Category: Blog

Blotting paper

Its brand story is an inspired conception; a narrative crafted to knead and unknot that part of the consumer’s brain responsible for decision-making.

So as someone who once studied that kind of thing to pass a few exams, I know that Hemingway and Picasso didn’t actually soak up their genius-vomit with the same oilskin-bound acid-free papers I see in Exclusive Books and hear with angel-song accompaniment.

But I buy them anyway, as overpriced as they are, because they’re well-made and I’m sold on their minimalist practicality. And I have an abnormal fondness for notebooks. Any brand, even those ones from the government stationers we used to get in school on first days; pages hinged together with a sturdy cover, fuck, that just speaks to me!

The bamjee-beaten one you see in the photo (fourth from the top) was my first moleskine ever. A gift from a friend, it lasted almost three years, and would’ve been in action today, had I not run out of pages. It’s not that I’m not a prolific writer (well, yes, there is that), I’m a forgetful one. There’s never just one notebook, but several at any given time. So perhaps their longevity can also be attributed to the fact that my mind is literally in so many different places.

Some of them are still in their wrappings. I haven’t filled enough of my current notebooks to warrant me opening any new ones. And they make great gifts, so maybe I’ll pass some on. (I’m also one of those people who leave the protective plastic covers on their gadget screens until they absolutely have to be peeled off because they just start looking gunky.)

Right now, I’m leaking onto the brown leather-bound and the spiralwire-spined one (right at the bottom). The wire hinged one was an emergency buy at the airport before I left for Malawi. I had to have a notebook with me. It had nothing to do with the fact that my job description has journalist thrown in there somewhere. I needed the notebook because, without it, I feel kinda lonely.

This is where you laugh and feel better about yourself.

Anyhoo, my notebook is the place where my mind gets to lay its head down. In it I make stuff up and figure things out. It doesn’t matter if I spill my deepest and darkest, very few can read my handwriting anyway. In the picture below is a sketch I did of a window overlooking the Vatican City. It was a long queue to get in, and time was sweating itself slowly out of my skin. I don’t usually sketch, because, well, I’m crap. No, seriously, it’s obvious. Don’t even try at amelioration in the comments. One must always be cognisant of one’s shortcomings children. Below the sketch, is the rendering of an arcane script from a long-extinct civilisation. Seriyaas! The Ahelaas of Eejmab.

😉

I had a notebook jacked from me in Std4. It was held to ransom by a bunch of boys in my class outside my house at my 11th birthday party. My mother invited them all inside, and all I heard after that was, “Oooh… Saaleha had boys at her party.” I crossed the line between nerd and cool, and to this day, I still hover above it.

There was nothing personally incriminating in that notebook. Just the random observations of any 10/11 year old. In it was a list of home phone numbers (cellphones were stuff we awed at on Beyond2000), under my own made-up codenames, belonging to some of the more popular boys. Numbers I would never call by myself, because I wouldn’t know what to say. I probably made up the list with some girlfriends, for when we played stupid funny prank games like “Is your fridge running?”

I once found someone’s notebook. I was walking back from madressah, and cut through an alley close to the flats behind what used to be Ruwaida’s Hairdresser. The rain had fused some of the pages together. In it were copied poems in neat female handwriting. Curving lines, their roundness spelling out why boys with brown eyes were better than boys with blue. Something like that. I left the notebook where I found it.

Day 4, 5 and 6

I was born on the fifth of Ramadaan.

A Friday much like yesterday, except for the faint chill of winter that threads through June air.

I always forget my Islamic calendar birthday, and have to be reminded by my mother.
Once I hit fast#3, the days become one huge amalgamated mass of light and dark, with only the numbered chapters of the Quran and the tear-away days on our Ramadaan calendar providing any sense of where I really am.

However, this is not exclusive to Ramadaan. Just a few weeks ago, I misplaced a whole day. I have no idea what I did with Tuesday, August 26. Any information you might have regarding the missing hours can be forwarded via email to me.

The quiet still shrouds me, amplifying all those ugly, scraggly bits of character I need to do away with. If only a metaphysical Verimark existed, and I could pick up a nifty flaw and fluff-remover along with some Bio-slim (as this month of abstention does nothing for a body that’s stubborn and clingy).

The community website ramadaan.co.za features a really good series by Mariam Mahomed titled Ramadan Bootcamp. A post on forgiveness pulled a string in me, and I began to think on all those whom I had stomped on and the ones who muddied me.

I believe it’s a feature of only-child syndrome to want to be loved by everyone all the time (other solo brats feel free to disagree).

