Extract from the short story 'Mr Essop' in Pravasan Pillay's collection Chatsworth

The cottage remained empty for two months before Mr Essop moved in. Mr Essop was a friend of my father’s cousin Prega.

Uncle Prega, who was seventeen years older than my father, had known the seventy-two-year-old pensioner for all his life. Both were originally from Renishaw, a small town on the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal.

Mr Essop had worked as a sugarcane-field labourer in Pongola for much of his early life before opening a fruit and vegetable store, which he ran with his wife. After his wife died of cancer in 1986, he sold his house and business and moved to Durban to live with his son.

Uncle Prega said Mr Essop had grown to hate living under the same roof as his son and daughter-in-law. He said that they trea­ted the pensioner as if he were a child, forcing him to go to bed at eight each night and taking control of all his money. He wanted to get away from them and had asked Uncle Prega for help.

This was when Uncle Prega approached my father. He came on a Saturday afternoon.

“He got nowhere to go,” Uncle Prega said. He had brought a bottle of brandy along and my father and him had worked their way through two-thirds of it. “We can’t let a good man like him die in such a house. That’s not the kind of house you must go in.”

“For true,” my father replied. He had already agreed an hour before to rent the cottage to Mr Essop, and the two of them now seemed to be chewing through the decision. My father unscre­wed the bottle of brandy and poured a double for himself and Uncle Prega, and then he motioned at me to top up their glasses with Coke.

“You know when I was growing up in Renishaw, that ballie was like a big una to me –” Uncle Prega said, before stopping and addressing me, and, at the same time, tipping up the Coke bottle neck with his forefinger. “That’s enough, boy.”

I poured the same amount into my father’s glass before sit­ting down behind them.

Uncle Prega continued: “After Apa died, Mr Essop should help us like we his own. Every month end, when he should come from Pongola he should always bring back something to give to Auma. Never mind, it was a parcel sugar, or packet biscuit, or tea leaf or few metres material, small things, you know, but he shouldn’t forget about us.”

“A gentleman,” my father replied, taking a sip of his brandy.

“That’s it, a gentleman,” Uncle Prega said. “And, plus, must know, when big aka needed train fare to come to Durban for teachers’ college he was the one to give the money. Just like that, no questions. This man was only our neighbour, but he should treat us like we his family. If I had a place in my house, I should take him in tomorrow.”

“He got a place here, don’t worry about that,” my father rep­lied, knocking his glass against Uncle Prega’s ...

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Pravasan Pillay's Chatsworth is available from Made in Durban.