Mohamerd Yasin, Contributor

'She can't even heal a sick dog,' Father said.'Ow, H,' Mother retorted. 'She does heal people. A lot of them get cure and some even gone away to England and America. They does still send money for she.'

'Rubbish!' Father exclaimed. 'That is just a rumour to promote herself. She lucky they ain't arrest and charge her yet. Obeah is illegal, you know.'

'Is not really obeah she doing, H. And, tell me, how she getting so rich then, if the people she cure not paying her?'

'I'm not sure about that one. Could be she doing underhand things, you know, criminal things.' He crushed his cigarette in the nearby enamel plate which served as an oversized ashtray.

'I don't know what criminal things a vegetable gardener can do!'

'You never know what people doing these days; the country so corrupt.' He lighted another Bristol. Anything with a British name seemed to have a sort of magical appeal to him.

Mother looked at him and smiled. Perhaps she knew what she was about to say would further infuriate my father. 'I hear the other day she even cured the prime minister.'

'What? Only ignorant people would believe that.' The cigarette balanced precariously on his bottom lip.

Critical of Sadika

My father always seemed critical of Aunt Sadika, his elder sister. She lived beside a narrow mud dam, and along with her husband, tended a small plot of land for cash crops such as pepper, egg plants, calallo, ochro, eschalot, and medicinal herbs or 'bush'. But my Aunt Sadika was better known for her purported healing powers. Some deemed her a spiritualist, others referred to her as a faith healer; most called her an obeah woman. I gathered that an old African woman had taught her obeah rituals and incantations.

Aunt Sadika was about fifty, stout and fair-skinned. A small room with heavy black drapes below her house served as a shrine for her practice. The room was filled with thick white candles flickering in the perpetual gloom. Sticks of incense, blocks of camphor and a bowl of white eggs decorated a large table covered with white linen. The smell of the place alone was enough to send a person into a surreal state. Aunt Sadika also had white plastic buckets filled with sea-blue water. I heard she ritually washed and cleansed her clients with this specially prepared water after rubbing them down with raw eggs. This was done in a bathroom adjacent to the shrine. What looked like African ebony carvings and rattles rested on another table. And some distance from them, neatly juxtaposed like rice fields, were the well-known holy books: the Bible, the Ramayan, and the Koran. On a thick ledge, tall green bottles filled with dark liquid stood in line like a Greek phalanx. Aunt Sadika pounded and boiled herbs to make 'bush medicine'.

Aunt Sadika and my Uncle had no children. She treated my two younger brothers and me kindly and would often enquire about my father, who never visited her home.

'How H doing?' She would ask. 'Did he drink the medicine I send him?'

'H' was the shortened version of Hashim, which was my father's first name. Something really bad was wrong with him, but he refused to see a doctor. People opined that it had to do with his smoking. He had been smoking heavily for about 25 years. He said he started smoking when he was 23 and in the British army during World War II. He was proud of his war years, as he called the ten years he spent in England. He told gory stories about his service in Germany towards the end of the war, and I believe he saw active combat. However, he had no wounds to display, like photographs of his children, so I sometimes got the feeling that he exaggerated things a bit.

At first, my father drank his sister's medicine. But, perhaps expecting a miracle cure in a few weeks, he stopped. 'This thing smell like horse pee!' he blurted out one day. 'And it don't work. She is more of a fake healer than a faith healer!'

Mother said, 'Belief is cure, H. Belief is cure. You don't believe, so the medicine not going to work.'

'Bah,' he said, looking at me. 'Sheik, don't bring this stuff anymore, say thanks, but no thanks for me, okay?'

'Okay, Dad,' I said.

It was pointless arguing with him once his mind was made up. He even went further in his criticism of Sadika, claiming that people like her exploited the poor and gullible. The public health system at the time was in shambles, 'due to the dictatorial regime,' my father had said. He often lamented the fact that England no longer ruled the country.

'If the British didn't give up the country, all these shortages, banning this item and that item, would not have happened,' he complained. 'All this rubbish about socialism.'

