An extract from 'Mr Essop':
Three years after we moved into our house in Chatsworth, my father built a granny cottage on the property. He said that once the cottage was rented out, it would bring in an additional R800 a month to our household.
The cottage was small – a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen – but clean and comfortable by the standards of township outbuildings, most of which were damp, poorly constructed hovels. The most unique part of the building was its veranda. It was a two-by-three-metre space, with a tiled floor, bordered by cement balustrades, and covered by a blue corrugated-plastic roof.
Despite the builder’s advice that such a small building didn’t warrant a veranda, my father insisted on adding it. His reasoning was that it would set the cottage apart from all the other outbuildings being let out across the neighbourhood.
When the cottage was ready for its first tenant, my father placed an ad in the classifieds of the Chatsworth Sun. It took him almost a week to compose it.
“We must be careful,” he cautioned my mother, the night before phoning it into the newspaper. “We don’t want to rent to katchara people. You meet anyone first time, they act nice in front of you, but, must see, two months later, they don’t want to pay their rent.”
From Chatsworth by Pravasan Pillay, a collection of 11 short stories that highlight working class life in a residential area that was allocated for South Africans of Indian descent during apartheid. The stories take place in the recent past and bring to life the nuances of life in this community, without leaning into stereotypes.
Available at www.madeinchatsworth.co.za.
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