For a large part of my lived life thus far, the thought of someone not falling in step with that line refused to compute. And with that, I lived selfishly, doing what I had to do to get what I want, with little cognisance of the sharp words I’d utter or the disappointments I’d cause. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise…” were frequent and familiar. I’d give you a smiley face and some story of how I’m just so caught up in myself to be aware of what I’ve really done. All would be forgiven, because, well, I’m me, and everybody likes me.

But it happens, that one day, someone actually is not able to stomach you, and it sickens you to your bowels, because really that’s never happened before (or maybe you were just so caught up in that little monarchy in your head, that you never noticed). That experience was enough to allow for a long-overdue growth-spurt of maturity. And you begin to think on who’s really forgiven you.

It would not make any sense to go back to every single person you’ve wronged for all your time on earth. What would you say that wouldn’t rattle with empty? “Look, I’ve just had an epiphany. I’ve been really ugly to you. I know I asked for you to forgive me, but will you really forgive me, because I’m being sincere this time around.”

You can’t expect people to hand out their heartfelt maafs on your demand. They have a right to withhold it for as long as their soul will allow. All you can offer is your honesty and prove by your subsequent actions that you truly are regretful.

As for those for whom you penned great epics of wrath and rage for, it’s all kind of laughable really. You would not be who you are today were it not for some reptile who forced you to walk on another path. While you need not cut out your heart for canapés, know that hate makes you brittle.

I visited my family in Azaadville today; with all their quirks and crazies, they keep me grounded. Reading salaah next to my grandmother, I found it hard to suppress a smile when she made her takbeer aloud and proceeded to recite her prayers just above that of an audible whisper. She’s been praying like that for so long, I don’t think He minds anymore. This is the woman who raised me, more mother than grandmother, I’m blessed to have three I can call Mummy (the recent addition of sg33k’s). My grandmother laments my weight gain and pushes sweets on me, all in the same breath. The ways of the old sometimes grate on the young, but in that exercise of patience, lies great reward.

My uncle had a tumour removed from his bladder two days ago. He’s caught in that horrid limbo of waiting on his results. Some of you reading this may have met him, and for others who’ve not; know that he is a father, a husband, a son, a brother, an uncle. At a time where our prostrations are just that little bit more extended, and we’re inwardly clamouring for the Almighty’s approval, remember him, and all those who are not in their best of states, in your prayers.

Jelly and Ifthaar are inextricably linked for me. Whobbling wonderfulness, I lose at least twenty years whenever I’m shlurping some.

Day 2 and 3

There is a stillness in Ramadaan; a special type of quiet that wraps around us. A stillness that renders us malleable; a warm and pliable soul, ready to receive all of Good.
Those things that rub against our grain; loaded words that bring on brain-hives and the desire to strew expletives over the offender — for no well-reasoned argument will dumb the donkey’s bray that offends — we find those things have no place in this soft soul.
It is from the stillness that patience is to be born, with a certain measure of tolerance and the will to let things go. Water off of a sheet of glass.
But I must acknowledge how fortunate we are to have within our midst, those who abide in domiciles built from a certain amorphous solid, and who are only too keen to hurl projectiles at those who pass by. Well-meaning missiles, of course; targeting our ill-placed sentiments into something that loosely resembles one person’s notion of what constitutes a Mu’min.
Why, you need not scar your forehead asking of The One to guide you onto the path of Truth and Light, when you’re being herded onto a trail predetermined by one who simply knows better.
And everyone knows better. Except you, of course.
My patience is not complete. It has yet to be tempered into something better than glass.
(Coffee at Sehri, keeps you Merry. Salma will agree, that rhymes somewhat)

Day One

It was hard for me to bask in a spiritual infusion today, when my brain must’ve been trying to escape through my eye sockets, for all the pain I blinked back.
Hello Caffeine Dependency, you are such a bastard.
A website I was working on had its database eaten by some e-tokoloshe.
That translated into two full days of work having to be compressed into a couple of quicksand hours in order for us not to look like inept fools should some client surf over. This excluded the two hours of downtime we experienced due to the power being cut-off because someone was having a Marie Antoinette moment down at the municipality.
It takes a strong person to not want to smash up the internet and unleash an inner Gustav on anyone within arms reach.
I am not a strong person.
I tried to smile, and I failed.
The frustration and the physical fatigue gave my aura the brown-colour wash of a party-pooper. I could see relief iron out the wrinkles on my boss’ face when I asked to leave early.
I admit the juggling is a feat and I’m trying very hard to keep work, pray and kitchen in smooth circles up in the air.
But this is only Day One. I have an entire month (and beyond) to work out my arms.
And there is something truly magic and complete about breaking your fast with someone who builds your world.

cremations and the blue-footed booby that arose thereof

Despite having done the following for most of my life; drinking things warmed in the microwave, eating kool-aid straight out of the packet, using a roll-on anti-perspirant daily, a couple of weeks ago, I managed to hit a quarter century.