Father also said that Aunt Sadika was sacrilegious. She was born into a Muslim family and Muslims shouldn't believe in or practise anything ungodly like obeah.

I visited Aunt Sadika practically every day when on school vacation. I would make surreptitious incursions into her sanctuary; that's how I knew what was inside. Quite often, at least six or seven people would be sitting on a long, wooden bench waiting to see her. They all looked distressed.

Never asked for payment

Sometimes, when she emerged from the room to call a client, I would observe creamy flecks of froth drifting down the sides of her mouth. She would have a glazed look in her eyes, and was always decked out in a loose-fitting white robe with a white head covering, like those worn by old African women. People said she never asked for payment, but grateful customers would leave money or send bags of rice, sugar, a chicken or two, a sheep, or whatever commodity they could spare. Soon, Aunt Sadika had opened a little grocery shop at the side of the house. Her husband, Uncle Azeez, operated the shop. He still planted the garden, and sold the produce in the shop as well. Bundles of bush for minor ailments like colds, flu, 'swellings', and so on, were also offered for sale. Uncle Azeez had lately bought a Morris Oxford car. It was a nice vehicle, maroon, shiny and tough-looking. He spent a lot of time cleaning and buffing it.

My father worked at the local sugar factory as a fitter/machinist, whatever that meant. We lived in a ramshackle wood house, which seemed to be in danger of collapsing at any time. On nights when the wind blew fierce and rain shot down like bullets on the rusty zinc roof, I would beg God not to let the house tumble.

Relatives murmured that my father was a lazy man since he never cultivated the vacant piece of land in our yard, which belonged to my grandmother. They said he should at least cultivate a kitchen garden. One of my maternal uncles commented that my father lived in a dream world, thinking he was still a soldier. He only read British war comics and his favourite movies were those based on the World War II. But I loved my father and refused to accept what I overheard.

'Sadika cured the prime minister. I hear he had lung cancer.' Mother broached the topic again one day.

'The prime minister is an atheist,' Father said. 'He only got faith in himself, so how can he believe in faith healing? You talking real stupidness, Khi.'

My mother's name was Khirool, 'Khi' for short. She seemed to idolise Father. She served him hand and foot, despite her frequent arguments with him. She would even pick up his cigarette ash and cigarette butts from the floor. I had never witnessed her upbraiding him about it. She also was the one who waited in long cigarette queues for his cigarettes during the frequent cigarette shortages.

One of my aunts - my mother's youngest sister, to be precise - had a different theory about my mother's adoration for my father. She commented that my mother had an inferiority complex towards my father because he was 'white like Mr Thorton', the British manager of the sugar estate, and my mother was 'as black as a slave'. Sometimes I wanted to believe her.

'I telling you, H, the prime minister had cancer, and I believe she cure him.'

'I don't know where you got that from. First of all, if the prime minister went to her home, people would know, wouldn't they?'

'How about if she went to the 'Residence'?'

'Lady, you does really believe all sorts of foolishness. That man won't have the likes of her at his palace.'

Mother always seemed to know when to quit. She went back to the kitchen, from where wafted the overpowering aroma of curried fish. She was making curry fish and roti. It was one of my favourite meals.

Early one Saturday morning, my Aunt dressed up in her usual healing costume, except for her shoes. They were black and gleamed in the morning sun. At home she went barefoot. I had never known her to leave home.

Uncle Azeez did all the shopping. He also did a lot of drinking, and my father said he had a woman in town, where he shopped for groceries. Uncle Azeez was a tall, slim man. He had wavy black hair and a neat moustache. I thought he looked like a dark-skinned version of Errol Flynn, one of my favourite stars, who acted in swashbuckling pirate and Robin Hood films.

Uncle Azeez would often tousle my hair and comment on how handsome I was. He would give my brothers and me small change for the cinema, and to buy mauby and buns. We loved the icy cold mauby served in aluminium cups and the soft coconut buns from Miss Patrick's bakery.

Part II next week.