Being Kari. Qarnita Loxton
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like I always used to. Get on with it, I imagined Di saying to me. And just when I did, a woman in head-to-toe black closed the front door and walked down that garden path towards me. She stopped and looked at me.
“Karima? Is that you? Oh my word. It is you!”
Crap. The scarf is still in my bag, is what I thought. I relaxed when the streetlight showed Shireen’s face, round and pale, looking out at me from her black burka. Rounder than I remembered, but inside that burka and under that abaya was my brother’s wife. I’d met Shireen when I was fifteen and she was twenty-one, and when she married Dhanyal I got the sister I had always wanted. Earlier today Shireen would’ve been only a soft thought, but tonight she stood real in front of me. Ouma always said death has a way of suddenly changing everything. Right she was about that too. Tonight Shireen hugged me for a long time, the soft of her cloak with its wide sleeves around me like a blanket. Somewhere underneath I could feel her firm round body. After, our faces wet, we stood close on the street, our backs to the yellow city lights spread out behind us. In the beginning, I had struggled with life away from those lights; now I ignored them as I struggled to hear what she was saying.
“It was so fast, Karima. Ouma was sitting there in her chair at the TV when she said she wanted to go and sleep. ‘My head feels funny,’ she said. I didn’t think it would be the last thing she said to me. I didn’t really think anything, you know. I was also tired and I was glad she wanted to go to bed. She was anyways never the same since . . .” Shireen’s words trailed, as if they were trying to catch up with her thoughts “. . . since that thing happened with you, but even when she couldn’t think so lekker any more her body was still strong, you know.”
Shireen stopped. I waited. I had nothing else to do in the dark.
“Yes, she was strong for eighty-five. I didn’t think anything so I helped her get up and then she sommer fell over. Right there, right in front of the TV. She didn’t even shout or anything.”
She stopped again. I was quiet, but all the time I was thinking I didn’t even know which chair was Ouma’s favourite these days, which TV shows she liked to watch now. Was her bedroom still in the same place?
Shireen finally let all her words out in a stream.
“Your mama was upstairs saying shahada with the girls in their rooms, so I just screamed and screamed. I couldn’t think. Your mama got such a shock with me screaming, and she came running down the stairs so fast that she fell. Right down the flippin’ stairs, Karima. So there I was screaming and the two old ladies were lying at the bottom of the stairs, and Alia and Sara ran out their room and they were also screaming. Them at the top of the stairs, me at the bottom. It was mad, but you know your mama – her mind is strong. She shouted at me and the girls to stop screaming. She said I must phone Dhanyal. I got my mind together when your mama started shouting at the girls. She never shouts at the girls. That’s when I phoned Dhanyal.” She stopped to catch her breath. “I had to phone five times before he answered.” Shireen looked at me as if this part of the story would shock me the most. “Five times, I’m telling you!” she said, flicking up her left hand showing me her fingers, her yellow gold wedding band flashing. “I never phone him – he could have picked up this one time. When he did answer, he was so cross, said I should have called an ambulance. He came quick after that, Karima. But it was still too late. It was too late.”
Shireen had talked without waiting for me to answer. It was as if all she wanted was to get the words out of her own head.
“Can you believe it? One minute we’re watching TV, the next Ouma is dead. Dhanyal says he thinks it wasn’t only a heart attack, says it must have been a sudden cardiac arrest ’cause then there is no time. Your heart gets like a giant shock and you can sommer die straight away.” Still passing on the medical details, the inviolable right of the doctor’s-receptionist-turned-doctor’s-wife. I wondered if I could tease Shireen about it like I used to. And now she was a mother too – with daughters old enough to pray and say shahada at night.
I was someone’s aunty. Twice.
But I had nothing to say. My stomach was lurching with leftover champagne, leftover red wine. I could still smell faint puke, though that couldn’t really be. First Dirk. And now Ouma. I couldn’t begin to imagine how it had happened. I didn’t know about Ouma’s funny head. I couldn’t even picture the inside of the house, where it had happened. But before I could force myself to put words together, the rest of me seemed to come into focus for Shireen.
“Karima, you need a scarf. You can’t go in there kaalkop – all the people are already there. I came here to leave the girls with Gigi; they are too upset to be at home. But I’m sure Gigi will have something you can wear, just wait here.” Shireen turned back up the path to Rafiq’s house and disappeared behind the old wooden door.
Gigi and Rafiq?
I was still half-thinking about this news when Shireen came back out with a black burka and abaya identical to hers. “Ouma gave me and Gigi the same set when she and Dhanyal went to Mecca, but Gigi isn’t wearing hers now, so I asked her if you can wear it tonight.” She held them out to me. “Gigi didn’t really want to give it but I said Ouma would have liked you to wear it,” she added when I didn’t take the burka immediately.
And so that’s how V-Day Ground Double Zero finally ended. Right there in Eden Road before midnight on the longest day ever, I covered up Kari.
Eden & Eden
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5
When I stood there on that pavement, in the first minutes of Saturday, newly covered in Gigi’s burka and cloak, it felt like I was at the start of something, something heavier than the thin burka and abaya on my body. I still don’t know what, but it was more than just the beginning of a new day. It was the start of Life After Ground Double Zero.
In the burka, Shireen seemed to give me her mental stamp of approval. Halaal! Hair tucked away, body camouflaged.
Bo blink, onder stink.
She hooked her arm through mine and we walked the short distance to the house. “Salaam, salaam,” the men greeted as we walked past them, their heads bent together, talking into their cigarettes, standing in front of the two super-white double garage doors. Swirly paving under my feet where there used to be grass. Two great pots with lollipop trees where Ouma’s hibiscus trees used to be. When did this Walmer Estate Wisteria Lane happen?
Shireen and I swished silently into the house and no one even looked up. If I’d worn these clothes at Eden on the Bay, people would’ve stared. Here on Eden Road, the busyness of many burkas, many keffiyehs and many salaams made it normal. “Ninja clothes!” Owen would have snorted about the burka, but he wouldn’t understand how it somehow gave me strength. I don’t really understand it either, but I felt safe, like I was armoured up for what was coming.
Inside the house all the furniture had been cleared, and men were setting up trestle tables in the lounge; women were making tea and sandwiches in the new-to-me open-plan oak kitchen behind. For all the movement, there was no chaos. It was as if everyone knew what needed to be done and knew what they had to do. Incense sticks stuck into potatoes burned in random places so that the air was already heavy with sandalwood.
“It’s so full already, when did everyone come?” I whispered to Shireen as she led me past the sombre faces and the wooden benches lining the passage wall – seats for those who would come later to read out of prayer books.
“People started to come as soon as they heard, they come to help, you know how it is.” Shireen shrugged. Three photo frames on the wall along the passage were covered with cloth, photos with Ouma in them probably. Another big square covered with cloth filled a spot that looked right for a mirror. When a Muslim dies we are not to look upon the dead or the living.
Shireen took me past our old room, mine