CHILLIBITE BORN IN BELLAIR ROAD

AUNTY May, the once ravishing dressmaker, who tells anyone who stops to listen that she was robbed of the Spring Queen title in the 1968 garment factory beauty contest was surgically slicing a 5kg geelbek salmon that had just walked off the boat in KalkBay harbour when my iPhone buzzed with the news that Teddy Mafia was dead.

“No one believes me when I say she had ballas!”

As much as I loved langada stories, my sour fish curry lashed with tamarind and green mango had to wait.

The 2021 new year in Chatsworth had got off to a bloody and gory start.

I reluctantly pushed pause on Aunty May and the beauty queen who allegedly packed nuts.

“You Durban Indians are hectic,” tittered an upcountry journalist who called me for an inside scoop on the breaking Teddy Mafia story.

A year or so earlier, when I launched my mischievous memoir, Made in Chatsworth, at a Hindu temple in Lenasia thanks to my charming cousin, his ballroom dancing wife and their congregation, a delightful Jozi kugel giggled: “Aah, a book about Durban Indians!”

She snatched a clutch as Christmas presents after extracting a promise that I would write more about Durban Indians.

Being the local fixer for everything from where to find the best bunny chow to the private phone numbers of hard-to-reach politicians, newsrooms from Al Jazeera inNew York to the BBC in London to prime-time networks around India have me on speed dial.

Yaganathan “Teddy Mafia” Pillay made running headlines at home and the inside pages overseas. Social media hummed with gruesome videos. Thabo Bester and Nandipha Magudumana’s prison break sounds like a kindergarten picnic alongside the folklore of Teddy Mafia.

Quite why he was harmlessly called Teddy, no-one knows or dares to speculate. His mafia moniker as Chatsworth’s Teflon don where no charge stuck had a flipside of being a kind of Robin Hood who paid poor people’s bills in return for a couple of substance-related favours.

Amiable police spokesperson, Brigadier Jay Naicker, was on the lead team of law enforcement that hurried to the murder scene at the intersection of Table Mountain and Taurus Streets in Shallcross.

SAPS had to bring in its crack squad of riot policeto protect members who came under gunfire and were brazenly pelted with rocks byTeddy Mafia’s “neighbours” in full view of live television cameras.

Naicker told Zainul Aberdeen of the Daily News: “Upon arrival of the suspects at their home, the daughter proceeded to the back of their property where she heard gun shots. The daughter then established that her father had been shot. The community apprehended both suspects and they set them alight thereafter beheading both of them.”

The daughter gave television news another version that she had even offered the visitors a quenching cooldrink of “mindrel” in a storyline which five years later remains a mystery spawning twists and turn like the Anupamaa soap opera drama.

Earlier this month, Yoshini Perumal reported in the POST that: “A Shallcross man related to notorious drug kingpin "Teddy Mafia" was arrested for murder just moments before he was due to stand trial for attempted murder. Nashlin Krishin now faces charges for the execution-style killing of Justin Pillay ….

"He was arrested by detectives on Friday, moments before he was due to appear in the Durban Regional Court withTeddy Mafia’s son-in-law and grandson for start of the attempted murder trial of Andile Cele in September 2024.”

Justin Pillay had been on the receiving end of thirty bullets while asleep in his own bedroom.

Gone on that sultry January 4 th of 2021 was the innocence that Durban Indians were Gandhian pacificists who walked the path of non-violence.

The news had even reached the homeless community of bergies who lived rough in hovels in the shadow of the real Table Mountain.

“Aweh, ma se kind, you mean to say you ouens chop they heads and burn them in the street?”, asked Chillibite who had come from Durban in 1968 in search of a waiter’s job at the Mount Nelson.

He never found any job, let alone one at the country’s premier hotel. Yet he stayed on to become one of the pavement aristocrats of the Company Gardens originally laid out in 1652 by the first Dutch land invader, Jan van Riebeeck.

“I know you was a Durban Indian the moment I set my mince pies on you, my captain. Jy weet mos, I was born in 321 Bellair Road Cato Manor,” he volunteered.

“I’m a 031 like you, keptin.”

He had a spotting eye better than the hawkers in the Spice Souk in Dubai or the Colaba Market in Bombay who greet you in an eloquent smattering of Afrikaans or fanagalo.

I pulled out my notepad to write down his name.

“Just call me Chillibite. I forget my name a long time before Mandela come out of prison,” he laughed with the toothless grin that featured on postcards of Cape Town in the forgotten years when the Post Office still worked.

Chillibite stood up with great effort to bump a cackling French tourist for the tail end of her cigarette.

He introduced me as his brother, the Durban Indian.

“Yoh, in CapeTown when we say I’ll burn you, it is a threat but these here ouens they don’t makethreats, they kap you and they burn you for real.”

There was I, in a boring beige hiker’s shirt and trendy puffer jacket with Ray-Ban aviators and a bucket hat getting street cred with a coy mademoiselle for something that had absolutely nothing to do with me.

But I was christened a Durban Indian and that had a spicy ring to it.

An edited excerpt from Kiru Naidoo’s forthcoming book, Durban Indians, published by Micromega. It will be launched as part of the 165th anniversary commemoration of the landing of the Truro and the Belvedere bringing indentured Indians to Natal.

POSTPLUS