The World Unseen by Shamim Sarif Read Free Book Online

now and then with the workers, greeting one or two, and laughing. As she watched him, Miriam felt the prickle of a gaze upon her, and her eyes went to the front of the shop where one of the workers stood apart, drinking from a bottle of Coke, and watching her. He looked her up and down, slowly, and she felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck rise.
     
    “Don’t trust the kaffirs ,” her bhabhi had once told her. “They want only one thing - from their own women, and from white women and Indian women too. They do. And they are strong,” she had added. “If they attack you, there is nothing you can do. And then there is the syphilis. And God knows what else.” It was only then that Miriam had her first inkling of what had caused her sister-in-law’s illness. But when she had asked about Jehan, Farah just laughed and said that Omar and Sadru only preferred to think that Jehan had been raped.
     
    “Your sister-in-law had a boyfriend ,” Farah had laughed. “Almost as retarded as she is, for god’s sake, but he loved her.”
     
    “Why didn’t they get married?” Miriam had wanted to know.
     
    “Because he was a kaffir ,” Farah told her impatiently. “He hung around for weeks, until the men in the family caught him and almost beat the life out of him. He had to stay away in the end.”
     
    When she looked up again, the African worker was gone, replaced in her mind by a brutal vision of kicking and beating, the cold imaginings which had come to her so often after hearing Farah’s flippant story. Outside, Mr Wessels was shouting for everyone to get back on the truck. He spoke in English, for Afrikaans was the White language. Omar spoke it – he had learnt it at school here, but the Africans usually only knew enough to comprehend their masters and, if they worked domestically, their white mistresses. Mr Wessels moved among the men, grasping a stick in his hand which he never used, only leaned on, or twirled about, using it as a prop, rather as other men might keep their hands busy with a cigarette. He shooed the workers back onto the truck as though they were so many huge birds, and one by one, they arranged themselves into the back, the last few perched on the sharp edges, keeping alight with a practiced sense of balance.
     
    They were relieved when the last truckload had left, and it was still only one o’clock. This pay-day had fallen on a Wednesday, and that meant that they would receive a visit from the sons of their landlord. George and David Kaplan often stopped by the shop “on their way through” to somewhere, for a pack of cigarettes, or some small item. But in addition they always came by on the last Wednesday afternoon of each month for a social visit that softened the collection of the rent money with talk of politics and weather, and often they brought their wives.
    The two Mrs Kaplans held a fascination for Miriam that she could not explain. It seemed to her that they always floated into the shop, bringing with them the slow whisper of a chiffon dress, the soft pastel of their low-heeled pumps, a shimmer of blonde hair and the lingering scent of expensive French perfume. Their voices were high and laughing, filled with delight at greeting Miriam, as though she were the one and only thing they could have wished to see upon entering the shop. While their husbands talked business with Omar around the table in the back room, the wives stayed in the shop with Miriam, sipping tea and chatting.
     
    They arrived today at two o’clock, the usual hour, by which time Robert had helped Miriam to set the tea-tray with a fresh cloth, embroidered by her own hand, and three cups and saucers from their best set of dishes. The milk was poured into a china jug that had once belonged to Omar’s mother, the white sugar was brought out to replace the everyday brown, and then a replica of the whole tea-tray was set upon a white cloth on the back room table for the men, to whom Robert would serve tea, while