Creation

Creation is the soul, verily the God who imagines for us a complex, colourful and compassionate world where we are educated in what is sustaining for us and what nourishes us and what liberates us.

A little girl of four year old loses her father watching the grief of her mother feeling helpless and knowing in that moment that this was to shape her world as the smooth edge of maternal protection is scarred in the face of a paternal God who says He will protect his women. As the days advance into months and into long years, she remembers him; her one vivid and never fading memory; of him swinging her on his long legs.

Her father looked like a white man, towering in the early part of the twentieth century at six feet three inches, fair in complexion and all set to protect his family blessed to have the complexion of the oppressors into a safe and harmonious and trouble free environment where his six girls would marry with their gifted beauty into affluent Tamil homes. He was a bookkeeper and business man and his young petite wife undertook the household chores with an iron fist. Her first five daughters were born roughly a year apart from each other. Her sixth child was not a boy. They were awaiting a boy desperately after five girls who would take over as the man in the household. She did not want the child when the sixth was born a girl and committed the child to the stormy skies that were raging on the night of her birth. The grandfather of this sixth exceptionally fair daughter told his fraught offspring who had given birth to this child that he would take the child and raise her and he named her after the God of War who carries the spear revered as the vel among Tamil speakers; this warrior child exceedingly soon became the favourite of the mother who having rejected without seeing her in the first instance fell in love with her on taking her in her arms.

The little girl of four trying desperately to console her distraught mother embraced the world as a mix of genders vowing to protect her mother and inheriting from her mother a need to trust in the conscience of a world. Her mother was disinherited from the spoils of her husband by his greedy brother who claimed that this grieving widow was young and would remarry again. More tears. Mother and unmarried daughters resigned themselves to maintaining their cosy wood and iron cottage with shop adjoined shining the apples as the father had taught them to do inviting customers to shop from them.

The older five sisters ranging between nine and sixteen years older than the sixth child were all married by the time they were in their late teens. By and large they married into respectful families with income and assisted their mother and little sister with groceries when they could. This was in the 1940's and to make ends meet their mother had taken a job as a cook in a local Indian school where she was responsible for feeding up to a thousand children peeling enormous quantities of potatoes daily roughening what must have been once delicate hands. As her youngest child grew, the mother graduated to a more sedate vocation of being Tamil school teacher where her baby of the family was studying.

The baby of the family, the youngest of six sisters was nicknamed Yula for short as her second name was after the Goddess of the Universe. It cannot be emphasised that Yula trusted a world with a conscience. Well into her primary years, a scholar who perhaps came from a questionable background scribbled on a book ganging up with would be friends and told the teacher that Yula had done this. Yula was duly punished being caned with a bamboo stick and tears wet her eyes but did not disclose the truth to the teacher. It took a few days for her palms to heal from the caning where her mother cried nursing her baby. Such an incident was a metaphor for the life of Yula, still young in years, where she would embrace a God as she reached her middle ages who represented forgiveness, compassion and love.

The 1940’s saw the final ten years of colonialism in South Africa before the official segregation of apartheid came into being in the 1950’s with Afrikaner rule. The Indians in South Africa primarily on the east coast in Durban and surrounding areas were the legacy of indentured labour as set out by the British. Yula, when her father was alive, would linger around his grocery shop aptly named ‘Roadway Fruiterers’ and chat away to the customers being of an exceptionally friendly disposition. An elderly white woman by the name of Mrs Campbell had an eye out for the pretty, fair and chatty child and offered her father a few hundred pounds, a substantial amount in such days, to buy her and raise her as her own. Yula’s father promptly took her by the arm lifting her up and putting her in the adjoining house locking the door and told her mother not to let her out, fuming on this humiliating occurrence. After her father’s death, Yula’s mother would regularly relate this story to her and as she grew up Yula would mercilessly tease her mother on why her parents did not sell her and she would have a new kind of life and a completely different culture.

Yula’s early teenage years was defined by the days of the Commonwealth when the British Queen was a princess travelling with her father, mother and sister by boat in stark and saddening contrast to the boats the indentured labourers travelled on with them surveying the might of their empire. Yula, blessed with a raw talent for vocals, which will be considered in profound detail later, was chosen to sing with some students for the then presiding king and consort with his two daughters. She sang her heart out with meaning and intent for this foreign royal family excited to have been chosen for this special honour. It must be mentioned that one of Yula’s elder sisters was not quite as fair as the rest of them and if there were fights among the elder group of sisters, this particular sister was labelled ‘karpai’ that being the Tamil world for ‘blackie’. This sister used to be very upset with this label and young Yula watching on would feel very sorry for her and in her lay the seat of compassion which the trappings of being the advantaged complexion as far as Indians went could not eradicate. When Yula was about six years old, her mother had a Tamil lady doing some work for them who was considered to be lower class and her mother would make her sleep out in the enclosed verandah with a thin blanket groaning in the cold night’s air. Yula would hear this woman groaning and feel desperately sorry for her daring to challenge her mother on such a prejudice and not being able to vocalise this to her mother but would tell this story to her daughter many many years later after both woman from the abhorrent class and caste difference had passed on.

This foundation of compassion is key to the aura of creation which is the soul and I end this introduction with a story of one of Yula’s uncles who displayed the seeds of compassion with Yula herself noting that when he would visit the young mother with her youngest daughter he would ask Yula to cup her hands together and pour coins into her hand for as much as she could hold that would see her mother through the grocery shopping for the month.