The way I see it, none of this would have happened if we stayed put in our little neighbourhood.
I still remember the group of men who gathered in our living room. Each carried a crumpled letter and wore a harassed expression. The children quickly moved to play outside, and their wives and sisters gathered in my Mother's kitchen.
"It's serious news," my friend Koyal whispered as she tried using the hula hoop once more. "I've never seen my Dad that angry!"
She tried again, but the hoop fell.
"This is boring! Where is your tea set? We can have a tea party with my dolls."
Excited at the prospect of a tea party, I ran back to the house. The shouting could be heard before I entered.
"We will not move!" Ravi Uncle (who lived down the road) shouted. I'd never seen him so enraged before that.
The entire room erupted and everyone started speaking at once. Tailor Uncle (I never found out what his real name was) called for calm and once again, the room was reduced to orderly manner. I stood in the passage of our home, trying to understand the muffled whispers before my Mother spotted me from the kitchen. I still remember how sharp her voice was when she asked me to leave. I went back outside, without the teaset, trying to make sense of what I had heard.
These meetings carried on for a few months. The arguments became louder and more heated. Fewer and fewer people attended every time.
I didn't understand it as a seven year old growing up in the late 60s, but the apartheid government wanted to buy our homes and land and in return, place us in a new area. This was a euphemism for the implentation of the Group Areas Act - an act passed a few years earlier in parliament. Different race groups were to be separated in different districts. Arrangements were in place for a new Indian township called Phoenix.
Ravi Uncle was the first of our neighbours to leave.
As the years progressed, pressure mounted and more families left as they feared their safety. Things around me were changing, too. Classmates began leaving our school and Miss Sahni and a few other teachers left as well. Corner shops that gave sweets instead change closed down and houses were emptied. No longer did trays of chillies and mangoes dry in verandahs. By 1976, we were amongst the few families left in the area. Then the vandals hit.
They would bash in windows and spray paint expletives onto houses. Gardens were destroyed.The Hassans who lived on Fig Avenue found the pig of a head on their doorstep. There was no telling what they would do next. That year, we left the only home I knew.
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We moved in next to Kavita's family.
Her family visited us on our first night there, bringing along some vegetables from their garden. A distant relation between the two families were found and soon our parents were speaking like old friends, speaking of the house and memories left behind. It didn't take long before a friendship between Kavita and I were formed and a tea party was promptly organised.
The next few years passed in a blur. We had tea parties, finished our homework together under the watchful eyes of her Mother and at my Mother's table, we learned how to bake. Primary school turned into high school. We became like sisters to each other. The boys who tried to approach us were sorely disappointed as their affections were dismissed. Kavita had a habit of correcting their grammatical errors and sending their letters back. She was always the gutsier one. Many of our friends were married off for even the slightest flirtation and we were determined to stay off the marriage path until after we finished high school.