However, it was a birthday spent mostly in bed (I wish I could do a giggley-wink-wink here, but I was merely whiney, miserable and sickly with flu et al.), followed by two weeks of corporeal rebellion.

How predictable that epiphanies would come bouncing along wearing their “Stick with the winners” badges as I approached the eve of ageing.

It’s been a while since my last cigarette. Note ‘last’. I can say this with an almost arrogant certainty, “I will never smoke again.”

I did not find some aspect of God. A fractured personality did not suddenly develop moral fortitude and stage its coup while I slept. I just didn’t want to any more.

There was something about my habit that lingered with each dissipating exhalation.
The blues and greys were the rising detritus of past demolitions. Ugly things that diminished me and built me up so long ago, they might as well have not existed. And yet I still held this thing to my lips.

I smoked because I wanted to see. I smoked because I wanted to feel. I smoked because people didn’t expect me to.
I smoked because I liked it.

I have fond memories of burning tobacco.
There were conversations with good friends that stretched over sunsets, ashtrays and hours.
There were the liftclub cigarettes, the packs that belonged to everyone and no one, the ones we prayed over, hoping we didn’t stink of the guilt when we got home to our families.
A solitary indulgence sometimes, I’d take to quiet heights with views of the city and myself; the roof of the archi building at Wits, Great Hall stairs, the balcony of my boss’ house when we still had offices there.
I can still taste the menthol of a slow Craven A, the best after a meal at Muchacho’s while driving down the Brixton Hill towards Auckland Park that one day in 2003.
There was the cigarette in my cousin’s garden on the morning of my wedding; everything was damp from the rain, and so sharp, I could cut with the leaves.

My last cigarette was dispatched without any ritual; the end stubbed out among a billion other crutches in the communal ashtray of our office smoking room. I walked back to the office, without a word to anyone.

And that was it really.

I don’t wish to glorify something that has the potential to harm you. I lived through my grandfather’s struggle to breathe. A chain smoker, who had to stop because of a bullet that grazed his lung during a robbery he stumbled upon. After decades of reaching into his pocket for the next one, he quit just like that. The damage was already done. It was a few years after that, when he needed two oxygen machines, because he just couldn’t do it on his own. Something so basic, done without active thought, and yet there he was, aware every second that those humming machines were the gatekeepers of his mortality.

I should’ve known better. And I did, but I smoked anyway. There’s this quote from Gregory David Robert’s Shantaram that I often pull out, something along the lines of, “I smoked in those days, because like all people who smoked, I wanted to die as much as I wanted to live.”
And maybe I was caught up in something I didn’t quite understand. But you get on in years, and if you’re lucky, you learn from what you’ve lost and your world becomes that much easier to navigate.

This is not a ‘come walk with me, I have seen the light’ post.
People smoke for different reasons. People quit for different reasons. Some people never smoke at all. But one thing I do know, we all have our crutches. I know I’m still leaning on a few.

Jane and the incredible secret world of the annual L Wechsler & Co. sale

The number of cars lining the side of the road and choking up the improvised parking lot, was the first portent that Jane was about to become part of something rather important.

When she saw the horde of people emerge from the side of the tent pushing trolleys, each one labouring under the weight of multiple cardboard boxes, her heart missed a diastole. “Ooh, what could there be in those boxes,” she thought.

And when she noticed how each them wore that same blend of triumph and satisfaction on their faces, Jane was jolly glad she remembered to put on panty-liners that morning.

“This is it,” she whispered fervidly to her sister-in-law. “I can’t wait to see what’s inside. I’ve heard stories about things like these…”she broke off, almost in reverence, as they approached the tent’s entrance. “Oh my, do you think one trolley will be enough?”
“Ha! I like that question!” said a random woman grabbing her own steel basket. No doubt she’d already been inside and was privy to things arcane and mysterious.
With a very deep breath, Jane clamped her fingers around the steel of the trolley and passed through the white plastic flap of the entrance.

She’d never seen anything like it.
Before her lay shelves and shelves of stacked brown boxes. But it was not the boxes that mesmerised her. It was the items on display next to them, the ones that hinted at what was inside each box.

There were dinner services, serving plates, charger plates, casserole dishes, sauce pans, goblets, tumblers, salad dressing bottles, colanders, egg poachers, apple corers, shiny silver things that could skin an avocado and harness the energy of a hundred suns. So many things of magic and delight, and oodles and oodles of cutlery. And it was all on sale. Jane wept.

