PART 4: SHORT STORIES

A SMALL MATTER
By Andrew Kulemeka

TWO UNCERTAIN knocks, a brief pause …and then the door was being pounded with what
felt like a sledge hammer. Mandala instinctively crouched, protecting the maize porridge which
was still warm in his stomach. He looked at the frail door shaking in its frame. It had to be one
of women. Who could come so early and knock so aggressively? One of them was here to
humiliate him in front of his family. He could see her drenched with dew having walked on the
narrow red clay path from the village across Namilulu stream. Her broad bare feet cracked and
covered with dew and mud. She would sit on the verandah, wrapped in a wet chitenje, and
refused
to go away until he had paid for the beer he had drunk on trust ten years before. And he was
supposed to remember how good the beer had been that distant. Afternoon as he had sat on a
mat, chatting with his friends who were unusually happy because he had taken upon himself the
task of filling their stomachs with this woman’s beer, promising to pay for it when the Cheque
arrived the following week. When she had come to see him the next week, the mail had not
arrived due to the rain and muddy roads. The following week, yes Tuesday, would be fine. But
when she came on Friday instead, he had screamed at her for not keeping appointments. He had
spent money on food, she would have to come at the end of the month, yes on the last day of the
month.

For Mandala the end of the month arrived in blink of an eye, and the woman was there. He
couldn’t pay her then, his sister was very sick in the hospital. He had to go and see her, perhaps
the end of next month. When she came at the end of that month, Mandala was gone to a far
away town on some official business, his wife said. At that very point in time, Mandala had
squeezed his tiny frame under the uneven bed and could hear his wife smoothly lie to the village
woman.

For many months he had invented one story after another, until one day Mandala’s own six year
old son told the woman that his father was dead.
“Had a burial taken place”
“Yes”
“Where was he buried?”

1
“Hhmmm? “Where was he buried?” At school.” The young boy lowered his gaze, turned and
stared at the bedroom window. The woman was disgusted and decided she was wasting her time
and better just forget what Mandala owed her. That was how she stopped coming, until today.
What had provoked her? Mandala couldn’t understand it. It had to be hunger, or a husband, yes
a husband insisting they had to get what he owed them. Shameless beings! They were as
tenacious as desert camel.
More pounding and a distinctly male voice shouts, “Open, open, we know you are there!”
mandala jumped in his skin. Whose voice is that? He did not recognize it. What could he want?
It had to be he husband brought along to scare him. That was not necessary. He had a family.
They shouldn’t treat him like that…after all he was a teacher. Noiselessly, he stood up and
tiptoed to the door. He squatted, and without touching the door, peeped through the key hole.
The unmistakable trousers! So this is it!. It’s Khweya. And what gave him the right to knock
like that? Just because they drunk together does not mean he can thrust himself on him like this.
Mandala was filled with rage and was just about to wrench the door handle open when he was
paralyzed by another thought. His right palm froze above the door knob and it slowly retreated:
that was not Khweya’s voice.

Slowly he parted the curtains and blinked, and blinked again. What he was seeing couldn’t
possibly be true. But Khweya wouldn’t go away. He stood on his old two feet in the same tight
and faded green jacket with cotton padding showing on the shoulders. His navy blue polyester
trousers stiff and metallic shiny with ironing as if snails had smeared their slime on them. The
knot on the stringy necktie dug into neck below the bulging Adam’s apple. The necktie hang
onto his neck like a snake. But it was regulation necktie and he had to wear it. Everyday.

It had to be a mistake or a particularly a bad dream. He hopped it would be, but Khweya would
not go away. He stood drab and expressionless like a wet garbage bin. His puffed stodgy hands
handcuffed and held in front of him. On his either side was a fat looking man. Mandala felt a
strong urge to run, but despaired on seeing that at least eight armed policemen had formed a semi
circle in front of his house and each one was coldly watching him. Besides, he noted mentally,
his house had one door: this one. The windows were so narrow that he could not pass through
them. He trembled. He was a rat on a bare cement floor watching a club swiftly descend on its
head without an escape hole anywhere in sight.

