English for Life Reader Grade 9 Home Language. Elaine Ridge

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      Then suddenly, in early October, Noorjehan left the school. A friend of hers told me that her parents had decided to keep her at home. That was all I learnt and she was no longer a presence. About a fortnight later I received a letter from her, brought by a maidservant to my home.

      ‘You must have wondered,’ she wrote, ‘why I left school at this time of the year. The truth is, my parents are convinced that I shall soon receive a marriage proposal and that in anticipation I should prepare myself. You will appreciate that I have no choice but to obey.

      ‘Last month the go-betweens of the boy (or man?) interested in marrying me came to have a look at me. At first they spoke to my parents in the lounge while I was told to stay in my room. Later my mother asked me to prepare tea and serve the guests. This was a way of allowing them to scrutinise me. There were two women and a man. One of the women smiled at me and the other asked me a few idle questions.

      ‘After they had left, my father said that it would not be long before I was married. I protested, overwhelmed by the prospect of a sudden change in my life. My mother declared that God would punish disobedient children, and in any case who was I to object to the wishes of those who did everything for the happiness of their children.

      ‘Is it possible for you to come and speak to my father and try to dissuade him from forcing me into a marriage I do not want? Forgive me for troubling you, but could you come?’

      I went to Noorjehan’s home. She lived in a small semi-detached house, the outside painted lime-green. Her father asked me to enter after I had declared my identity and offered the explanation that I had come, in the ordinary course of my professional duties, to inquire about the absence of one of my pupils.

      ‘She left for a very good reason,’ said her father, a tall, austere-looking hawk-nosed man. ‘Noorjehan is going to be engaged shortly.’

      I said that perhaps it would be wise to allow her to complete her matriculation before she was betrothed, but he waved an impatient hand at me and said:

      ‘Teachers are understandably concerned about their charges, but parents know what is best for their children.’

      I then said that it did not seem to me reasonable to provide girls with a modern education and then expect them to follow tradition in their private lives.

      To this he did not answer but looked at me impassively.

      I left. I did not see Noorjehan while I was in the living-room. Outside, as I reached the front gate and turned to close it, I saw her standing at a bedroom window with one hand holding aside the froth of a lace curtain. She smiled tepidly and fluttered her fingers good-bye.

      After a few days I received another letter from her.

      ‘I am to be engaged at the end of November. The go-betweens were here again to arrange a time and date. While they talked to my parents I sat miserably in my bedroom. You can imagine my feelings when people are closeted, seemingly for hours, deciding the course of my life. It felt as if I was living two lives, one isolated in the bedroom and later in the kitchen preparing tea for the visitors, the other captured in the living-room, the subject of much talk. All that talk about ‘me’ gave ‘me’ a kind of significance that frightened me.’

      After her engagement she wrote again:

      ‘I was engaged two days ago. My future husband came with his family and friends. He brought the usual gifts (which remain in their boxes, unopened) and presented me with a diamond ring which stands on my dressing table and which I cannot, perhaps never will, bring myself to wear. What point is there in telling you what he looks like since he is a stranger to me and I cannot love him.

      After they had left I went to my bedroom and cried bitterly. My mother came and tried to comfort me by saying that a girl must marry and what difference does it make whether she marries now or later, or whether she marries a certain man or some other man.’ ‘I never saw your father,’ she said, ‘until the day of the wedding, and we have been happy. You are very lucky. His family is very wealthy. Your father is only a shop assistant.’

      Shortly afterwards, in another letter, Noorjehan made the following confession:

      ‘However much I would like to please my parents, I cannot see myself being married to a man I neither love nor hate, whose welfare will become an object of my life-long devotion. Such a marriage for me will be a marriage of self-obliteration. I am just not made for this kind of transaction. For some time now a terrible and desperate longing (growing out of my misery and helplessness) seizes me, the longing for ‘my prince’ to rescue me. Perhaps this longing for a ‘prince’ is generated by the memory store in me of the magic world of fairy stories told to me in my sapling days at school; or perhaps I am being silly, romantic and sentimental. But you will admit that the girl who meets her ‘prince’ in the end is lucky.’

      After several weeks Noorjehan wrote again:

      ‘My wedding-day is to be arranged this coming weekend. I know what it will involve. All sorts of preparations will begin, invitations will be sent out, my trousseau will be in the hands of a busy seamstress, and everyone will be excited while I will be regarded as an outsider who has little relation to the event. It is in the wedding trappings and its props that people will be interested. When I think of the day I am seized by a strange indefinable fear, you know the sort of fear that comes to one sometimes in dreams when one senses oblique danger.’

      I felt sorry for Noorjehan. I could understand her emotional predicament. I had known her to be a girl of precocious intelligence and sensitivity. Now, under pressure from her parents and the conventions of their society, she was reduced to the level of a sacrificial victim. Marriage transactions, although wilting under the force of the twentieth century changes, were still conducted, and I had known of girls who had been pressured into marriage when they were yet mere slips, hardly ready for its demands.

      On Friday morning I received a very brief letter from her:

      ‘What must I do? What must I do to escape my fate? There is no one to help me. If only my …’ The letter trailed off without mentioning the redemptive possibility.

      Late in the afternoon I received an urgent message from her to meet her at Park Station at seven in the evening.

      It was a cold evening – a chill wind had come up from the south – as I waited for her outside the station. Soon a taxi came to a halt and she alighted. I immediately noticed that she had undergone a transformation in her appearance. She had lost weight, seemed a little older and bore a solemn look.

      ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said in a soft voice.

      She wore a green trouser suit. On her wrists were several silver and brass bangles and she wore a necklace of oyster-white beads.

      As I felt that it would be callous to ask her immediately where she planned to go, I said it would be warm in the station restaurant.

      We sat at a table next to a window. From where we sat we could see the movements of pedestrians in the street, the beams of glossy cars, the mendicant signs of varicoloured neon lights and frosty street lamps.

      ‘I suppose no one knows that you have left home,’ I said in a conspiratorial voice, stirring the sugared coffee.

      ‘Only my teacher knows,’ she answered, ‘and he should also know that I am taking the 8.30 train to Cape Town.’

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