She felt the ground beneath her give a little. It was not from the sheer excitement suffusing her insides, but the thrum of a million trolley wheels coursing down the aisles.
Families, couples, singles, every type of family unit crawled over and around each other in a mad shimmering dance.

She saw wives throwing themselves onto the cutlery piles, staking claims on steak knives going at a steal, while their husbands edged away slowly, perhaps out of fear that they might be emasculated by an overzealous grandmother with a sharp potato peeler.
An arthritic woman on borrowed and now overdue time, barely escaped being crushed by a middle-aged woman missioning to claim thirty teaspoons priced at R5 each.

What struck Jane the most was the amount of newly-weds at the sale. “How did they find out about this place?” Jane wondered. She was brought here by her sister-in-law who got wind of it through her other sister-in-law who heard from her sister-in-law via that colossal grapevine that now weaved through Jane’s life and tripped her up with its branches.

It really was a whole new world opening it’s core to her. She understood the thrill of fingering Jenni Button Melton jackets and boots from San Marina, and now, to have that same feeling extend to olive spoons and honey-drippers, Jane felt she’d emerged from a chrysalis.

Jane was jolted out of her fugue by someone so captivated by the R25 salad forks, that everything in her path towards the display would just have to be obliterated.

Jane rubbed her smarting elbow and immediately oohed at the yellow flan pan on the shelf before her. “Must have…” she murmured, just a little drool sketching a line towards her chin. All thought of pain poofed away when she happened upon the egg cups that came with a cute little salt shaker and an equally adorable little spoon.
“Must have…”
Jane saw pink ponies and babies playing the theme from Desperado on their violins, her mind was so lost between the bright red saucepans and the citrus juicer.

Time passed the way it does when one’s under the influence of something delightfully narcotic, and she soon emerged from the tent with her own big brown box in a trolley.

“The lady at the till said they unpack new stuff everyday!” Jane enthused to her sister-in-law. She really needed a good potato-masher and the L Wechsler & Co sale ran until the first of May. With one look at the cardboard box containing her now prized cake lifter, Jane knew she’d be back.

— Somewhere lyrics spilled out of a car radio, “You can step out any time you like, but you can never leave…” —

On our way home

We are
creased commuters, squashed between mama and the silent man with the itch in his side. After-robot! Now we can nurse life back into a tingly leg.

We are
drivers with our windows open and the radio up, we’ll chance metal against our temples because the air con’s broke and it’s a long wait at a dead robot at 5.30pm on a weekday.

We are
the man selling sunglasses at the corner. And the one selling mangoes. And the one selling clothes hangers. And the one selling a massive neon bouncing ball.

We are
the lady selling chances to numb your guilt.

We are
the one giving her money, thinking her child seems too old to be carried. “Look, his legs dangle past her knee,” we mutter while fishing in the ashtray for the car-guard’s change.

We are
taxi drivers, battered emperors of the tacky tarmac. Don’t be so insolent as to believe you have any right of way over us.

We are
12 year olds at the roadside, wielding spark plugs for just one shot for glass to rain. Just one chance. One cellphone. This is the difference between today and tomorrow for me.

We are
the people who shoot them. Thieving bastards deserve it. Damn, he looked older when he smashed my windscreen.

—-

You may have heard/read this in the news. Crime has made something ugly of us all, the victims and the perpetrators. See how the lines are blurring.

Jane and the magic kiddie-stop beans.

“There are indications from clinical studies that the mild antimineralocorticoid properties of the Magic Kiddie-Stop Beans result in a mild antimineralocorticoid effect,” Jane carefully read aloud from the tome.
“Anti-mineral-o-corti-coid,” she mouthed with all the slow-nooooo effect of a Zee TV daytime soapie rani lunging at her son who was about to drink the poisoned lassi meant for her mother-in-law.
Were they saying the properties of a substance that suppressed the secretion or opposed the action of mineralocoritcoids, would result in the suppression of the secretion or the opposition of the action of the mineralocorticoids?
Jane’s left eyeball was suddenly spiked by a spear of blinding pain.
All she wanted to know was if the little beans would make her bloated, grumpy or suicidal.
Reading the little booklet that was packaged with the magic kiddie-stop beans made her feel bloated, grumpy and suicidal.
Dros Pirenone and Ethin Ylestradiol sounded like her eastern-european neighbours who led an alternative lifestyle and had just adopted a two-year old nepalese child.
Too many syllables. Too many acutes. Too many thromboembolic disorders. Too many scary sounding things she didn’t understand that related to parts of her body that sounded rather important to have without the complications of itis, emia, oma, opia or esis.
Jane reached that point of confusion where the only thing that made pure and perfect sense was to go shopping for a new pair of shoes and a breastpump.