Tandia (2 page)

Tandia had no guidance into womanhood. It arrived shortly before her thirteenth birthday, one cold June morning three years earlier, when she had awakened and discovered blood. She was terrified. Unable to confide in anyone, she bathed herself and afterwards used an old blouse to make a crude pad before pulling on her school bloomers. That night and for the two following she lay in her dark little shed weeping until she fell asleep exhausted. When she rose at dawn to set and start the kitchen stove she wrapped the blood-spotted rag in a scrap of newspaper and burnt it. Then the bleeding stopped and that part of her seemed normal again. Two months later the bleeding returned. She felt a terrible despair. Was it the kaffir in her which had caused some dreadful disease? She was going to bleed to death!

Tandia decided to kill herself first. She would take the bus to the beach and just walk into the sea and then keep walking. It was the best thing to do. If Patel knew she had inherited a disease from her black mother's side she felt sure he would no longer keep her or pay for her schooling.

Tandia had decided to do it on the weekend after she'd finished at Patel's printing shop where she worked every Saturday. She would go home to Booth Street as usual and prepare the Patels' dinner. That would leave her plenty of time before eleven o'clock curfew to take the bus to the beach and hide some place. After curfew it would be quiet, she would wait until the police van had driven up and down the beach to see if any blacks were on the streets, then she would do it. It would definitely be best to die on a Saturday night because on Sunday she had a half-day off and Mrs Patel got Patel's breakfast and so nobody would miss her, not even at lunchtime, because on Sundays Mrs Patel always visited the home of either Teddy or Billy in Clairwood and Patel spent the day at the boxing club.

When they returned in the evening to discover she hadn't prepared the evening meal or even cleaned the house, that was the first time she'd be missed. Which gave her plenty of time to drown, be washed out to sea and never found again.

Maybe they'd even be a little sorry about losing her. She didn't care about Mrs Patel, but she wanted Patel to be sorry. She wanted him to mourn her just a little bit.

Tandia quite liked the idea of simply disappearing off the face of the earth. Though having to die in order to do so seemed unfair.

By Friday however the bleeding had stopped again. Hope springs eternal and it seemed silly to kill herself when maybe she was cured. Tandia's next period occurred on a Monday and was over before Saturday. Once again she was saved from the watery deep.

Tandia began to wonder about the disease. She could honestly say she felt no ill effects from it, in fact, after each time, she seemed if anything to feel better. Her breasts had begun to swell noticeably and her hips didn't seem to jut out as much either. But she had to face reality, for you couldn't get to be thirteen in a place like Cato Manor and not know that there were diseases black women got
down there,
horrible diseases that a person could pass on to someone else and which would also eventually kill them as well.

It briefly occurred to Tandia to try to see Dr Rabin, who was a much-loved young white doctor who came even at night for coloureds and blacks and had once come when Patel's pleurisy turned into pneumonia. Except for smallpox and polio vaccinations, which had taken place at school, Tandia had never been near a doctor. Now, having convinced herself that the bleeding was something she had inherited from the black part of her, she became obsessed with hiding it from Patel or anyone who might know the family, even Dr Rabin.

The Thursday her period came back Tandia was locked in the school lavatories when she overheard a conversation between Maree Ratchee and Fatima Suluman, two fifth-form seniors.

'I wish I could get out of stupid basketball tomorrow, there's a Rasheed Mantella film on at the Odeon in Victoria Street,' she heard Fatima say.

'Ag, man, do what I did, tell Miss you got your periods.'

'God, I'm dumb! I should have thought of that!' There was a pause and Fatima's voice brightened. 'It's not too late, I'll tell her they just came!'

'Better be careful, she takes the date down so next time she knows if you lying.'

'But it's true, I really have got my periods, but, to tell you the honest truth I don't bleed very much. I could play if I wanted to.'

