Kiru
Naidoo
The
pilates instructor has some meat on the bone. I am not in the class but I
appreciate that the gym hires beyond the size 28 dress size.
On
increasingly frequent mornings I take up my position outside the glass doors. The cycle arena is packed like schoolgirls at
the YDE sale but it has the vantage point of neighbouring the pilates class.
Lest I
be construed a voyeur let me confess that may not be strictly correct. I draw inspiration from the core exercises. I
can only take it in twenty minute bites though.
Well that's when the cycling machine chucks me out and summons the next
punter.
In
gym-speak I migrate from cardiovascular to the weight training upstairs. Even though I am a master of the
overstatement that is rather rich. Being
of fairly portly disposition and reluctantly trudging uphill to middle age, I
am more rumour than danger. Let's just
say I potter around mental knife in hand.
The guy
doing forearm curls next to me had a transplant. Tree trunk for thigh. I stab
him bloodlessly. The strength in my arms
coming from years of lifting Homer, Austen, Dickens, Achebe and Naipaul.
I was a
legend in my own mind in my native Chatsworth.
No one worked the aisles and shelves of the Unit 10 municipal library
like I did. It got to the obsessive
point where I even knew when an obscure book had been checked out. I would
harass the librarians to know when it would be back. I would even know how
overdue fines on the said item would tally up.
I spent
a lot of my life in that library. In between reading I would chat up girls.
Let's just leave it at the fact that I had enormous success with the reading.
This
was the earlyish eighties - a time of raging teenage hormones and of intense
anti-apartheid political activity. The Unit 10 library was one of the sites of
mobilisation. Des of the green eyes rarity was one of the
librarians. He would organise a bus to
take 50 or 60 of us to the gumba. This was usually at the Rick Turner Student
Union on the Howard College campus of the then University of Natal.
My
mates among whom were Daniel, Seelan, Neville and Clive, especially Clive were
all eager for the ride. After rousing
speeches by the likes of Desmond Tutu, Bheki Cele and a host of other political
firebrands we were treated to a sweaty disco in the hall named after the
assassinated anti-apartheid hero.
And
there-in lay the greatest attraction. We could gyrate with girls of all hues, tongues
and physical locations. In a rigidly
racially segregated society you have no idea of the thrill of that. Hormonal relief aside, those gumbas were remarkable
baby steps in building a non-racial society, of a nation turning to each other
rather than on each other.
The
dance parties usually lasted until the security police viciously broke it
up. We would scatter in panic in every
direction with the leadership all the while appealing for us to be calm and
directing us to our buses home.
Hats
off to the theorists of the South African revolution who conjured those ideas
of organisation and conscientisation with a mix of dancing. Regrettably in the twenty years since freedom
was won we have not come full circle in building a truly non-racial society. We
must each shoulder a morsel of blame for that.
Some of
us have spent too much time getting fat at the buffet and I am not talking
about the pilates instructor.
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