On those Sundays in simpler times, she’d wake to Nisa’s toes tickling her ear.
It followed invariably that her mother would toss off the gudrus, to expose the yinyang of their economy to the elements of raw morning and her not so dulcet tones.
“Get up you lazy things! Sunday! Mijwaan aawaano!”
‘But he comes every Sunday Ma!’
It was not long before little Zeenat and littler Nisa realised that Mijwaan was not a specific person, but encompassed a whole range of visiting aunties, uncles and cousins they had to get the house neat in time for.
Zeenat had never known a Sunday without a steady stream of family washing through their home on tides of tea and cold drink.
The families of Fifth street were all related by some link or two. Most shared a communal yard and those who didn’t, lived close enough to be just a few doors away. This meant that anyone’s guests were hosted by the entire neighbourhood.
And it was among the flotsam of fried samoosas that Zeenat got to know all her cousins and their cousins and their cousins.
These were her friends and cohorts. She holidayed at their homes in those bundu towns one usually drove through to get to somewhere that mattered, and she wrote letters to them when she returned home.
It didn’t matter if it was the half-sister of a third cousin related by marriage, everyone was family and that bond was concrete and came with obligation.
That was how Ridwaan ended up boarding at Aunty Khayroon’s. A tale followed him and his bags to Fifth street; a whispered bit of sordidness involving the young wife of a certain well-to-do back home. As the son of Khayroon’s second cousin’s husband’s nephew, she couldn’t refuse him a roof. She hoped the local girls would have better sense and heavier skirts.

 

—

A few months after her wedding, Zeenat had heard from Aunty Khayroon’s daughter-in-law that Ridwaan had crossed over the seas to the UK to work in a biscuit factory his uncle owned.
Some time after, she was told he was planning to return to South Africa and settle in Cape Town.
News of him petered off as the bonds lost their stretch to passing years and families relocating to suburbs many kilometres off from Papa Seedat sneezing and Uncle Joe saying yarhamukallah from four doors away.
In families trying to put more space around them, there was no preventing the spaces that had sprung up between them. That’s how Zeenat felt, anyway.
No one visited anyone anymore. Scattered phone calls, weddings, births and deaths afforded the only times to reconnect. That she had become something of a recluse didn’t help things along either. But that was out of her own sense of shame, what excuse did other people have?
Now, she slept in on Sundays; a luxury even her late mother had begun to appreciate in her advancing years.

—

When Shakira told her that Ismail’s parents would be coming over to visit on Sunday afternoon, Zeenat made sure she greeted the morning in good time. Her ear tingled uncomfortably from an accidentally slept-on folded pinna. This made her think of Nisa and her cheese-curl toes. She would call her sister after the visit. As adults, they made better friends.

She’d once confided in Nisa her concerns about Shakira
Her daughter never spoke about boys. No one called the house. There were no furtive midnight conversations on her cellphone. No one ever picked her up from a few blocks down so that her parents wouldn’t see. And it was not that they were too strict with their daughter. They believed they’d raised her with a decency and common sense that often eluded her peers. Shakira was not denied any freedoms. She just wasn’t interested.
‘Nisa, do you think Shakira could be gay?’
‘Hai, don’t say such things.’
Zeenat was used to living by tip-toe between eggshells. It did seem God had let her off too easy that time; a lesbian daughter would’ve been rather fitting.

–

(Part 7 to follow)

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