehow she had always managed to replace it. Sometimes it had been slow to accumulate: money from the sale of a few pieces of gold jewellery brought with her from India, a few cents here and there from what she could scrimp out of the money Sonny had given her to buy food and clothes in the good old days when he still had a job.

These savings were all that stood between them and destitution now. The previous night she had removed the money from its hiding place beneath the linoleum under her bed, and in the dim light of the lamp she had counted it carefully, stacking the small coins in even piles, smoothing out the crumpled notes. Then she had returned it to the hiding place for safekeeping.

After a while Chotoo started fidgeting and wriggled out from under her arm.

“You don't tell nobody,” Dadi-Ma warned him. “If old man Naidoo find out he make big trouble for us.”

Chotoo nodded. Despite his age, he understood. “Can I go and play now, Dadi-Ma?”

“Ja, you go and play, but you remember what I tell you.”

“I won't tell nobody, Dadi-Ma.”

She nodded and he sauntered off to the side of the house where the dagga smokers hung out. She watched him go, legs thin and scaly, the knobbly knees protruding just below his short trousers, his feet rough and thickened from going barefoot.

The tenement somehow always reminded Dadi-Ma of the quarters they had once occupied on the sugarcane plantation. There she and her husband had lived in a barracks with dozens of other workers, separated from the rest by paper-thin walls, or frayed curtains. In summer the windowless barracks were like ovens and then when the rains came it was like the monsoons in India, lasting for weeks and turning the compound into a quagmire.

Further north along the east coast was the town of Stanger where Ratnadevi had eventually moved after her husband died. His death had released Ratnadevi and her family from the contract which had bound them to the plantation. When Dadi-Ma's own husband had died and Sonny had run off to the city, Dadi-Ma had also moved to Stanger to live with Ratnadevi.

She remembered every detail so clearly. The wooden shack set back from the road amidst a clump of mango, banana and litchi trees. There had been an abundance of everything on that small piece of property; even the birds flocked to feed off the ripening fruit. It was indeed a wonderful sight and one that Dadi-Ma had cherished since that time.

She had never been happier than during those days with Ratnadevi in that old shack in Stanger. The two of them had managed by taking in laundry from the white people, most of whom were English-speaking. They also used to weave baskets which they sold in the local community, or peddled in the marketplace where Ratnadevi had a hawker's barrow.

The house was at the end of a gravel road. It was the last house on the street with a larger corner lot where parts of an old picket fence still stood. On windy nights they could hear the pickets clattering and rattling against each other. Each sound had its own particular significance and was like music to Dadi-Ma's ears. Some nights when it was very quiet she imagined she could hear the strains of a flute, the same poignant sounds made by Manu, the confectioner in her village in India, when he sat on the front step of his hut playing to the night.

From one of the big trees in the front yard hung a swing carved from an old tyre. There had been enough room for a large garden and the eggs produced by the hens were taken to the market each day. Dadi-Ma learnt a great deal about survival from the years she had spent there.

Then to interrupt this happiness, something unexpected had happened which irreversibly altered the tempo of her life. Sonny, who had married and moved to Port Elizabeth, sent for her. He was her son; her only son, how could she have refused him? Without the slightest hesitation, Dadi-Ma packed her few belongings and went to live with her son and Neela, her daughter-in-law. Neela, she found, was a frail and sickly girl who was unable to withstand the rigours of married life. Dadi-Ma took care of them all.

Several years went by and to Dadi-Ma's dismay her daughter-in-law, Neela, had still not produced a child. For reasons that Dadi-Ma did not understand the young girl could not carry a single pregnancy to its full term, miscarrying each after only four months.