The World Unseen (3 page)

She had to make no effort to be quiet - she was naturally light in her movements. Anyway, it was time for her husband to get up, and he knew this, and slowly reconciled himself to the subtle shifts of his wife’s movements through the room, out into the cold bathroom and back through the hallway again, when he would hear her stop at the door of the children’s room, before she descended the stairs. In the early morning gloom of the kitchen, she could see that Robert, the boy whom Omar had hired to help in the shop, was already loading with coal the fire that would burn throughout the day in the stove. Robert looked around with a smile, the hessian sack of fuel still in his arms. It was mined nearby in Witbank, and was plentiful and cheap. Miriam wished him “Good morning” quietly, and not without some self-consciousness. She had been used to having help in her mother’s house while she was growing up, but that had been somehow different. Omar’s attitude to the Africans was always a little patronising, and often harsh. Giving sharp orders did not come naturally to Miriam, but he had told her to be firm with them, and she felt she must try.

The back door opened then and the night watchman came in. They had soon discovered that here in the country, just as in parts of Pretoria, a guard was necessary at night.

“The
kaffirs
,” Omar had said. “They would steal anything.”

So each evening, just as the shop was closing for the night, John would arrive, tall, heavy, his close shaved hair almost completely grey. She would see him approaching the shop twenty minutes before he actually arrived, having appeared over the horizon from some unknown place where she knew all the African people lived together. He would help Omar pull the display tables back into the shop from the porch, and his long, lean arms, though much older than her husband’s, made lighter work of securing the various padlocks. He would nod with deference at Miriam, but he was always consistent in politely turning down her shy offers of a drink or some food, until she came to see that she should not ask any more. He would settle down for the night then in his chair, on the edge of the
stoep
, before an old corrugated tin cylinder, in which several coals burned in an effort to stop him from freezing. Sometimes, if she was up late, sitting before the kitchen range sewing, Miriam would watch John as he paced before the window, and she would see the red of the coals, which hissed and spat now and then, especially if the wind blew. At intervals during the night, John would unwrap a cloth parcel, and take out a portion of
mealies
, the ground corn which she had found was as much a staple here as rice was back home. This he would turn slowly over the heat before eating it.

“How are you, John?” she asked.

“I am fine, madam, fine.” He watched Robert load the stove with the air of an interested uncle, and once he seemed satisfied that the boy was doing the job correctly, he turned to open the back door.

“I see you tonight, madam,” he said, and Miriam raised her hand goodbye.

Robert stirred at the coal for a moment more, before shutting the heavy black door.

“Shall I fetch the flour, Madam?”

She turned to him. He was fifteen years old, with a slight limp from some accident in his early childhood - when she had asked him about it, she had not been able to understand much of his English, accented in a different way to hers, and the details had been lost to her. He was a little smaller in height than she and had very shiny white teeth. She nodded and watched from the corner of her eye as he bent to the sack and measured out two cupfuls, and she marvelled again at the fiercely tight curl of his hair and the deep coffee colour of his skin, such a different shade to the ink black of John’s. She had never seen a black person in the first twenty years of her life.

“You must not be friendly with them,” her husband had told her. “If they think you are soft, they will take advantage. Make them work. That is what they are there for.” She had listened, and had had a hundred questions about “them” that she had not dared to ask her new husband, and so she had only nodded and agreed with him. Upstairs, she could hear the occasional creak of a floorboard and she knew that Omar was up, and that his unthinking, heavy steps would wake the children.

At least it was better than it had been in Pretoria. There had been no quietness there, early in the morning - or at anytime. At the very least, her
bhabhi
would be up with her, and the sound of her neighbours’ talk and their childrens’ wailing would penetrate the thin walls and come up from the streets outside. And then she had to feed and wash Omar’s sister Jehan, whose manic chatter and laughing always seemed to begin before any of them had fully woken.

She took the flour from Robert gratefully. At the front door, the boy found the milk which Mr Morris, the Coloured farmer whose smallholding was nearest to them, left there each morning. It sat in the darkness of the early morning, foaming and still a little warm. Robert carried in the big urn, with small quick steps, struggling beneath its weight. The milk smelt fresh, not sour, like the stale bottles they had shared in Pretoria. One of Miriam’s last tasks each night, after cooking, serving and clearing away the evening meal, after putting her children to bed, and after ironing Omar’s shirts, had been to make Jehan drink a glass of milk. Her brother-in-law had asked her to do it, in his blundering, well-meaning way, for he believed it would settle his sister’s mind before sleep, and his own wife rarely bothered to do as he wished. But Farah would always pour out the old dregs for Jehan, and Miriam had learned not to protest, or her own children would also be slipped the stale milk when she wasn’t looking. The smell of that milk, in Jehan’s darkened, stuffy room used to make Miriam feel sick. At those times, nauseous from lack of sleep and light-headed with hunger, she would remember what her mother had said when Miriam had been hesitant about Omar’s proposal of marriage.

“His parent’s are dead,” she had told her. “That will make your life easier, because no mother is ever happy with the girl her son marries. Go to South Africa with him and be thankful that no mother-in-law will ever make you work like a slave.”

No mother-in-law, perhaps, but Farah had worked hard at making her life miserable. At least John and Robert smiled at her now. Miriam watched the milk as it heated and recalled the time in Pretoria when no one had smiled at her for ten whole days.

She had known it was ten days because she had been counting in her head. The last person to smile at her had been the halal butcher when she had gone to his shop the previous Thursday. She had been back since then, and had hoped that the butcher would break the run of days that she had counted, but the man had been busy hacking at a fresh lamb carcass, and had barely acknowledged her.

