The dinner table threats that raised us
It was the time of Halley’s Comet, Rubik’s Cubes and rock stars wearing ripped vests and wild, shaggy hairdos. Our mothers, not to be outdone, styled their hair in frizzy perms.
One whiff of Elnett hairspray or the sight of a neon Madonna bangle and the Eighties are back in vivid technicolour and with a raspy rockstar voice. And no song better encapsulates my childhood memories of the decade than Bob Geldof’s charity outfit Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? Even us Hindus on the fractured continent did.
There would be no snow in Africa this year, we mouthed, feeling sorrow while crushing on George Michael.
The song is rivalled in notoriety, if I’m honest, only by the dazzling USA for Africa ensemble performing Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie’s We Are the World. In the primary school choir we sang, our passion echoed in the timely clicks of our fin- gers, about being the world, the children, the ones who make a brighter day. Our parents beamed with pride; some even dabbed handkerchiefs at their eyes. Empowered, we bleated out the egregious lyrics from the pit of our stomachs: So let’s start giving/ there’s a choice we’re making/ we’re saving our own lives.
Mealtimes were often punctuated with threats of a hungry world we would be depriving by wasting a crust, a spoonful of peas, a minefield of Brussels sprouts.
“There are children starving in Eeth-ope-ya!” my parents would warn, referring to the crushing famine that shadowed our childhoods.
When I thought of ditching the lousy peanut butter and jam lunch sandwiches, I would be struck by my participation in the crisis and how my ingratitude rendered me complicit in the larger tragedy. Waste equated betrayal and surely the death of an innocent child.
Wastage in our home was simply not tolerated, though my brother did stash his peas under lettuce leaves sometimes. He would always get caught, of course. From our parents’ perspective, the demand, however illogical, was a conscionable one, moral, even political. And, because there was to be no snow, no Christmas (we did celebrate, even as Hindus) and only the bitter sting of tears under a blazing sun on this blighted continent, almost as worrisome as a withering glance from father, we children ate even the smelliest of vegetables on our plates.
I recall praying in gulps, feeling thankful, as Bono said I should, that it was them, instead of me. The distribution of resources appeared to be a wheel of luck to my young mind. Random, like a roulette wheel spun by an unpredictable god (many, multilimbed gods in our home), who was placated by the lighting of a camphor lamp and the faithful offering of full-cream milk in a brass vessel and fruit, which for a long time remained a luxury in our house.
Only when sated, and the last wisp of incense smoked trailed off, could we partake by cutting the banana into slices to share, the orange into segments, which I ate, gnawing into the spongy pith.
We were the children of uneducated parents, who hovered between varying levels of economic challenges and who never had it as “good” as we did, with our boxed cereals for breakfast, meat more than once a week and niceties such as new clothes and shiny leather Bata Toughies.
Table strictures in the Eighties, not just in our lower-middle-class home in KwaZulu-Natal, but in homes across the United States and Western Europe, I would later learn, included the rhetoric, “There are children starving in Africa!”
It was our kind-hearted parents’ ploy to instil compassion, and guilt, in fussy eaters and insolent brats.
How glad we were not to be like the remote African children living where nothing ever grows and no rain or rivers flow, while it stormed thick and soupy each afternoon in the Midlands. While the wet earth dried, beggars made regular afternoon rounds for leftovers that our mothers packed in Save-O-Matic bags. The greatest gift they would receive is life, we hummed. Bestowed in part by the peas and Brussels sprouts, wild herbs and green beans, the lesson we learned was to be careful not to waste.
I recall, at about the age of eight, dreaming of owning a telescope to watch Halley’s Comet on its return — which, if my calculations were correct, would be in 2061 — roughly enough time for the internet to bury the ill-conceived lyrics we mouthed for most of our youth. And perhaps, by then, a powerful foreign pop star would acknowledge that, sometimes, it does actually snow in Africa.
But never at Christmas time.