KHADIJAH Marsiena Ebrahim was born on July, 1928, in Cape Town, South Africa. She was the fifth daughter of Haji Omarji Ebrahim and his wife Ayesha. That the much desired son was born after her, after a “string of curses”, as she would say, may have altered the way in which she formed her ideas about the positioning of women within the dynamic of patriarchy. That she was born in a country where the colour of one’s skin determined the place where one lived, who one married, what jobs one worked at, where one schooled, and where one was ultimately buried, most certainly influenced the way she saw humanity — suffering and voiceless in the face of gross injustices perpetrated by other, more powerful, human beings.
Educated at Kinnaird College, Lahore, and at the London School of Economics, my mother had grown up in a house on Chapel Street, in District Six, the area reserved for non-whites in a city where Europeans reserved for themselves the right to rule the indigenous majority as well as the multi-cultural immigrants who had found their way to the shores of this most beautiful country in the most magnificent continent, Africa.
My mother’s political consciousness began at home, on her mother’s lap, listening to tales of another struggle, in a distant land where her ancestors tilled the fertile black soil watered by the great Narbada. In her chaste Gujurati, my grandmother spoke to her youngest daughter about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who had arrived in South Africa in 1893 to provide counsel in a lawsuit.
In 1907, the Black Act was passed, requiring all Indians to register and submit to finger printing. Compelled to pay a poll tax of three pounds, Indians were not allowed to own land except in a specifically allotted location, they had no franchise, and were not allowed to walk on the pavement or move out of doors after 9pm without a special permit. Gandhi had already launched the Satyagraha campaign against the marginalization of Indian immigrants, and in 1908 he stood trial for instigating Satyagraha and was sentenced to two months imprisonment in Johannesburg jail.
Twenty years later, my mother was born to parents who were acutely aware of their Indian heritage as well as the contempt with which it was treated by the white rulers of South Africa, their adopted country. My grandfather imported a tutor to teach his children to read and write Gujurati, he insisted that all his children be tutored in religious texts, and instilled a sense of discipline and stoicism which enabled the family to endure the sudden and early death of my grandmother in 1938. My mother was then just ten, and was asked to recite verses from the Qura’an at that time of grief, her lovely voice soothing the sorrow of a family suffering such a colossal loss.
It is my mother’s voice which I miss most with her passing. As a child, my mother sang with the choir at Trafalgar High School where she became further politicized through her teachers.
When she was widowed at the age of thirty-nine, she sang softly to herself, after she had tucked us into bed. On several occasions I had woken up in the middle of the night, terrified that I had lost her, that I would never see her again. I would walk silently to the room where she she would be sitting alone, listening to nightfall, singing the lines written by Bahadur Shah Zafar: Lagta nahin ha ji mera, ujrey dayar mein.
Perhaps my mother’s strongest voice was in her writing. She began to write for the Pakistan Times in the early 1960’s. She also edited for the Afro-Asia Book Club, and helped to publish The Punjab Times, later The Punjab Punch. The novel she had begun shortly after the 1965 war was completed years later. Taking a line from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, my mother had titled it The Coming Season’s Yield, painting a canvas where uprooted and displaced people trekked from rural Punjab into the urban metropolis of Lahore, living in the ghettos where the dispossessed collected under a shelterless sky while the newly wealthy strove towards amassing greater wealth, their greed stretching endlessly like the vast tracts of land occupied by the omnipotent military.
In her letters to us, our mother used a voice she never spoke in, always careful not to let down the guarded reserve which was so much a part of her culture. The day I learnt of her passing, I opened a diary I had neglected for years, and found folded within it a letter she had written twenty years ago, on my twenty-fourth birthday. Reading it through a haze of tears, wishing the twelve thousand miles between myself and my family would disappear along with the anguish of her absence, I clutched it in my hands as if by doing so I would be able to bring her back, to speak these words to me, to breathe her breath on me, to give me life all over again:
“My dearest daughter,
On this day, twenty four years ago, I was dimly conscious of the life and death struggle my body was waging as I lay prostrate on the operation table, literally drowning in my own blood... Your birth... was my only concern. No, that’s not true. I wanted you to live and I wanted to live: to see you, feel you and hold you to my swollen breasts...
Then the miracle of all miracles happened and what’s more miraculous that watching that life created in my own womb unfold mysteriously the way a dew-drenched bud opens to the sun? With child-like wonder my anguished eyes watched the doctors lift you out of my womb — a pink and white ten pound perfection — I could actually feel them separating flesh from flesh! And then your first cry like the crescendo of raag jaunpuri, lifted me above and beyond the agony, the pain, the uncertainty and the numb fear that my body and mind had lived through in those tumultuous days... From my being, new life was created. I was a creator of life...
“It’s a girl”...
“Would he still want us to ligate?
“Call him in”
Apprehensive, indecisive, those shadows in white hovered over my lacerated, exposed womb, waiting anxiously for the patriarchal decision... You were born a female, a slave child, as the Chinese called a girl. Perhaps there was need for male heirs. There always was in a community that counted male heads only.
Nobody asked me what I wanted to do with my own body... whether I would like to risk another birth at the cost of my own life, simply because I had produced only one son so far... l had decided long ago, as the hazardous pregnancy advanced, not to risk another, much as I love large families. Rather, I was determined to regain my health and had cherished a dream of nurturing not only those I had given birth to but also myself in the process of growth. And for that, one needed strength of body and mind, an elan vital to capture every moment of life to share fully the joys, discoveries, the wonder and mysteries of nature and the sorrows and pain which are all a part of human existence.
But I was not asked what I had decided about my own body... For three agonizing days I watched you, from my torturous bed, yearning to put you to my breasts swollen like our rivers in the monsoons. But there you nestled in your first hand-me-down, your brother’s crib, serene and content with a few drops of water...
When I was strong enough, I carried you out into the sun and sat nursing you among the cluster of rose bushes. The deaf mute who had filled me with terror with his grotesque utterings when I had first arrived in the throes of labour, came along and stared silently at you, cradled in my arms. Then a smile lit up his battered face...Exclaiming excitedly he went over to a rose bush, plucked the prettiest rose and laid it in my lap... He kept pointing to the rose and then to your face. His face looked exalted.
I smiled to say that I understood and agreed fully. Yes, it was all over... the sleepless nights, the uncertainty, the pain, the suffering. For every birth comes with agony, and someday you shall create from your own being... They will say “It’s only a girl” but you and I both know that it, that very girl who will grow up to become the creator of new life, to sustain that life with love and tenderness, protection and care.
In the sun, among the blooming roses, that day twenty four years ago, I dedicated you to everything that was true, good, and beautiful in this our mortal life...”
A month ago our mother was buried under overcast, monsoon skies. Shortly after the funeral, the heavy clouds which had gathered as if joining us in our grief burst forth with the bounty for which the earth had yearned. I watched as the rain lashed against the marble headstones of the many graves surrounding us, and I remembered the words with which she would always comfort me, that this too shall pass, that all of us have to go, that we take nothing with, and that if there is ever any kindness that you can do, do it now, for you shall not come this way again.
