Fatima and Shakes had first met
officially when Shakes had been offered a place to stay at a local residence,
near the cricket grounds, in Lenz. He
stayed with Suleiman, who was responsible for tending the local cricket
pitch. Suleiman was a man who had taken
his role so seriously that he guarded his front lawn like it was his own
personal cricket pitch experiment, his laboratory. His main thesis was that the pitch should be
grown with the surface unbroken, from the very start. Nobody was allowed to walk on his lawn with
shoes, and sometimes even going barefoot in a careless manner could warrant a
bark from Suleiman. The only sentient
beings he preferred on his lawn were birds, especially pigeons. Each afternoon he would scatter the
remaining day’s crumbs from the breadbin out to them.
“Pigeon shit, very good for the
soil dikrah. Like gold it is!”
This lawn was his pristine
experiment, his baseline from which all other pitches could be judged, a
perfect, pristine, unused and never to be used cricket pitch lying on a thin
strip of grass in front of a council house in Lenz, an unlikely location for
such a rare item indeed.
When his grandchildren would
later in life arrive to visit him from Durban they would rush across the lawn,
ecstatic to see their grandparents. His
voice would boom loudly (but not un-lovingly) as he would sit up, one hand in
the air, finger pointing to the sky,
“Not on the lawn, dikrah, not on the lawn!”
To which Shakes would mutter
under his breath in Gujerati and roll his eyes skyward,
“Kassam thi, maro warso gah na niche
che!”
(“I swear my inheritance lies
under that lawn!”)
Shakes was impressed by the man
though, and thought his eccentricity a sign of independence, of not wanting to
fit into the stereotypes imposed upon a whole generation of older men. Suleiman had always wanted a cricketer for a
son, and having Shakes, a virtual prodigy, in his home, delighted him.
He would tire Shakes with
questions, comments and remonstrations about cricket but Shakes would always
pay him his due respect and made him feel valued. It was deeply ingrained in Shakes to pay
respect to his elders – their family was based upon these hierarchies and they
preserved the role of everyone within them.
Suleiman could sense that Shakes had come from a good family, which had
its history intact, not the fragmented existence that had been his own. Even though he knew his history the lack of a
living extended family meant that he was somehow without a history.
Fatima served them tea and
biscuits and later cool-drinks in the living room while her father and Shake’s
spoke. She was quiet and very much in awe
of him. She couldn’t believe that he was
actually in her home and was deeply infatuated from the start. It is reasonable; he was a superstar at 22,
having already established himself at provincial level and abroad as one of the
finest cricketers in the country.
Newspapers followed his progress and women adored him. She was a 15 year old girl coming of age,
beginning to understand her own womanhood and he was a catalyst to her. Her skin would feel his nearness to her, the
warmth from his body and she would feel warm inside. At the time, Shakes was 22 and Fatima 15,
seven years between them. It may seem a
large amount of time between them, but it was not out of place then, and she
looked older than she was. She was
already very attractive, and perhaps there was also the Lolita appeal for
Shakes in having a woman much younger than him.
She was still a girl, but he saw more in her.
When he had four front teeth
knocked out by a well hit ball into his face at silly point he had only grabbed
his mouth with one hand and hung his head to the side. He was like a wounded animal that didn’t know
how bad the injury really was. He just
moved off to the side to show his face to the wicket-keeper who was running
over when he removed his hand and saw the blood. Then the pain hit him. Until then everything was in slow motion but
now he could hear the exclamations of pain around him and started to feel the
looseness and dull ache of his gums, blood filling his mouth up, forcing him to
bow down on one leg and release the thickened red spittle onto the grass. Lying in them, like newfound pearls, were his
teeth.
“Fuck!” he thought, “what now
eh? Better not lose the teeth.”
By now everyone had rushed over
and team-mates were consoling him and organising help for him.
“Was there a doctor on the
field?”
“Where’s he?”
“Oh, call that fullah then,
that one who said he knows Chookie bhai!”
He could sense confusion
amongst them, and with some help started to make his way up from his knees and
started to move off the field. He didn’t
want to hold up the game and make a drama of it. These things happened. He would take many full blows to the mouth in
his career, some from his trusted peers, but most from the apartheid state
sporting machines and white press, which sought first to buy him out, and then
to diminish him when he refused their offers of concession to him. He didn’t want to be seen as ‘special’. Like Suleiman, he was also infected with the
idea of equality.
When he looked up from his
pearls amidst the ground there was a now familiar voice;
“Shakes - you alright?”
“Here, let me get those for
you,” she said, reaching down into his pool of spittle and blood with her
feminine henna framed fingers and quite matter of factly grabbing the loosened
teeth out of them.”
“My fathers friend Johnny-Bhai
will take you to the doctor. There’s one
just around the corner and he’s still open.
Don’t worry; he’s got a dentist next door so they can both have a look
at you.”
She said it so matter of factly
that he obeyed her without thinking. He
didn’t even stop to think that she wasn’t supposed to be there at all. He took it in his stride and let himself be
led by her off the field. He thought,
“She’s quite grown-up for such
a young-one!”
It was a pattern in their
relationship. Where he was strong, she
was weak and where he weakened she grew to great strength. They would grow into an eternally locked
dance of the cosmos – they were yin and yang, each with enough of the other to
overlap and have a unified experience of the world that is satisfying. There was much love in that overlapping
space, but it is only because of their sharing and appreciation of each others'
respective yins and yangs that they were able to move forward together, sharing
and bearing each others' burdens for each other when they faltered alone.
