The World Unseen (2 page)

Chapter Two

T
HE FIRST TIME
that her father’s mother saw Amina Harjan she nearly fainted. The elderly woman’s arrival in South Africa from India had caused a commotion in the Harjan household which seemed to affect everyone except her only granddaughter. It would probably have made a difference to Amina too, were it not for the fact that she was simply not there, and could not be found. She was away “working” for a few days she had said in the scrawled, barely legible note that she had left for her parents on their kitchen table, and since her family rarely knew the full nature or location of the various odd jobs that she took on from time to time, no-one could find her. This was not usually a cause for much concern to her father, who, unlike every other man of his age and background, had let his daughter do very much as she pleased since they had arrived in Springs several years ago. Amina’s mother was a meek, stunted woman, and her worry was silent, spoken only by the permanent lines between her eyebrows and on her small forehead. It was she who understood most the complications to their routine lives that her mother-in-law’s impending arrival would bring, and she went to the unusual trouble of leaving her kitchen and asking for her daughter at the café in Pretoria, about an hour’s drive from their family home in Springs. Jacob Williams offered Mrs Harjan some tea, and listened to her politely, but explained that he had heard nothing of Amina for three days, because she had taken a taxi job, driving two people on the long journey from Johannesburg to Cape Town.

“She’ll be back soon, lady,” he said, using the deferent form of address common to the Cape Coloured community. He smiled encouragingly at the worried mother. “She always comes back soon. Always.”

Although she did arrive back soon, she did not arrive back in time, and so the old lady was picked up by her son alone; not the effusive, crowded family welcome that she had spent her long and often sickening voyage imagining. Mr Harjan was a worn, transparent-looking man, whose gaunt frame looked almost emaciated in his baggy work clothes. He met the train slightly late, and found his mother rooted to the end of the platform, surveying the dusty station and the milling Africans with distaste. He greeted her without much enthusiasm, as though he had just seen her the day before, and installing her in his rattling car, drove back to his house without expression, and with little awareness of his enormous mother’s discomfort, as though he had just picked up a package of no consequence. Her repeated listing of her ailments passed over his head like a cloud of gnats, irritating, but of little ultimate concern.

During that first day, the old lady claimed her place in the household, effacing any remaining trace of her son and daughter-in-laws’ personalities, and firmly imposing her own. She sat in the small parlour, in her son’s armchair, as if sitting in state, and began to receive all her family and neighbours - graciously, but not without ensuring they understood the favour she bestowed by meeting them. Her concern at the absence of her granddaughter had been considerable, but her enquiries as to her whereabouts were met with such vague uncertainty from the parents that she had contented herself with a short lecture and left it at that. Two days later, Amina arrived.

The old lady heard an engine cut out abruptly outside the front door, and from her seat near the window, she pulled back the greying net curtain that hung limply over the pane and looked out. She could not make out much, but something made her stare hard at the girl who jumped down from the small pick-up truck that stood outside, and she watched as the mother hurried out of the back door, and whispered urgently to her daughter and gestured to the house. She saw Amina nod and smile and watched her unload something – it looked like bags of flour - from the car and hand them to the maid, Rosemary, who came out smiling to greet her. Amina then handed Mrs Harjan two dresses, holding them out against her mother, who folded them quickly over her arm. The old lady frowned - what did she need new dresses for? She sat back in her armchair, a frown of consternation upon her round face, as Amina strode up to the house, and through the screen door. She walked in and her grandmother saw that she wore what appeared to be a pair of her father’s old work trousers, some braces and a collarless shirt. She wore also a wide-brimmed hat, pushed back on her high forehead so that it held back most of the long, black curls that otherwise tended to fall about her face. She looked like one of the Boer farmers who came to her father’s filling station to buy petrol for their trucks.

“God forgive us,” the old lady whispered to herself. The girl had never looked entirely demure or docile in India, but this was something else. The mask of horror hardened over her face, so that when Amina entered the room, tall and smiling, she stopped short, appalled at her grandmother’s expression. She followed the woman’s gaze and immediately understood, of course, that the offence lay in her clothing, her attitude, her way of carrying herself. Amina had spent the last six years of her life in this place living in accordance with her own wishes, and her parents seemed, if not understanding, then at least accepting of their only daughter’s wish for freedom. They had been worn down over a period of years, their best efforts to contain Amina having come to nothing even when she was a child. As a toddler in India, her mother would lose her at least once or twice a day. The house would be searched, the maid and the nanny would be questioned, the small garden scoured, and eventually the child would be found, exploring some new place, smiling and nodding her curly head at the relieved women who surrounded her. Only one maid, a young bright girl of nineteen, who shimmered with as much energy as the toddler, could ever keep up with her. But she had only stayed with the Harjans for a year, before eloping with a neighbouring house-boy, and after that, no-one could control Amina. She was not a naughty child - any sense of deviousness or guile was alien to her; but her energy and curiosity were insatiable, and her quiet parents seemed slowly to fade away under the questioning mind and irrepressible movement of their growing daughter.

“You should have been born a boy,” her mother had told her wearily, more than once, and this comment had puzzled the girl, and hurt her. She thought deeply about it, as she thought about everything. She liked to play sports with the boys at school, and she was good at her schoolwork - when it held her attention - and she wanted to work at a business or a trade when she grew up. Why were these attributes only fit for a boy? Finishing school in order to get married made no sense to her, nor did it hold much appeal, and as ingrained as it was into the consciousness of everyone around her, it was still almost beyond her comprehension. She felt at times that she was living in a different universe, breathing a different atmosphere from other people, and as she grew up she found her refuge in work and in books. She would do any odd jobs that she could find, though only within her parent’s house – there was no scope for her to take on manual work elsewhere – and when the house and garden were in perfect condition, she read. Tattered old novels, poetry and biographies followed each other on a dancing course through her consciousness and imagination, and with each one her awareness of the world and its variety and breadth increased.

