Picture to yourself a little town set amid blue
mountains. A town that was born out of the yearning of some sweating white man
in power, homesick for the climate and sights of his own dear England. And so a
tiny summer retreat was born and grew till it became a busy town with white
Anglican churches posing amid groves of fragrant pines. It is called Pinetown.
The year is 1957. The British have been gone for
exactly a decade but they are still very much of a presence. You cannot make
more than two hundred years of domination vanish in just one decade. The
British are in the names of the houses, in the golf course, the orchards of
plum and peach, in the trout-filled streams. They are in the Hendersons,
Robinsons ,Smiths and Taylors, Bakers and Grays who still lord it over this
little piece of earth. Above all, they are in the minds of the brown-skinned inhabitants,
who are yet to fully take in 15 August, 1947.
My father ran a restaurant in the town. It served
South Indian food, mostly. Chicken cutlets were a specialty. I attended a
reputed school for girls. I was popular because of the goodies I brought to
school almost every day. On rare occasions, I would triumphantly display a few
cutlets reclining royally in the steel container. The aroma would alert Sheila
Wood. She would saunter over to where we, the Brownies as they called us, sat.
Sheila was almost white; her father was an Englishman who had chosen to stay back
when India was handed over to Indians ten years ago. His wife was a very fair
Anglo-Indian woman. I had seen them often when they stopped outside our hotel
to take home hot chicken cutlets.
In time, Sheila and I became friends, after a
fashion. Perhaps it was the cutlets that did the trick.
At recess, we would sit together, while the others
played Seven Tiles or Bounders, whites against browns. Neither of us cared for
the games. We loved reading and shared an ambition - both of us wanted to be
doctors.
The Christmas exams were going on. We shivered in
our cardigans. It was Science that day. Both of us had prepared well and hoped
to perform well. When the question papers were given out by Miss Andrews, our
dreaded class teacher, I found to my joy that the Life Cycle of the Cockroach
figured - a question Sheila and I had hoped for. Sheila was sitting to the
right, two rows in front of me. She turned a little, waved the question paper
slightly and smiled. I nodded, smiled and turned back to my answer sheet. Then,
a grey whirlwind blew up to me. A slap landed on my left cheek, the sound of
which made every head look up. I was pulled to my feet and through the haze of
pain and shock, I heard her say, “Skinny brown cheat. You started it.” Then,
she dropped me onto my bench and walked back to her seat.
That evening, we had visitors; Sheila and her
parents. She came to me; stroked the weal on my cheek. They had brought me
chocolates; she had brought love. That love binds us together even today. We
are with the International Red Cross and currently work in the same hospital.
Each day, they come to us to be healed- the white, the brown, the black, the
yellow.
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