'You're lucky, man. I bleed a lot every month and feel lousy,' Maree replied as the two girls left the lavatory block. Tandia felt quite dizzy.
Period
was a word she'd vaguely heard before from the other girls, always accompanied by giggles, but until this moment it had never occurred to her that it had anything to do with her own condition. After school that day Tandia waited outside the gates until Fatima Suluman appeared. Nervous, she fell into step beside the bigger girl. At first Fatima appeared not to notice her. It was not unusual for one of the brats to get a crush on a senior and she wasn't going to encourage the little coloured girl.

While Tandia wasn't exactly ostracised by the girls at the school, for the most part their friendliness ended at the school gates…This wasn't so much a thing decided by the girls themselves as by their parents, several of whom had written to the headmistress suggesting that Durban Indian Girls' High was exclusively for Indian girls and that didn't, as far as they understood, include people of mixed race. The headmistress, who was not easily pushed around, and who knew Patel, ignored their letters.

'Fatima, can I ask you a question, please?' Tandia said at last.

'Ja, of course.' She sensed the anxiety in the smaller girl's voice but she was also keen to get rid of Tandia before they reached the bus stop. She didn't want to have to sit with her all the way to Victoria Street where she got off.

'When you bleed every month. Can you tell me about that, please?'

Fatima stopped, taken by surprise. She looked around quickly to see if anyone else had heard, then she turned to Tandia. 'Shhh! Don't talk about such things! Somebody might hear you, jong!'

Tandia's eyes filled with tears, 'Sorry, Fatima, but it's…it's happening to me also! I don't know what to do!'

Fatima put her arm around the smaller girl, drawing her into her ample waist. 'C'mon then, stop crying, what's the matter? Tell me, what is it, Tandia?'

The feel of the bigger girl's arm around her was almost more than Tandia could bear. It was the first time in years that someone had touched her to comfort her and she desperately wanted to remain in Fatima's embrace. 'C'mon, it's only your silly periods!' Fatima said gently.

Sniffing, Tandia pulled away. 'I heard you in the lavs yesterday, you were with, with, Maree Ratchee. You said…' Tandia let out a sudden sob, 'you said you bleed every month also!'

Fatima took Tandia's hand and together they retraced their. steps towards the school gate. She heard the bus arrive and pull to a halt at the bus stop. She'd be late for her afternoon job at the Goodwill Lounge. Never mind, the little kid needed her. 'Listen, we'll go back and sit on a bench in the playground and talk, heh? I'll tell you everything. Don't worry, it's just stuff that happens when you start to become a woman.'

The following morning Fatima found Tandia before school assembly and told her to meet her at the lavs at lunch. At the break Fatima led Tandia into one of the toilets and, opening a brown paper bag, she pulled out a dozen small squares of towelling about the size of a bathroom flannel, an elastic loop large enough to slip around Tandia's waist, and two good-sized safety pins. She quickly showed her how to fashion a snug pad to contain her bleeding and how to attach it with the pins to the loop around her waist.

It was the nicest thing Tandia could ever remember anyone doing for her. Fatima replaced everything in the paper bag and handed it to Tandia who, quite unable to speak, was trying hard to hold back the tears. Fatima closed the door slowly. 'See ya later, alligator!' she said and was gone.

Tandia latched the lavatory door where she remained for the rest of her lunch break. At first she cried a bit, hugging the brown paper bag to her chest. Then she put the bag on the floor between her legs and hugged herself again, but this time she smiled. She was happy that her childhood was coming to an end and that she had started to become a woman. It meant she was getting closer to the time when Patel would love her again.

Fatima had said after your periods a woman could have a baby. Tandia thought about it being possible for her to have a baby. Not that she would ever have a baby. No man would ever want to marry her anyway. But she didn't care about that. She was glad about that. She shuddered at the thought. Ag, sies! No man was ever going to touch her, put his sausage in her like Patel had done to her mother. Never, never, never! The end of recess bell rang and she picked up the paper bag and ran happily from the toilet block.

Now, three years later, she stood at Patel's graveside just as dawn was breaking. In Tandia's mind she came to have a good talk to him. It had almost been dark by the time she'd completed decorating his grave with the wreaths the previous evening and she hadn't been able to say goodbye properly. She had planned a conversation which she could never have hoped to have with him while he had been alive. But overnight, as she lay in her iron cot in the shed, his death had built a bridge, a place to cross so that she could reach him. In death Patel became the father he had never been in life.

