Mrs Jeenah

It was comforting though not always comfortable when Mr. and Mrs. Jeenah lived opposite.  They were elderly and always there.  Mrs. Jeenah, a tiny woman with a scrunched up face and beak like nose, would sit on a wicker chair on the verandah and keep tabs. She was a busybody who knew everything about everyone. Although this could be unnerving at times, it was also consoling to know that somebody was keeping an eye on the comings and goings in Eighth Avenue. 

Before dementia made her frighteningly paranoid and she would summon me into her house to inspect an imaginery hole in the ceiling where imaginery burglars had forced entry and stolen her imaginery possessions, she would go through phases of being pleasant and unpleasant. It was as though she would make a conscious effort to be a good neighbour and after a few weeks of this, another persona would take over and she would become spiteful and mean.

At Christmas one year when she was in a good neighbour phase, she sent Phumzile across the road with a large box of chocolates and a card.  The card was not a Christmas card but a wedding card, and a very kitsch one at that, of an exaggeratedly perfect bride and groom standing arm in arm outside a church, with multi-coloured glittery confetti being showered upon them.

I never worked out what that card was really saying. I thought about it for quite a while.  Was it that Mrs. Jeenah had absolutely no idea what Christmas was about, or was a handsome groom at a perfect wedding her Christmas wish for me, or was her sinister persona emerging and was she insinuating that I was somehow lacking because there was no man in the house?  Because she was not a straightforward person, even now it is impossible to say.

When the Jeenahs sold their house and the West African community moved in, I missed Mrs. Jeenah. I think of her often still.

*Real names have not been used.