She had finally left school at the age of sixteen, because her father had decided to emigrate. For years, he had heard stories from other families of the great opportunities in South Africa, but even as he worked at a poor accounting job he despised, he dared not bring up the idea of moving there, not while his mother-in-law was alive. He knew well that she still carried the scars of her time there, in the misshapen, bruised bones of her body, and in the brutal, battered memories of her mind. Amina had learned much from Begum, most of it knowledge or advice that few other women of her grandmother’s age had dared to even learn themselves, much less impart to an impressionable young girl. Her maternal grandmother spoke to her of pride, of self-reliance, and of courage. These were the things to cultivate, she had told her granddaughter, and not a slavish attitude to duties and traditions that were built on subservience and pain and fear.

Amina knew this advice to be good, for it appealed to her natural sense of integrity and justice, but her admiration was as yet abstract, for she had never experienced the horrors of which her grandmother spoke. So, a few months after Begum’s death, when her father decided that they should leave for South Africa, Amina felt no particular excitement at the idea, nor was she unhappy. The misery that her grandmother had endured was something she respected, but Amina knew that she could not hate a whole country on someone else’s behalf, even Begum’s. At the age of seventeen, the distant future was no more than six months ahead, and in six months all she knew was that she would be halfway through an ocean voyage to Africa with her parents.

On the morning that they had docked she had stood almost alone on the upper deck at daybreak, and had watched the coastline rise up from nowhere, out of the ocean, as clean and as bright as the edges of a map, and she smiled to see it. She could make out little then except the golden rim of the beaches, but they seemed to be unending, and at once she had felt at home, released, able to breath, and her innate confidence had combined with this immediate empathy for the country they were now approaching, and had given her a strength of purpose that nobody could contain. Her parents had very soon stopped trying. The cursory, half-hearted attempts they had made in India to try to make their daughter conform to accepted conventions fell away completely in South Africa. The family went directly from Durban to Pretoria, but they did not remain among their own people in the Asiatic Bazaar; instead they chose a house and a business - a garage and gas station - outside Pretoria, in Springs, where the pressures of conformity were largely removed from Amina’s father. Her mother was thrown into a life harder than they had been used to in India. Her weekly housekeeping money had to be carefully counted now, and there were no live-in maids - only Rosemary, the daily help who would not always work as she should. And Amina, instead of helping her mother in the kitchen, usually ended up working with her father in the garage. Mrs Harjan could do nothing but watch worriedly as her daughter pumped gasoline, cleaned windshields, and generally fell into her own life in this new place. This untried and often wild country fitted Amina like a well-cut suit of clothes, and it was this ease and confidence of hers, that had by now been built up over a period of years, that so disturbed the grandmother who now sat before her. Amina was entirely lacking in any semblance of the expected attributes of docility and of self-effacement - and although her grandmother understood none of this, and thought that it was the trousers and braces that appalled her, it was really her granddaughter’s attitude and bearing that affronted her most.

The old lady did not actually faint, however. In fact, she recovered very quickly, with the main points of her lecture to her son and his wife (whom was mostly to blame, she was sure) already taking shape in her head. Right at that moment, though, before she could say anything at all to Amina, the girl extricated herself. She was, by now, quite used to these kinds of reactions, particularly from her elders, and her methods of dealing with them had gradually eased from anger and self-defence, until they had reached the kind of polite removal that she now effected.

Amina immediately took a step back, removed her hat, and welcomed her grandmother with a few formal and correct Gujerati words of greeting. Then her hat was back upon her head, and before the old lady could even respond, she was closing the screen door behind her.

“God forgive us,” her grandmother breathed again, as though exorcising a horrible spectre. She stood up uncertainly and moved as quickly as she was able to the curtain over the door. By the time she had pulled it aside and peered through the hazy glass, her granddaughter was gone, and all that remained of her was a set of tyre tracks and a whirl of dust that sat for a moment in the air and then fell slowly to the earth.

During that first year in the countryside, when she lay in bed at night, Miriam’s head would ache with the silence. It was so large, and it seemed to come sweeping down from the sky, like something cold and solid. Especially now, in the winter. No insects or crickets to scrape even a hollow hole in the wall of quiet. Then Miriam would close her eyes tightly, and force herself to listen to Omar’s breathing, to the deep, fierce sleep of the man lying beside her. The slow rasp, the sliding of a head on a pillow - in the long night she fell upon these sounds like a beggar on a shower of coins.

At five or five thirty she would rise from the bed, often awake before the early morning light or the insistent crow of the cockerel on the farm next to them. She had always woken early as a girl in India, but this pre-dawn habit had only formed after she had married and come to live with her in-laws in Pretoria. Although Omar’s strong self-assurance meant that he generally took charge of his family, his brother Sadru was older, and so Farah, his wife, took precedence over Miriam in the subtle hierarchy of women in the house. Omar’s sister would have been above them both, but she was slow-witted and sick, and Farah easily controlled her by slapping and hitting. Miriam disliked Farah’s bossy attitude and lazy ways, but she had had no choice but to accept them and to make up for her
bahbhi’s
shortcomings by working even harder in the kitchen. Every morning she was forced out of bed at five o’clock to start preparing the dough for the breakfast
rotlis
. With a shake of her head Miriam put aside the recollection and slipped out of bed.