New York is as cold as all hell, but there are friends and ghosts to touch base with there that always make it a memorable place to be. Quite apart from the fact that New York is exciting anyway, even when you’ve got nothing to do – as long as you’re not completely down and out, that is. Then New York, especially in this bitter weather, is a nightmare.
In the midst of a hectic four-day schedule, it was a pleasure to be able to take time out to have dinner with my old friend Sonny Pillay, who now calls himself by his proper tribal name, which is Shunna.
Shunna hails from Durban, and had a tough upbringing as a poor Indian boy in the racially tense Banana City in the 1940s. Now he lives in a nice apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a quiet sort of semi-retirement with his American wife. There is little chance that he will ever return to live in South Africa. The river, as they say, does not return to its source – though many of us have tried to make it do just that.
I lost track of Shunna after we parted ways in London in the early Sixties, when I was still a kid. I had always imagined that Sonny, as we still called him back then, must have become some kind of unapproachable movie mogul, if he was living in New York. In fact he is just living there, getting on with life like you would anywhere else.
He had, however, been slated to become the next Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra, after getting famous in South Africa in the 1950s for singing (among other standards of the time) to swooning Jewish girls in the clubs and concert halls of Jo’burg and Durban.
“They used to have to have an ambulance on standby outside,” he says. “One or two of these rich white girls would always faint as soon as I started singing and have to be taken to hospital.”
That’s how convincing and emotional his rendition of that popular ballad was at the time. Yes, strange things were possible, in spite of everything, during those days in South Africa.
Sonny was briefly married to Miriam Makeba, and then left the country. Like other South African showbiz figures, New York beckoned, and big people in New York were said to be ready to give Sonny a leg-up to a superstar career.
But by the time he got to America, he discovered that he was suffering from tuberculosis. He spent the next few years battling it out at a sanatorium in upstate New York, far from the lights of Broadway. By the time he was healed, it was too late to resuscitate his dreams. The fast, fickle world of big-time show business had moved on without him. But he carried on living in New York anyway.
In the ghost department, I can’t walk past Tower Records off Broadway on the lower east side without remembering that my friend, the painter and sculptor Dumile Feni, collapsed and died of a heart attack while browsing there in the winter of 1991-1992. He was stubbornly hanging on to life in New York and refusing to return to South Africa because he didn’t trust the process of politics after all these years. He just didn’t believe his artistry would be properly recognised back home, even though liberation politics had leaned heavily on artists like him during the darkest years of exile.
So instead, like his flatmate, the forgotten South African photographer Ernest Cole, he waited till death caught up with him on the icy streets of the world’s greatest metropolis.
It’s cold as all hell in New York. The dazzling Christmas tree outside the Rockefeller Plaza is drawing the usual pilgrimage of Americans from all over the country, a happy jam of bodies gearing up for the season of good cheer. There are flurries of light snow floating down from the heavens, opening up the prospect of a white Christmas. It’s time for me to be moving on.
Six-and-a-half hours out of Kennedy Airport, we touch down in Dakar. It will be about eight in the evening in New York, but it is the small hours of the morning here, and yet it is still hot. Snow and Christmas lights are a distant dream.
Here it is humidity and Ramadan.
In contrast to the high-energy partying of the Big Apple, Dakar is unusually quiet for a Saturday night. This is a city where, in normal times, people start to wend their way to the thriving assortment of discotheques and nightclubs at one in the morning, and stay there till the sun comes up. The streets would be roaring with taxis, there’d be music in the air.
But during the season of Ramadan, this predominantly Muslim country is submitting to the collective discipline of fasting from 5am to 7pm. It’s a long hot day to get through without sustenance.
By the time the fast is broken in the evening, the only thing to think about is stocking up with enough fuel to prepare you for the next day of fasting, and preserving your energy so that you will make it through the rest of this month of self-sacrifice. Few have time to think of the frivolous pursuits that they would have been throwing themselves into during the rest of the year.
Unusually, Christmas and Ramadan coincide this year. Unusually, I experience both of them: the riot of Mammon on one side of the Atlantic, abstemiousness and reflection on the other.
I think of absent friends in distant places, and wonder that we can inhabit so many parallel universes, and still be of one flesh.
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