Noma
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A friend from England phoned. He was in New York and would meet me for dinner at an Indian restaurant on 6th Street. I found it easily, a small blue door surrounded by thousands of fairy lights. Inside I ducked under a heavy canopy of bright red chilli Christmas lights and made my way through the cramped red plastic tables. I found Mark and he greeted me like old friends do, hugging me too long and changing the subject quickly. I watched his handsome face across the table and thought absently that it must be easier not to be American. At the next table six Indian waiters sang ‘Happy Birthday’ at full volume accompanied by a blaring disco soundtrack. Mark and I sat smiling and waiting. Poppadams arrived with sweet chilli and mint and yogurt.
Then he said it.: “I’m moving to Cape Town.”
“South Africa?!” I asked in disbelief. “you can do that? Just move?!”
I have often had the feeling at pivotal moments in my life that the soundtrack suddenly fades. The restaurant blurred suddenly around us, the brightly coloured lights and the singing waiters blending into a distant haze as Mark answered question after question about how and where. After I hurry him through his dinner the restaurant spat us out on the freezing sidewalk. Snowflakes were just starting to fall and we could see our breath leaving our mouths in steaming clouds as we talked and walked home.
That night I pushed the neighbours cat out of the way and opened the 6 locks on my front door. I left the lights off and dropped my keys into a ceramic bowl in the front hall before proceeding directly to my computer. One touch of it’s green blinking eye and the room was suddenly bathed in blue light. I clicked on the Travelocity website and quickly booked tickets…
A few weeks later my daughter lay sleeping beside me, the gentle hum and rumble of the jet engines all around us. I pulled the synthetic airplane blanket around her and switched on my reading light. In the small pool of florescent light I reached for the in-flight magazine. Flipping quickly through the pages I landed absently on a real estate ad. It seems now that all these events happened without my full knowledge. Some greater hand turning the pages of my destiny. Funny how life is altered by the smallest things – a phone call, an ad in a magazine. What made me tear the page from the magazine, tuck it into my bag and switch off the light? Does fate just step in every once in a while and take the wheel?
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Toast in my mouth, I take a swig of tea and I run down the stairs to answer the repeatedly-ringing doorbell.
“Coming!” I shout.
Rain pounds on the corrugated plastic roof of the front hall. At the door stands an enormous black woman with a red turban and matching dress.
She is perfectly dry.
We stand looking at each other and then her face blooms into an enormous smile. “I am Eunice, I have come to work for you.”
I hadn’t asked her to come, she had simply appeared; like the moon appears sometimes in the sky as if it was always there. There was no question that I would say ‘yes’ and we sat at the dining room table without being sure what else there was to say.
“It’s not your name is it? Eunice.”
“No.” She says “But you won’t be able to say my name with your American tongue.”
“Try me” I said.
The word rolls so beautifully off her lips and lands in the air with a soft click. I was determined and I did my best and she smiled at me and nodded.
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Then the house was slowly filled with her personality. In the good times she would sing as she did the ironing and I could feel her presence making my heart warmer inside wherever I was. In bad times she would sit in my office and wipe tears from her broad face. Or we would stand in the road outside her house, my tears falling on her generous chest. The connection between us was always strong but deepended over time. So much so that we shared physical pains. If she fell, I felt pain in the same limb; if I woke with a pain in my neck I knew she would arrive rubbing her neck just there.
She shared a million African wisdoms with me: bees in the house means company is coming; Worms in the drain, a message from the ancestors; The feeling inside when something is coming; and the meaning of Ubuntu – ‘I am who I am because you are who you are’ – the (truly African) practice of sharing what you have with those who don’t.
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Noma arrived in tears one morning. Her husband, had come home from work drunk, they had fought. He pushed her out of the room they shared and - as she and her children tried to beat down the door- he made a noose with en electric cable. Now filled with guilt and anger and shame she came to me. Together we drove to her house. We parked the car on the dusty road and walked in silence through the twisted paths between shacks to hers.
Her husbands’ sisters had been summoned to sit on suicide watch and we all sat formally on chairs in the small living room not knowing what to say. Her husband moved from room to room sullen and shamed, in a trance. His thin face said everything and nothing as his sisters’ similar features smiled politely at me. She and I shared this.
We have shared everything. Divorce and betrayal, sickness and health, sadness and joy, growth and pain. We raised daughters together and lived together for more than twelve important years. When I think of South Africa and the years I have lived here hers’ is the first face I will think of. And when we return to visit she will be my first stop. I was so luck to have seen life a little from her perspective and when we leave, a piece of all of us will stay with her.