There can be no absolutes where
yin and yang are concerned and both of them were no exceptions. Shakes was yang on the outside; a pillar of
strength, the warrior, the jock, the samurai who could stand up against the
rogue powers of the time but he was really yin on the inside. His yin came from his mother, her nature had
found itself into his inner core. It was
a patient core, at ease with the cycles of things, with the ability to wait and
plot and see before taking action. Like
water, he could feel everything in this state, making him sensitive to even the
slightest inflection or deviation in the behaviours around him. He was more connected to everything because
he was calm inside. Leaping fish are
easier to view in calmer waters.
Cricket and women appealed to
him because of their cyclic nature. In
human history, most things cyclic are given a feminine essence in its
interpretation and is hence yin in nature.
As a batsmen; he was not bored at the change of overs and change of
fielding positions every six balls. It
was something which broke the nerve of other players. They would become taken up by the cycle, finding
a hypnotic rhythm in them. As soon as
the hypnosis would set in they would start to feel tired. They would start to feel the stiffness in
their legs and backs every time they had to change overs, walking slowly across
the pitch. It reminded them that there
were still more cycles of overs to go and they would start to wane in focus,
hitting loose shots and trying to sneak impossible runs with tired legs. The heat would drone in on their hot heads
like a microwave and eventually, the cycle of each run would become an effort. They would then try to hit for the
boundaries, flailing at good deliveries and starting to unravel
themselves. Often, it was the psychology
of a player that eroded before his performance did.
Shake’s was of a different ilk
and constitution. For him, every ball
was a new one. The cycle was just an
opportunity to take a breather and assess things. He had the patience of a saint. His soft yin had given him what the Asian
fighting masters call ‘beginners mind!’ He approached every new ball as a
totally new opportunity. He didn’t
labour himself trying to figure too much out when a ball was hurtling towards
him. He saw it as new thing entirely
from whatever came before, a new universe trapped in red which he felt out like
a panther eyeing its prey. He sharpened
only at the point of action. There, his
yin would guide him into a flawless execution of form. Like a cracking whip all the yang that the
ball had arrived with would be dispatched back to it at exactly the right angle
he desired. It was like magic, but he
knew his own secret. He was
patient. He carried no anxiety in his
frame but an open-ness to each new event, a calm with the winds of change. His yang was only perceived by those around
him who didn’t understand the graceful source of his actions. He appeared as a hero, a titan, and indeed,
we needed him to be one. He, like
Suleiman, stepped up to a fate which went against his nature, but which he saw
as a calling. When there is a call to
arms, many different types of soldiers answer.
He was indeed a soldier in his heart, but it was a soldiering born of
love and a desire for peace, not one born of revenge.
Fatima by comparison was all
yin on the outside, but she had to keep all her yang within the shade of
Suleiman’s large shadow and it always remained hidden, in her core, until she
had the occasion and reason to show it.
On the outside, she was her costume; a patchwork of identities crafted
to ease her interaction with the world, to please them with her presence. Maybe it was the way the thickness of the
Transvaal accent creeped into her conversation every now and again that gave
away the bits of yang waiting to emerge.
Even though she was yin on the outside there was a firmness that
revealed the great yang on the inside.
One knew that she had boundaries if you met her in public.
Their complementary natures
would provide each other with support each time one faltered or weakened. He would put her through clothing design
school, from which she would quickly establish a small business which expanded
into an entire factory. She wouldn’t stop
there though. She would set up clinics
for underprivileged women and teach them how to source, sell and sow
garments. She passed her skills on
without prejudice and thought for monopoly.
She even withdrew when her business grew too big, selling it and using
the sales to help Shake’s establish a haberdashery warehouse who was then
selling women’s swimwear out of the back of his car in various
neighbourhoods. He was not a person
fuelled by personal pride; he would make an effort to feed his family. His pride was a collective one, one which
rested in a belief system rather than his personal make-up. But it was not a job without hazards,
“Imagine having one of the most
desirable men in the country appear at your home with bikini’s to sell? I wonder how women responded to that?”
Fatima would taunt herself with
these thoughts and grow jealous. Maybe
she had serious ulterior motivations for funding his new business effort so
heavily, but it was in her nature to deal with things rather than dwell on the
sources of unhappiness.
In her marriage to him she’d
arrive wearing her costume to his home.
She was aware, that it was an item of great beauty but still felt inside
that it was ‘pieced together’. It wasn’t
real!
“Maybe like me?”
She would feel guilty when these thoughts
assailed her and she would push them out of her mind. She loved strongly and her mothers love meant
so much to her that she refused to allow herself to desecrate this love with
these thoughts. She fought it and wore
her costume proudly every day. After
all, she did have a history, even though it was wrapped up in a patchwork of
people, places and identities that only she knew of. Hers came from the close family she’d grown
up in. Suleimans brothers who’d arrived
in South Africa had also had families by the time she was a child and they were
a poorer but loving network of people who openly hugged and made displays of
affection towards each other. In spite
of hardships, she’d always felt that this family was what had carried them all
through. Everyone knew how difficult
Suleiman could be, so other family members took on different roles, imparting
little bits of knowledge they thought would help her in the world.
She had already learnt a value
system, and it came into conflict with her new family at first as she
interpreted their inability to hug and kiss, or allow boys and girls or even
fathers and daughters (after a certain age) from being too physically
close. She saw it as cold family, but
she later learnt that she was mistaken.
They were just not outward about their feelings in the same way. In their family, not everything you felt
needed to be spoken or demonstrated. She
was still young then, a student at technikon, taking in the sights and sounds
of Durban, getting accustomed to the differences from the Transvaal. It must have been difficult for her in many
ways but every time she faltered, Shakes would be there standing strong. She knew he was there for her and he knew she
needed to know that. They argued a lot
at first too; but he soon, with his inner wisdom of yin and patience, was able
to assess her nature and make the leap that he was not required to talk too
much; just to provide love and support.
She would come to him when she needed his opinion, and she respected it
deeply. He loved that about her.
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