An Imperfect Blessing, by Nadia Davids

An Imperfect Blessing, by Nadia Davids. Random House Struik Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2014. ISBN 9781415207154 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0715-4

In An Imperfect Blessing, a novel that is sharp in its insights yet warm in feeling, Nadia Davids gives us the tumultuous years between the end of white rule in South Africa and the Mandela presidency as seen through the eyes of a family from a Muslim community that is itself coming under pressure to adapt and evolve.

Nadia Davids  

Friday, 8 January 1993

It was her longest summer yet. And it had been (almost) without wind. For the months of November to February to be filled with days of warm stillness, unhurried by the wind that always began innocuously - a small sigh, a nothing, and then abruptly a full-skied shriek - was as rare as it was loved. A windless summer, Alia thought, remembering how often she had said those words as prayer, not as fact. Hers was a city of winds and storms, of fierce sun and chilling fog, of long cold rains and terrible droughts, of unexpected hails and gales, and sometimes all those things in one day. A city of unease, Cape Town. A moody city. A place of rock and water. Rock and water. The mountain and the sea had long ago broken and brokered its shape, but history had pushed back at the natural rim of the coast and formed a place out of careful division. Alia lived in a neighbourhood called Walmer Estate, a small universe at the foot of Devil's Peak. The streets ran on long steep slopes bound for the harbour and the homes that ran beside them tilted forward as though they were being tugged by an invisible pulley. Walmer Estate was full of op-posites. It was a place of large light-filled houses and stingy gardens, of overcrowded smelly flats and open fields, of little girls in burkas hurrying down sharp hills to madressa and teenage boys clustered outside corner shops, smoking cigarettes, admiring each other's sneakers and contraband denim. It was where wind-stunted shrubs and stooped trees leaned gratefully against five-foot tall graffiti commands to defy the state. Where old women sat on stoeps in faded house-dresses saying terrible things about their neighbours one day and weeping like hired Greek mourners at their funerals the next. It was where men never quite outgrew those first longings for German engineering, and that rite of passage, the purchase of a Mercedes Benz, new or used, could happen well into middle age. If asked, no one could tell you who "Walmer" was, or if the land had once been an estate and anyway, everyone pronounced it "Warmer" and they took "Estate" to mean that they lived somewhere a little loftier than others. Its residents were often accused of nurturing a certain arrogance,-living on a hill (any hill) will do that to you. But Alia thought it was more than that. The hills were one thing, the wind was another. She believed it made them all mad. And tough. Mad and tough. The wind was a constant, more common than life, more frequent than death. For Walmer Estate children it was first among the elements. Before sun or rain, they learned how the air could move. They knew that a thin breeze from the north could cool your cheeks in the summer, but that a berg wind driven over the mountains could tip the temperature just a few degrees up until you felt as though you were wearing a hot, slightly billowing dress. The crazed southeaster came in the in-between months, ruining springs and autumns, breaking all those fragile beginnings. [...]

This is an excerpt from the novel An Imperfect Blessing, by Nadia Davids.

Title: An Imperfect Blessing
Author: Nadia Davids
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Random House Struik
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2014
ISBN 9781415207154 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0715-4
Softcover, 14 x 22 cm, 416 pages