Polony and the Albino Squirrel

“What is palany?” The young Arab man behind the counter at Grand Palace Fast Food offers a puzzled look across his bushy beard. “Palany, pa-lo-nee, polony,” I alter the pronunciation slightly each time. “Is it a kind of meat?”
He nods. “It is ground.”
“What animal?”
“It's beef, right?” the black lady next to me stammers.
“I just ordered one,” the woman on my left confesses.
“One quarter polony gatsby with salad on it,” I order decisively. In New Orleans, it's a po-boy. Elsewhere, a grinder, hero, sub. Eskimos have many words for snow. I have more for sandwich.
It is slobbered in hot chili sauce, stuffed with soggy South African fries under an afterthought of lettuce and tomato. Inside are a few pink beet-like slices of meat. This is polony – a thicker, beefier version of bologna. It tastes salty and chewy. I eat it, wash my hands with a wet nap, and promise never to order it again.
Above us, Table Mountain tosses off her veil to celebrate summer in the sun. The colors of Cape Town blossom under a crisp blue sky. I walk through Company's Gardens. “Company” is the Dutch East Indies Trading Company, a leader in the slave trade for centuries. It was the first corporation to be granted the legal status that now makes corporations more powerful than nations.
Now the gardens are a stately public park. A solitary white tear is frozen in its path down the trunk of an enormous rubber tree. A young girl feeds a pigeon out of her hand. Another chases them in the grass with a shriek. The rainbow nation is evident in the children, varying shades of black, white and light brown. On the trunk of a huge pine is a shiny white squirrel with pink eyes. Strangely fitting, an albino squirrel here in Company's Gardens in South Africa, a race-obsessed society trying to be color blind while staring at a history of racial atrocity. Albinism—a curve ball in classifying anything according to skin color—in Cape Town—a curve ball in South Africa's effort to assign people neat racial identities.