Four years ago, in my first year teaching, I read the 1982 play "Master Harold and the Boys" by Athol Fugard. It is the story of a 17 year old white boy in South Africa who has a nurturing relationship with two black servants while his father is a drunk tyrant. In the climax of the play, Hally chooses to follow in his father's footsteps of racist behavior towards the two black men and in turn sacrifices the only nurturing relationships he has. Fugard wrote the play based on his own personal shame after having treated a black man he cared about disrespectfully as a teenager.
When I read the play, I immediately had a flashback to a moment with Mansoor, our driver in Karachi. Up until sixth grade, I spent a good chunk of my free time accompanying Mansoor to the markets where I would listen to the yelling, music and honking of the streets. We would go to the shanty town area in Karachi that was built on mounds of garbage (think of the scenes from Slumdog Millionaire). When we arrived in the three room hut of Mansoor's friend, the family would all crowd in and the soda walla would be beckoned so that the family could buy a Fanta for their visitor, me. I'd play cards with Mansoor and his friend. Once I remember winning money, only to learn from my dad when I arrived home that I was not to take money from people who had so little. I know we had a television in our house, but I spent time watching "Little House on the Prairie" in his room in the servants' quarters. When my parents divorced, and my mom converted to Islam and married a Pakistani, changing her name to Alia Bana, there was a safety in Mansoor's constant presence.
I felt that Mansoor was my friend, which sounds silly for an eleven year to think of a grown man, but his stability provided something for me. Then, when I got a terrible case of malaria in fifth grade, and my father and I were medically evacuated to London, it wasn't Mansoor who carried me out to the car. It was a white American. I can remember wanting it to be Mansoor, and wanting to ask for him, and maybe I even did. I remember realizing sometime later that it meant something that it wasn't him. There was a separation that I hadn't felt before and I didn't like, and I couldn't articulate.
In our last year there, on some random afternoon, I asked Mansoor to take me to the school. He said he would, but that he was going to have his tea first. Maybe five minutes later, I stood next to the car yelling back towards his quarters to hurry, that it was time to go. He walked out, tall and serious, and he looked me in the eye and told me to stop yelling. He told me that he was going to finish his tea, and then we would go. I remember my shame. As I matured, I had begun to accept the power dynamics that go with economics and race. Mansoor reminded me that he was a human.
I have often thought of Mansoor since we left Pakistan; he is the person I miss and wonder about the most, but I didn't remember that moment in the driveway until I read Fugard's play. Now, that is what I think of when I think of Mansoor, and it reminds me of who I want to be, an anti-racist.
Photo is from circa 1984. Philamena, Dwarf and Mansoor.
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