RUSTUM KOZAIN

The unique sensory minutiae of the sights, smells and sounds of one's childhood, writes RUSTUM KOZAIN, are the very essence of memory.

Whenever I hear the word “home”, whether I’m uttering it or someone else is, what comes to me unbidden are images of my family’s life in the “servant’s quarters” where I was born (1966) and lived for the first few years of my life. My father, thirsty after a meal of salt snoek and bread, scooping a cup of cool water from a galvanised bucket on a kitchen counter. My mother, walking down the road to catch a bus to work. My brother, outside in the yard screaming “blue murder”, in my mother’s telling of the story, because his tricycle’s wheel was stuck behind a stone.

This home was a converted garage on my uncle and aunt’s property in the newly declared group area of Charleston Hill, Paarl. It had three “rooms”, each divided from the other by a “wall” of polystyrene several centimetres thick.There were no internal doors.You entered through the kitchen door on the western side and on the other side of the kitchen was a doorway that lead to and through the narrow space called the “sitting room” and into the bedroom.

There was no plumbing, thus the bucket of drinking water in the kitchen, and, in the bedroom, a chamber pot kept underneath my parents’ bed. Most of the time, though, us children, my brother and I, used the flushing toilet in my uncle and aunt’s house across the driveway from us, where they lived with their son, my cousin, and Pa, my bedridden maternal grandfather. But I know the liver-like smell of the chamber pot, having had to empty it regularly by the time I was five. (Why liver and not kidney?)

Uncle (my father’s brother) had a growing backyard panelbeating business and Ma (my mother’s sister) was a primary school teacher. My father was probably odd-jobbing and longdistance truck driver for a family with a fruit and vegetable business. My mother, I think, went back to work as receptionist and/or nursing assistant in a doctor’s surgery by the time I was four. So Uncle and Ma were a second set of parents for me.

When Ma was teaching “middag-skof ” (afternoon shift), starting only at 10 or 11 as schools used shift teaching to relieve overcrowding, she dragged me along. Most other times, I played in the back yard under Uncle’s supervision, watching workers hammer out dents, apply body-filler and sand down repaired areas on cars. Often, I was sent to the Duco cupboard to get the bottle-green or canary-yellow can of paint. Around the corner of my home, on its eastern side, was a small, neglected patch of grass, hip-high and growing densely up and through the chicken wire fence of the neighbouring property. Often on hot afternoons, when everybody else was napping or otherwise whiling away the time, this patch of high grass was my escape from the heat and the world. A quiet child could remain hidden in that grass for hours – hours spent in a small, deep fantasy world: upending rocks to pry at insects, reading, or thrilling at the feel of broken but sun-blunt glass trailing over skin. I stopped mooning around in the patch of deep grass when my uncle found a scorpion there, but is there that I born.

ON HOT AFTERNOONS, WHEN EVERYBODY ELSE WAS NAPPING OR OTHERWISE

WHILING AWAY THE TIME, THIS PATCH OF HIGH GRASS WAS MY ESCAPE.

A poet – his most recent collection, Groundwork, was published by Kwela Books –

and freelance editor, RUSTUM KOZAIN lives in Cape Town.