Not a Fairytale by Shaida Kazie Ali Page A

me. She holds my hand in the hospital’s corridors and she sits with me at night in the hospital’s muggy garden listening to the frogs. The doctors have asked me to stay on another day or two, like they’re hotel managers who can’t bear to let me, a favourite guest, end her vacation with them.
    At night, after Jimmy has left the hospital and my spacious private room is covered in moonlight, she tells me stories of our daadi, who died a year after I was born.
    I know my dead grandmother only by the shiny bangles my mother wears on her wrists, bangles Daadi left for Salena, but which my mother claimed as her own. The bangles were all that was left of my grandmother’s jewellery. The other pieces went missing mysteriously, according to Salena.
    Salena says Daadi told Ma that one day she had put on all her jewellery in readiness for a wedding, but as she went outside a great black bird swooped out of the sky and ripped the jewellery off her fingers and throat. She said the bird had the face of a demon, but she recited her Quls and the bird grew smaller and smaller, until it turned to dust, along with her jewels.
    She lost every piece except for the bangles on her wrists, which nothing, not even soap and water, not even magic, could get off, because she hadn’t taken them off since our great-grandmother, her mother-in-law, put them on her skinny bride-wrists.
    Salena says Ma cut the bangles off the corpse of our grandmother, and the 22-carat gold was so soft, the knife slid through it like butter, slicing through each of the dozen bangles. Six from each arm. Ma had the bangles repaired the very next day, and then added them to her own heavy arms, already filled with jingly bracelets. The first time I saw an American Christmas tree, all garishly decorated, I was reminded of my mother – a Christmas tree in court shoes, too weighed down by decorations to ever move freely.
    But there’s another story about how our granny’s missing jewellery went missing. It happened in a park.
    It was an ugly council park, protected from the invasion of certain children by its metal green-linked fence and its WHITES ONLY signs. I can remember peering at the park from behind the fence, but I never dared go in. Of course Salena, with her fair skin, could pass, as could Daadi.
    On the morning that Daadi’s jewellery went missing, it was a brilliantly sunny day. The unwelcome children gawked wistfully through the fence at the deserted black-tyre swings, and the park’s two adult occupants. The first was a plump, elderly woman, dressed in a gaudy scarlet sari and seated on a green park bench. The children recognised her. She was the motjie, Aunty Bilqis from Hanif Paruk General Dealers, the corner babbie shop on Albert Road. She snuck them homemade burfi, Sunrise toffees and Chappies bubblegum when her stout son left the café for his afternoon nap.
    The second occupant, known only as Poison-Parkie, was the poor-white park keeper whose job it was to care for the grass and feed the goldfish which swam fatly in the murky waters of the park’s immense fishpond. The children hated him; he always chased after them with his spindly legs and his brown stick.
    Poison-Parkie stopped weeding the perfect grass carpet when he noticed the woman. Milky skin. Straight hair. She must be white. But, still, she was wearing one of those funny dresses, and you could see the bare, fair, fleshy rolls of her stomach. Sies! Now he recognised her. How dared she sit on his bench? Who did she think she was? Just because she could pass for white. He heard the children laughing behind him.
    “Voetsek,” Poison-Parkie shouted at them and they ran off, shrieking.
    He turned back to look at the woman. She was no longer sitting on the bench, but standing near the fishpond. He watched as she threw something into the water. It landed with a splash.
    “Hey, you! Lady!” Poison-Parkie hated cleaning the slimy fishpond and now here was this bladdy non-white woman throwing