Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia

He had the reputation of being more intelligent than the average policeman. They were soft-spoken, possessing an individual potency that was feared throughout the country. You could disappear forever in the company of an sb. He could invalidate your employer’s endorsement on the spot and tear up your pass book. If you were a European, he could confiscate your passport, put you on an aeroplane to another country, place you in detention, or recommend you to the Minister for house arrest. If he caught you, then you had your chips.

      Victor was just standing up when he found that he had been picked up by the neck and was being forced through the door into Mr Shabangu’s room. The man behind him, efficient and strong, forced his arms behind his back and didn’t allow him to turn around. The man in front of him stood with his face suddenly red, removing the earphones and turning the recording machine off.

      —I found a friend outside. Seen him before?

      —He’s working with Polk. Isn’t that so, my friend?

      A thrill passed through Victor’s body, from his feet all the way to his head. The world was a performance. He and his father and Samuel Shabangu were players without a name, people who didn’t count in the grand scheme. He couldn’t say a word out loud to the Special Branch. But he defied them. He didn’t mind being tongue-tied in front of them. He was even luckier than he had ever been before. His name would be a legend.

      The man behind him held his ear and spoke.

      —We are like the bioscope for you? You think you can watch us like this, my friend? What are you even doing on this floor?

      —I sleep in the next room, where the mattress is. I was just passing by to see Mr Shabangu.

      —Your Shabangu is not here to save you. Where’s your pass?

      —I am Victor Moloi. Mr Shabangu will tell you. He took my permit today. It’s somewhere here in this room.

      —You are full of beans, my boy. I must tell you that you are full of beans today.

      Victor was held to the man’s head. He stood on his toes, hardly recognising the pain, and watched the other man start to pack up and put on his jacket. It was a relief to be held, to be located, and commanded, and forced to confess. He had been on the run for three years. Now he could be clear of it all. He could go back to his father.

      —Well, you will have to stay with us for a while, my friend. In any case we can’t let you go and tell stories now to Polk and his brilliant parade of actors and actresses. We don’t want to trouble his beautiful redhead. Tomorrow we will begin to clear up what happened here. We will begin to have some conversations with those involved. In the meantime you have come in the middle of an entire operation.

      The man in the back released Victor and pushed him onto the bed. The two policemen, now both wearing their leather jackets, sat in front of the recorder, trying to remove the two spools without breaking the tape. He thought they were even more helpless than he was. Their system of pass books and police forces, prisons and tape recorders, this system which they carried in their hearts and treated as their gospel, was a childish invention. It had fatal effects, and yet its reasons were no more serious than a child’s logic.

      —My reference book is here, in this room, because Mr Shabangu sold it to me in the first place. Everybody knows. When you give him enough money he will go to the department and come back with a reference book for you.

      —You’re making a serious accusation. Mr Shabangu has been a friend to our department for many years. I don’t believe he is trading pass books.

      —Let me look around the room. I can find it and I will show you.

      They didn’t allow him. The other man went to fetch the caretaker. He came back, after a few minutes, with a smile that stayed on his face. There was no pleasantness in it.

      —Our Shabangu must have heard something. He is gone like a shot.

       1979 BOXING DAY

      The arrival of the machines had destroyed the holidays. On the electric piano it was Neil Diamond. Boney m had released a Christmas album which used a drum machine at the bottom of the harps. The new Yamaha synthesizer took a star turn at the request of bands like the Carpenters and the Bee Gees, but it made the sound of a silicon chip. It didn’t count as real music.

      From Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day, Yash was in pain. He couldn’t close his ears to ten thousand radios in Phoenix township. Someone in his wife’s family was sure to bring a radio-cassette player, neglect to ask permission, and set it up on the parapet, whereupon the old and the young, the toothless aunt and her thirteen-year-old niece, the grandfather in his sleeves and waistcoat, and the grandson in short pants, nodded along. It hurt him that his relatives didn’t ask to put on their Lata Mangeshkar or Carpenters tapes. They wouldn’t dream of listening to his recommendations. Yash was surrounded by the Naidoos and the Naickers, people who would sooner walk on burning coals than ask his permission. But that wasn’t the reason he wanted to die.

      This Christmas there was a swan boat at Blue Lagoon that you could pedal around the basin. The funfair offered bumper cars on electric rails, operated by his cousin Logan. Non-Europeans couldn’t drive. For those who didn’t own a television there were replays of Taxi starring Red Kowalski on Radio Port Natal. Logan had cousins Australia side who had private copies of the entire history of Star Trek on Betamax cassettes. But you could never trust a cassette in terms of quality.

      In the window of the record shop in Commercial Arcade, Yash had registered the presence of the new album by the Shadows. That one group didn’t need computers to make good music. If he wanted to possess their new record before the end of the year, he would have to face the annoyance of Kastoori and, no doubt, her mother and her father. But he couldn’t borrow any more from her parents. They were involved in everyone else’s money matters, particularly those of their daughter Kastoori and her husband, who had gone too deep into debt to be excused for his expensive record collection. They were just looking for a chance to make him sell it back to the shop at a steep discount.

      The Naidoos were as stern with him as they would have been with another person’s difficult child. Yash was a performer. They looked at his existence as a kid’s performance. He played the guitar, read British music magazines on special order, associated with that Logan and his troublemaking friends, followed the adventures of Captain Kirk and certain comic books, and, in general, caused them nothing but pain and perplexity by his way of life. They saw it as the ultimate cheek.

      For his part, Yash welcomed being caught out. He accepted that he was in the wrong from society’s point of view. Modern music itself was in the wrong. The Dutch Reformed Church wanted to prevent rock-and-rollers, like the Beatles, from entering the country.

      The parade of visitors on Boxing Day would be worse than Diwali. They needed to be prepared. First of all Yash had to get Sanjay cleaned. It was still early.

      Left to his own devices, the boy refused to bathe. He feared water like a cat. But he liked it when Yash scrubbed him and rubbed him dry, keeping his head in the towel like the women in the salon who sat under the perm machines. Sanjay enjoyed the close attention from his father. While his hair was dried, he would close his eyes and smile like a prince. On occasion, Sanjay would throw back his head, hold up his arms, and keep laughing until he had been buttoned into his good set of clothes, consisting of cream trousers and a tasselled top. The green flash of his eyes drew your attention to the unusual length of the boy’s eyelashes.

      Yash went outside to get ready. He ran hot water into the plastic tub while through the open window Kastoori started to wring out and flay the sheets and curtains in the big basin, her elbows flying this way and that. They didn’t speak. She had started the preparations late.

      He took no pleasure being out and about. There was no sunshine on the day after Christmas, only a layer of cloud and the feeling of warmth remaining in the ground. The ranks of green- and red-walled houses, tin roofs dull despite the