BOOK SA: your window into the 2007 Sunday Times Literary Awards. See excerpts from other shortlisted books: click the ST 07 Book Excerpts tag.
A strong contender to win the Fiction Prize – and also recently shortlisted for the MNet Literary Award – Green-Eyed Thieves is Coovadia’s second novel. (His first, The Wedding, also made the Sunday Times shortlist.)
The book’s main characters, Firoze and Ashraf Peer – identical twins from Johannesburg – catalyze a comic treatment of various “eastern” crime syndicates operating from Peshawar to Brooklyn, which draw the brothers into a slipstream of events that places them dangerously close to the scene of the crime on September 11th, 2001. Here’s an excerpt:
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Our family business was a gingerbeer factory in the Fordsburg section of Johannesburg, behind the Caltex and around the corner from Shorty’s Café. The building was filled with the smell of ginger and the stink of fish heads from buckets of glue. The boiler, sandwiched into the brick wall, radiated heat back and front. The beer was brewed in enormous copper-ribbed barrels. Piled in the corner were sacks of brown rice and cheesecloth bags of Huletts sugar. Rice, sugar, and ginger alike were ignored by my uncle Farouk. He was my father’s older brother and an equal partner in the ginger beer business, although his true interest in life was rubies, sapphires, and emeralds.
Around Jo’burg people called him Ten Percent Farouk. No compliment was intended, but with time it turned into one. In truth my uncle liked the idea that ten per cent of creation was rightfully his. To collect his percentage he was prepared to do anything within reason . . . as well as many things beyond reason, and several utterly without rational warrant. Farouk was the prince of the harebrained scheme. Some, I guess, ran at a profit. He collected pension checks on behalf of three long-deceased nonagenarians with the help of forged birth certificates and his contact in the Department of Inland Revenue. Some of Farouk’s schemes made next to nothing, like the Datsun van and party of workers he organised to strip telephone lines for their copper. He was particularly proud of the Salvation Army uniform he donned each Christmas to dun shoppers out of their change. Yet my uncle spent more money dry-cleaning it every November than he made in twenty-cent coins placed in his upturned Stetson hat on Boxing Day.
Finally there were his harebrained schemes that were simply hair-raising. His latest plan had something to do with jewellery, but the details were unclear to me. Ashraf knew more than I did. He was more closely involved with Farouk and, to be fair, they were more on the same wavelength. Towards me Farouk was the archetypal South African uncle, by which I mean that he was sly, mocking, that he liked to shock me with his corrupt sense of humour. I feared him although I didn’t care to show it. His baldness created a dome above his serpentine green eyes that confronted me when he bent down to look in my face.
“You have a minute? I have something to show you from my new business. It’s under the microscope.”
I asked, “What is it?”
He took me by the ear. “Just come along, you ragamuffin.”
I knew that Farouk’s diamonds were contraband. Truant diamonds from Sierra Leone, picked by light fingers at the Diagonal Street diamond exchange, and those from stolen rings and watches made their way to our factory on Sandra Boulevard. Amid the piles of rings and Rolex face plates was kept a Zeiss microscope. It stood beside a jeweller’s lamp and a set of goldsmithing tools Mum shoplifted in a rare gesture of affection for her brother-in-law. And beside the Zeiss I was placed on a high stool.
“Have a peek through the eyepiece before your father comes to interrupt your education. That bloody fellow is sure to rock up the moment I try to teach you something valuable. Where is his much vaunted faith in learning?”
A sleeve of wax paper opened beneath a pair of goatish hands. Bending over my shoulder Farouk wheeled down the arm on the Zeiss’s conning tower. He adjusted the lens. “Fifty-times magnification. This is a Burmese ruby, Firoze. You can see that the redness comes from within the stone. Almost as if it’s glowing. So how do you like it?”
“It’s lovely.”
“But what do you really think?”
“It’s very beautiful,” I said. “It’s truly a beautiful ruby.”
Ashraf came in.
I hadn’t pleased my uncle. “Your brother, Ashraf, is a very arrogant character. Cagey as well,” Farouk told the new arrival.
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