Waste not, want not

I REMEMBER my uncle, Boominathan, used to park his Mercedes Benz 380SE at the remote edge of the shopping centre. He feared scratches and dings from flying doors.

"The way this man making us walk? Shorter distance from my house to Redbro. Next time I'm not coming in this car," my aunty, Kavitha complained. We called him Boomie Mama.

My mother called him Boomiena. To his wife he was Ramesh's father and when she was angry it was "this man". He worked at a posh car repair shop opposite the Mayville police station.

The English folks there called him Boomers. When that cute doggie appeared in the TV series in the early 1980s, his fellow spray painters and mechanics shortened it to Boomer. My father and he were always having arguments.

"Boomie has arthritis in his hands. When his hand go in his pocket, it gets stuck," my father lamented.

Boomie's extreme thriftiness when it came to buying a drink. His family, the Thirumurtis of tabla playing fame, had been dealt a terrible blow when the Group Areas Act rained down on Cato Manor.

Overnight, the eight-bedroom house on Bristow Road, with parking for 20 cars and a half-acre backyard for planting, was demolished to dust.

The old folks cried. Boomie loaded them into the back of his International truck and moved whatever belongings they could save to Chatsworth. Snyman, who was in charge of the housing allocations in the Durban Corporation, was a client at the garage.

When he brought in his black dovetail Chev for detailing, Boomie had a quiet chat out of earshot of the Englishman.

"Meneer, the family is seeking your kind heart and good offices to obtain a small favour."

It was his best Sastri College standard six English. The promise of five hundred rand, a pot of mussel-cracker biryani and two bottles of silicon tyre polish slipped under the rubber mat sealed the deal.

The Thirumurtis had five cottages allocated on the same road in Unit Seven within walking distance of the highway.

The longstanding rumour is that Boomie doubled the bribe's cost to get a bit more out of his three brothers' and brother-in-law's contributions.

When I worked at the housing department fifty years later, I often wondered if Snyman's dirty habits had washed off on some officials whispering to shady characters in the car park.

"From them days, Boomie had a gambling problem. He used to play call card in the Umkumbaan shebeens drinking umqombothi when his Mainstay money ran out," my father recalled.

Boomie was good about taking care of his parents.

He screened off part of the sitting room with scrap-metal panels in garish colours so they didn't have to climb the stairs to the bedrooms. His thoughtfulness towards his parents became thoughtlessness when he had a pack of 52 cards on payday. When the casinos started springing up, Boomie made sizeable financial contributions there too. "That stupid fella lost his house to the moneylenders. Lucky Karia Moona paid his counts," my father recalled.

Moona was the brother-in-law, he had fleeced in 1969.

"You know his name means lord of the land but he's got no land," my father tittered.

Boomie won the car when Moorgas, the bookie in the bucket shop could not pay the bet for Bush Telegraph romping to victory in the 1987 July handicap.

"People were saying I got the information from the horse's mouth when it was Garth Puller who told he was going to ride like a demon," Boomie regaled anyone who would listen.

The car was his pride and joy. "Showroom quality laaitie, in Stuttgart they want it for the museum but this is my baby, more precious than your aunty."

I loved the way Boomie shone and polished the car. "The secret is in the cloths laaitie. Shake it so not one grain sand can scratch." He was poetic in demonstrating the car wash choreography like waxing on and waxing off in the Karate Kid movie."Best cloths is old briefs, laaitie. Top quality cotton. Waste not, want not. And afterwards, nylon stockings for shining. Same horsehair brush I'm using for my Jarmans is for this tyres, 205/65 VR1 factory-fitted originals my laaite, no umshees articles for this baby."

My father also called him Bromer for the fanciful stories he told. Never mind that he had no land, that car turned every head even when parked on the far end.

Kiru Naidoo is a local writer. Catch him at the Magazine Barracks reunion at Arena Park Regional Hall on December 6 or on 0829408163.

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