Book Excerpt: High Low In-between by Imraan Coovadia

Imraan Coovadia's High Low In-between builds, with a slow crescendo, into a murder mystery that manages to touch on all of South Africa's ills, without ever becoming heavy-handed or didactic.

The characters Coovadia has created live with you, and lend you their gentle, ironic points of view, long after you have reached the last page of this fine novel, which is a text of ideas wrapped up warmly in a quilt of emotional bewilderment.

It's a book we've been waiting for in South Africa for a long time. BOOK SA is very pleased to bring an excerpt from the opening chapter:

* * * * * * * *

The broken window

In preparation for the visitors the house was being cleaned from top to bottom. Everybody was miserable.

The professor was miserable because it was impossible to concentrate as mattresses were carted onto the patio, beaten with sticks, and abandoned in the sunshine. Since the operation his attention had not fully returned.

After scanning The Lancet in preparation for court his gaze wandered to the front of the house. There was glass on the tiled section of the driveway. Estella had managed to break a window while moving the mattresses onto the veranda.

Estella, the maid, was miserable because of Nafisa, her employer. If one was unhappy then so was the other. In this one way Estella and nafisa were, people said, like mother and daughter.

Nafisa was miserable because her son Shakeer was about to arrive from San Francisco. He was taking the photographs at his father’s retirement party. It seemed that an entire generation was stepping down. Nafisa was sensitive to her son’s opinion. He was her only child. She didn’t want him to arrive when the house was in disorder even if Shakeer did not know the difference. There was only this one morning to straighten up. But neither Estella nor her husband were disposed to cooperate. They were obstacles!

The situation was bad within the four walls of the house. Beyond them it was worse. For some reason her authority had never extended across the property to the garage. nafisa didn’t understand what happened in the garage. People without names had dumped things in there since they moved to the Westville house. nor could Estella be persuaded to clean it from top to bottom.

Nafisa was panicky. Her hands shook. It seemed that her hold on circumstances, which had been unsteady in recent years, had been revealed as such. She thought she would fall down. Normally the state of the garage made no difference. The dog slept in a basket between the cars. nobody much else went in. But Arif’s retirement party was going to be large, as raucous as such an evening could be. Some of the guests, in search of privacy, were sure to find their way up.

The contrast between the bright morning and the cool inside the door blinded Nafisa at first. She tripped on something. It was the toolbench cluttered with wrenches and spanners. She needed glasses. Shakeer, with his father’s concordance, had been telling her so for five years.

From beneath the bench Nafisa picked up a bicycle chain. It belonged to a bicycle of which she had no recollection. The oil coating the links came off black on her hands. She dropped the chain as if it had scalded her.

But it was hopeless! Nafisa retreated to the door. Things had been allowed to ride for too long. They were out of her control. The house was hopeless!

From the steps she spied further disorder on the veranda. After breaking the window Estella had brought out the beds to air.
Something in the spectacle of the four Posturepedic mattresses, piled on the wall to reveal their discoloured undersides, made Nafisa’s eyes fill with tears.

The odd thing was that she could not recall crying as a young woman. other people had a different impression. on her wedding day her husband’s friend Jadwat, dr Jadwat, had mentioned her particular expression of sunshine and rain.

Jadwat was unreliable. It hadn’t been true then. There had been no rain at her wedding.

Today there was no sunshine. The reservoir of these tears had accumulated in the course of a difficult year. If she was distracted while driving, or couldn’t add two numbers together, or misplaced the key to her surgery, they found their way to the surface. They embarrassed her.

Nafisa believed that her ready tears were pre-emptive, the prediction of some circumstance of which she had no knowledge. Since her husband’s operation she had sensed some catastrophe waiting to show itself. of course it was such thinking, magical thinking, which Arif criticised in the country. He made judgements. So she had been unable to confess this sensation to him.

She put a hand across her forehead to conceal her condition from nobody in particular. Just as she did this Estella emerged from the house. nafisa closed the door to the garage and hurried down the steps.

“Just where are you off to?”

Estella said, “as you can see I have put out the last mattress. They need some time to air. I will be back in the house just now, Nafisa, and sweep up the glass. I am going to collect my telephone from the room.”

“And why is that? Explain it to me.”

“I know you don’t like me to use the house telephone for personal use.” Estella paused and saw that she needed to give a better reason. It was a tricky matter, to use her employer’s own words against her. “I must ask my neighbour, Peter dlamini, to keep a check on my daughter this afternoon. as I told you, Nafisa, she had another fit in the night. Somebody has to be there.”

Nafisa wasn’t sympathetic. She had trained herself to be suspicious where Estella was concerned, especially when a long explanation was provided. Estella borrowed her words and her way of speaking. It angered her to be studied in this way. Yet the problem was real. She had Estella’s daughter under observation.

The epilepsy was serious.

“Do you want to know what I think? I think it’s got nothing to do with your daughter. I believe it’s some new boyfriend you need to call on the dot every hour. and at a time like this! People will be here soon. Shakeer, for one, will be here this afternoon. So please don’t make a fool of me, Estella. I know precisely how you act when a new man appears. You’ve been wearing perfume.”

“I haven’t …”

“Look, your private life is your own business. all I ask is that you do the job. Since we are on the subject … you cannot be too careful as an African woman. You have to be tested and have your boyfriends tested before you sleep together. This is the one thing which will lead to your comeuppance. You’re crazy for men.”

“Not at all, Nafisa. From the time I had my daughter men don’t interest me. I have learned my lesson.”

Nafisa searched in the other woman’s face for a measure of self-consciousness regarding this untruth. She didn’t find it.

There wasn’t a lot to trust in this face. Its faults were on the surface. one couldn’t deny that Estella was gorgeous. Her complexion was copper, almost like a copper pot. Her nose and cheekbones were so cleanly pressed that to look at them nafisa was reminded of origami.

Beauty changed with the times. Unlike the african women of the previous generation, products of farms and villages, Estella had grown up in a nearby township. She took care of her looks. They were her capital. Her hair was firmly braided, beaded, and scolded into a bun.

Nafisa could guess at the effort channelled into this enterprise. It was a chore to be beautiful. She knew about the pair of high-heeled Cuthberts shoes, rolled in a sheet of rose-pattern gift wrap, and stored on the concrete shelf beside Estella’s bed. She had seen them transported onto the bus in Estella’s handbag. They represented a fortnight’s wages.

For some reason these red shoes stayed in nafisa’s mind. They summarised some fact about Estella.

Driving back from work Nafisa found her worker waiting at the municipal bus stop on Forester avenue. She sometimes stopped to ask Estella something about the house. She could swear that, through the window, she detected the scent of her Lacoste perfume which should have been locked in the bathroom cabinet. She couldn’t imagine how Estella had found the key, if that was indeed how she had found her way into the perfume.

Nafisa had informed her husband of her discovery of the theft. He laughed about it. Arif’s reactions were unpredictable. He refused to
take her side. He claimed to be objective. Yet there was an element of mockery in arif’s attitude and it was directed against her. She smelled its presence as surely as the diluted Lacoste.

Remembering this incident Nafisa was irritated and dismissed Estella to her room. She sensed that the girl had eluded her. Once
upon a time the shoe – that red-throated Cuthberts shoe – would have been on the other foot.

* * * * * * * *

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• High Low In-between by Imraan Coovadia
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  EAN: 9781415200704
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