Farah smiled now and then, but never, it seemed, with pure pleasure. There was inevitably some sense of superiority or a hint of triumph in her face whenever she smiled that made Miriam discount any show of teeth from her
bhabhi
.

“What are you doing with that meat? There won’t be anything left.”

Farah’s voice cut into her reverie and brought Miriam’s attention back to the pile of cubed mutton that lay before her. With deft strokes and pokes of her knife, Miriam was cutting away the edges of fat and removing all traces of sinew.

“My husband likes the meat to be clean,” Miriam replied. She had been scolded the previous week for leaving too much fat on the pieces of lamb that went into the curry.

“My husband likes it clean!” mimicked Farah. “Well,
my
husband likes to eat all the meat that he has paid for, and not to have it all cut up so there is nothing left.”

Miriam immediately put down her knife and began to pile the meat into a large bowl to be washed, before it was added to the onions that were already browning on the stove.

“Don’t worry,” she said quietly. “There will be enough for them.”

“Yes, but what about you and me?” asked her
bhabhi
.

Miriam rinsed the meat. She knew that Farah had never gone without her portion of anything, and that if there were a shortage, it would be Miriam herself who missed out.

“Maybe,” Miriam said quietly, “we should buy more meat and more flour for the
rotlis
…
”

“We don’t have money for anything more,” Farah said. “It’s amazing that I manage to put enough food on the table at all with what they give me.”

Miriam began to skin and chop the rotting tomatoes which Sadru brought back from the markets, and which were too soft for anything but cooking. She knew that Farah was lying and that she took part of each week’s housekeeping money to buy clothes and trinkets for herself and her children, but there was no way for Miriam to protest. Omar had refused to give his wife their share of the money – it was Farah that ran the house, he told her, and he did not want to cause problems.

Later that evening, while the men sat down to eat together at the table, Miriam quickly rolled out balls of loose, elastic dough into perfect circles. She picked them up lightly, passing them back and forth between her open palms, and placed them onto the hot cast iron pan. She waited patiently as they cooked, shifting from foot to foot to try and ease the pain behind her knees. She had been standing up since five thirty that morning. Only her few trips to the bathroom had given her a moment to sit down. She turned the
rotlis
now and then with fingertips that had long ago become accustomed to the heat of the stove’s flames. As soon as brown patches began to form and spread across the surface, the bread was removed from the pan, placed onto a plate, and the surface rubbed with butter. Whenever two or three were ready, she would carry them in, still hot, to the men, and to Farah, who had by now joined them.

“Come and eat,” Omar told her. Miriam nodded slightly, but before she could sit down, Jehan began calling out from her room. She screamed loudly, long delirious streams of words. The men looked up, but Farah continued eating.

“Have you fed her?” Omar asked. Miriam nodded, and went to see what hallucinations or dreams had disturbed her husband’s elder sister.

Jehan was easily placated for once. Miriam stayed with her for ten minutes, stroking her forehead and murmuring vague replies to the nonsense that she spoke. When she returned to the kitchen, Farah had already placed the empty dishes in the sink for washing. The serving plates were empty, so Miriam stood at the pot, and wiped the remaining sauce from the sides with a cold rotli and ate. Once again, nobody had smiled at her; not Omar when he arrived home from work – not even Sadru, who had a kind streak beneath his large, uncouth exterior, and who was often the most deferent to her. She pressed the aching lower part of her back. She had carried her son too much today, but he had been scared of Farah’s girl, older and tougher than he. She dreaded having to bring up Sam and Alisha amongst her sister-in-law’s badly behaved children, but she saw little way out. She had learned, though, through listening to the talk of other women, and from Farah herself, that there were ways to stop becoming pregnant, at least for a while. Omar’s demands on her had lessened as they both became more and more exhausted, but nevertheless she had been trying these since her second child had been born.

The following day, the oppressive atmosphere of the windowless bathroom was making Miriam feel nauseous again, as she moved over the floor with a scrubbing brush, her knees cold against the tiled floor. She worked quickly, and was almost at the door when it burst open, nearly hitting her in the face. She looked up. Farah’s eyes were wide, and her hands clapped together as she spoke.

“They said we can go! To the Bazaar café. For lunch!”

“Both of us?” Miriam asked, hardly daring to believe that she could be included in such a piece of good luck.

“All of us,” Farah replied, rolling her eyes. “They made me promise to take that lunatic. They want to give her an outing.” She turned to leave, stopping to glance back at Miriam once more.

“Hurry up!” she said. “Go and get her ready. I want to change.”

While Miriam dressed Jehan, she sang her a tune, a Hindi song from a film that had been popular years ago in Bombay. She smiled when she was finished, and Jehan laughed too, sensing a lightness of spirit that had not been felt in the house for months. For it was the first time since she had arrived in South Africa that Miriam would be eating a meal that she had not had a hand in preparing herself. She would be outside, without having to go shopping, or listen to the gossip of the women who were Farah’s friends and neighbours. And she would finally see Amina Harjan, the subject of so much of that gossip, for herself.

Miriam knew of her, of course; everybody did. For despite her lack of conformity, she was still Indian, still a very young unmarried girl, and her seemingly unlimited freedom and lack of concern for propriety was of great concern to everyone in the Asiatic Bazaar. Her way of dressing, the fact that she had just opened up her own business (“with a Coloured man”), even Begum’s photograph hanging proudly in the café - all these facts only fed the interest of those around her. They were appalled and horrified and shocked, but many began to patronise her café because they liked the food, they liked the atmosphere, and they liked the prices.