Tandia Read Online Free PDF Page A

still and let the hate come in. Let the hate spread, enter her salty, blood-rinsed mouth and creep down her dry throat and into her chest and down, down, down, to congeal in her stomach so that she thought for a moment she would vomit. She gulped, but she held the hate down. She held it until it spread throughout her whole body. And then, only then, when she knew it would never leave her, Tandia allowed herself to weep again.
    This time it was a cry that started on the surface like a child crying and then burned deeper and deeper so that it ended up a whimper, hardly a cry at all. It was only then, when the crying was leached out of her, that the fear came, it rose up in her breast until she could contain it no longer. 'Patel!' she screamed. 'Why did you have to die!' At almost sixteen, life as a kaffir had begun for Tandia.

TWO
    Tandia arrived back at Booth Street before Mrs Patel had risen. She moved painfully over to the yard tap and washed the red cemetery clay from her feet and legs. Then she filled a four-gallon paraffin tin bucket and carried it into the shed where she poured the cold water into a large white enamel basin. She undressed slowly, pulling the cotton shift carefully over her bruised body. With a cloth she rinsed in the bucket she wiped as much of the blood away as she could see before she squatted in the basin to bathe. The skin around her wrists had been rubbed away and in some places the handcuffs had cut deeply into the flesh so that each time she put her hands into the basin the water around her wrists stained pink. The cruel welts made by the policeman's belt still burned her buttocks and when she wiped tenderly over them there was blood on the cloth, although whether from the welts "or from the other place you couldn't be certain.
    Up to this moment Tandia's life had been a dichotomy, a two-person affair. She would return home from school and take off her white blouse and gym frock, her short white socks and shiny black shoes, and change into a servant's cotton shift and blue beret. Then she'd wash' and hang out her school uniform to dry; later, before she went to bed, she would starch and iron it when she did Patel's shirts. This personal task completed, she would change from a bright little Indian schoolgirl into the Patels' black servant. It was an emotional journey Tandia made every day of her life and one which she walked with a terrible loneliness.
    As a child she had cried the loneliness out of her system as she lay in the dark on a coil mattress in the hot shed. She could remember thinking that even the rats that scurried across the corrugated-iron roof above her head had mothers and fathers. She only had Patel whom she was allowed to call Patel, and not 'baas', like a kaffir, but not daddy either, like a proper daughter.
    Her bath completed, Tandia wrapped her towel around her torso and dragged the basin which was almost two feet in diameter to the doorway, tipping its contents into the dusty back yard. The water splashed, runneled and rushed for a few feet before being sucked into the dry earth. Moments later only a damp stain showed where it had been, and that too would soon disappear, baked dry in the hot mid-October sun.
    Tandia returned the basin to its place under her iron cot, and she applied a damp cloth to her swollen eyes and mouth. Then she dressed slowly, not only because of the pain but also because she sensed that the ritual of changing from servant to schoolgirl, a moment which every school morning of her life she had cherished, might be coming to an end. Her blouse crackled with the starch, just the way Patel's shirts did, and the freshly washed and ironed gym frock fell neatly on her trim body. Her back hurt as she bent down to put on her white socks and tie the laces of her brightly polished shoes. She would say nothing of her early morning graveside visit to say goodbye to Patel. If she told the old woman anything it would only give her yet another reason to throw her onto