Earlier, as she made her way to the cemetery, she had even tried using the various words for father in her mind. She'd tried the three conventional versions, throwing back her head and saying them out loud, testing them out on the stars in the pre-dawn sky. 'Father!' It sounded awfully posh. Patel was definitely not a 'Father'. 'Dad?' Could she ever have a relationship as casual as such a marvellous, warm, taken-for-granted word? She tried the third, 'Daddy'. She liked it best because it was so patently a contradiction of the relationship she had had with Patel. Except for when she was very small, when she would sit on his knee and he would absently stroke her tiny shoulder and talk to people about her green eyes. At that time the word had been possible and now that Patel was dead she wanted it returned to her.

But Natkin Patel the small printing shop owner, first-class Indian person, illegitimate curry sausage user, policeman's friend, who was well known in white circles, was still too soon buried for any of these names to work very well.

Tandia's final image of Patel was him sitting on the steps of the back
stoep
not even acknowledging her as she handed him the boots she'd carefully polished. But she knew time and several visits to the cemetery would soften the hard edges of the reality. She would now have someone to whom she could talk, with whom she could share her loneliness, and onto whom she could focus her abundant but unrequited love.

The curious invention of making Patel alive now that he was dead so pleased Tandia that she had momentarily postponed the fear she felt at the prospect of being thrown out on the street when she returned home at sunrise. But now that fear returned. H, as she had decided, she would use Patel's graveside for really important conversations, none was more important than the one she brought with her on this first cold dawn morning.

Tandia finally came to grips with the thing on her mind. The thing she wakened to every day of her life as long as she could remember. The thing she never said aloud, but was now going to ask Patel here in the Indian cemetery with the dew clouding the cellophane wrappings around the Easter lilies and with the pungent smell of the incense filling the air.

In the Indian Christian cemetery there was plenty of room between the graves for patches of grass, dandelion and blackjack to grow. Not many Indians died Christians, so you could pick and choose your spot. Mrs Patel chose a lot about fifteen feet from a grave which boasted a six-foot marble cross and belonged to T. W. Nepul, who had been a wealthy merchant and important spokesman for the Durban Indian community. It was said also that he had been a personal friend of General Smuts. She liked the idea of her own husband being close to a bit of gratuitous wealth and prestige. If a person could pick any spot in the graveyard, as Patel himself would have said, 'Dammit, man, it doesn't do any harm to be always with the best people.'

'What am I?' Tandia began. 'Am I Indian? Or am I a kaffir?' She talked directly to the mound of earth at her feet.

'Please, Patel, what will I do now, you must tell me, please?' She paused as though waiting for him to answer; then she continued. 'Do you think because I'm mixed race I'm a coloured? I don't want to be a coloured. Also, not a black person. Patel, can I please be an Indian when I grow up? Mrs Patel doesn't like me, When she throws me out and I have to get a passbook from the police, can I tell them I am your daughter, that I'm an Indian girl?'

With Patel's death Tandia knew things were going to be very difficult for her. When she got back to the house in Booth Street she expected no mercy from Mrs Patel. Would she simply send her packing? Kick her out of the only home she had ever known to the dark little corrugated-iron shed in the back yard? In her imagination Tandia could hear the old woman's voice. 'Go on,
voetsak!
Take your things and get out of my house!' Surely she wouldn't do that? She must give her a chance to find a job first!

Mrs Patel was an ignorant woman. She couldn't read or write and hadn't taken up Christianity like her husband. Her own religion commanded absolute obedience to Patel, but she had been deeply disturbed by his change of faith. The Patel caste is a religious one. Other castes may change, could change, but not a Patel. It was a hugely offensive thing to have done to his caste. Especially as Patel's religious zeal was shown to be less one of burning faith than of a desire to achieve assimilation into the European genre. Being a Hindu required her to forgive him everything, even sleeping with a black woman. Now, with Patel dead, the shackles of fidelity and obedience were undone; now she was in control.