WHERE I MUST PUT MY FACE?

 I REMEMBER Tootsie and Bobby not talking. Their cold eyes drilled each other in silence. When they shot insults, it was as if they were talking to an invisible third person.

“I really do not know how somebody married for fifty years and staying in the same house can hate each other so much,” screeched Sundri as she pegged a row of dish towels that looked like they had come back from the war.

Banmathie nudged closer to whisper, “But you saw how she was putting on Facebook happy anniversary to me with the wedding photo where the pastor’s hands is on they two heads?”

Sundri recounted that Bobby had hired a domestic worker to wash his clothing and tidy his section of the bedroom. Their single beds with matching imbuia headboards are kept apart by a nightstand overflowing with clinic-issue metformin and blood pressure medication.

“You know if her clothes is drying in the line and the wind makes it to touch his clothes, she will wash it again,” Sundri sighed.

Banmathie tried to make sense of Tootsie’s odd little habits like routinely laying out three meals a day for Bobby and tea twice in the same spot on the panelite kitchen table.

She only ate after he was done.

“You seen how when she goes to village, she puts thick sindoor, mangalsutra and full bangles like a proper married lady?”

Tootsie’s sunrise prayer ritual was to feed the Tulsi plant at her junda with a copious helping of water from a polished brass lota.

“I’m sure she must be telling Bobby’s name when she pouring.”

Bobby was a pious kneeling and rising Anglican who dressed like Sheriff Khan. He wore a felt fedora and two-tone Florsheims. He was a regular at church taking his place alongside the widow, Jennifer, on one side and the shoemaker, Wilson TripleX, on the other.

All three were creatures of habit. Arriving fifteen minutes before the service, a little chitchat before dutifully taking their places before Reverend Bernard cleared his throat precisely at 8.30.

And therein lay the problem. Jennifer. When her husband met his untimely death at the front end of a Mayville bus speeding out of the Beatrice Street rank to catch the Ninian and Lester crowd one Friday afternoon in 1982, Bobby was the one making the funeral arrangements.

Bobby was also the one comforting the grieving widow. The forty days of mourning had a sequel in forty years of canoodling.

“It is a open secret, Banoo. They hitting it up.”

Being people of a certain generation, all parties were perfectly discreet. Bobby dutifully went to the Verulam Market on a Thursday and came back with carrier bags of identical fruit and vegetables. In the meat line, even the live fowl, curry pieces and Deena’s spicy mutton sausages were parcelled in equal weight.

Straight from the market, Bobby plonked the bags on Tootsie’s kitchen table and dashed out for his other delivery. He had the remote to Jennifer’s gate. Her Yorkie leapt up to lick his face as he parked in his space under the awning. His phone immediately started to buzz as he picked up her wifi connection.

She kissed him on the cheek at the door. While she tipped Epsom salts into a dish of hot water, he carefully packed the shopping in library catalogue order in her fridge.

As he flopped into the padded couch, she knelt to take off his Jack Purcells and secret socks. He exhaled under the caress of her dainty hands massaging his feet in the solution in the dish. There was a chilled glass of his favourite brew at his elbow.

In a matter of minutes, a deep snore rattled the ceiling fan into a single whirl. Jennifer knotted the apron behind her back and started cutting up the chicken. On the other side of Cottonlands, Tootsie was on WhatsApp with her sister in Canada.

“Akka, when we get married it is for seven lifetimes. He walked with me round the fire. Where I must put my face?”

Shame is a powerful emotion to the Durban Indian. Much better to suffer in silence than have one’s dirty laundry exposed to the world. People would much rather lose their fortunes, even take their own lives than face public embarrassment.

“Not to say no Sundri, we all got some stink in our house,” Banmathie whispered.

There was a clank of metal that jolted them into craning both their necks like ostriches in the direction of Tootsie’s gate. In a scene that could have come straight out of The Bold and the Beautiful, in sauntered a whistling Wilson TripleX with a home delivery of a freshly heeled and soled pair of Florsheims. Tootsie hurriedly fixed her hair and patted her flaming cheeks.

This is an edited excerpt from the author’s forthcoming book, Durban Indians, to be launched on November 30, at the Umhlanga Apart-Hotel on Meridian Drive.

He may be reached on 0829408163.

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