The evening was cold and wet as the rain ceaselessly pattered on the rusty iron roofs. It had been
like this for a week now. The frozen June winds whipped the cold rain round the slender
bluegum trees, whose dead leaves lay soggy and matted to the red clay. Dedza town and its
mountain had disappeared shrouded by the fog and the dense poisonous vapours from the
flooded pit latrines.

2
At the bus station were a number of charcoal stoves made from old petrol containers. They were
producing little amounts of heat and tiny wisps of black smoke under the blanket of fog. The
wanderers huddled around their little stoves, helplessly trying to keep warm. The wanderers
lived here. The cold and damp bus station under the gloomy gum tress was home. Here they
lived where the travelers cursed the bus for being late; where everybody was in great haste to
leave. Home was surrounded by rotting banana peels, the yellow mango stones, thrown away
chicken bones, and the acrid ammonia from the damp urinals and the deathly vapours from the
fifty latrines surrounding the bus station on three sides. They were all filled up and overflowed
in a thick greenish scum which covered the floors like an expensive carpet.

Thirty years before, on the eve of independence and before the scum had reached the thresholds,
an overzealous party youth had pinned special edition pictures of the founder in each of the filthy
latrine huts; to remind users of the goodness of the Leader. Over the years, as heat, fermentation
and more shit had made the latrines impossible to use, the only face to continuously witness the
progress of decay in the fifty latrines has been the founder’s. He wears a bold fly stained smile,
pointing resolutely to a future rich with putrid smells and the mass of squirming white maggots
forever feeding on old human faeces whose pestilential odour hangs over the bus station like the
drizzle.
Khweya and Mandala came out of the decayed mini-bus. It had not been an easy ride with all
those people and the bags of potatoes, cabbages, and fish bags all squeezed into the rusty mii-bus
whose doors were held closed by rubber strips cut from old car tubes. The mini bus was so full
that it had been impossible even to make the slightest change in position. Thus, Khweya had
found himself completely crushed behind a rather full woman. Her warm perfume aroused him
as he allowed her ample behind to settle in front of him. She was alarmed at him and then upset
as she felt his breath on her neck. She struggled to wriggle out of the position, to get her neck
from his face, but it was impossible. She tried to stand sideways with her back to the door, but
there was absolutely no room for such a simple move once the door of the mini-bus was closed.
To close that door the driver and the conductor had shoved together against people’s backs,
almost crushing their ribs to fit them all in the tiny min-bus. Almost when the door was closed.
The mini=bus looked distended and full from outside like a grilling pork sausage. It was a
wonder that the min-bus moved at all.
But it did move. With a grinding of gears, prolonged revs on the accelerator, and squakes and
clouds of dark smoke belching from the exhaust, the mini-bus had shuddered violently and
jerked forward. It paused… , jerked forward and paused again. There was a more piercing
revving accompanied by a violent shuddering of the mini-bus. A dense spurt of pitch black
smoke merged and whirled heavily around the bus. It began to crawl slowly, tilting dangerously
to one side as if the road were slanted. It screamed, coughed and hesitated as the driver changed
gears, but it resumed crawling with both of its front wheels wobbling so much that they looked
like they would detach any moment and just roll away leaving the old mini-bus stranded in the
middle of the road. In that slow and crab-like-manner the mini-bus had completed its journey
from Bembeke Thanofu to Dedza bus depot.

3
“Why did he have to pack us like that?”
“I guess they like to make the best of each trip. Common sense to me” Mandala said with a
smile.

He did not seem to worry so much, but accepted things in his stride, so to speak. In spite of his
possessing a solid certificate to teach in the primary schools, he had always survived like a
peasant. His pair of shoes was of the most ordinary, by the cheapest shoe manufacturer in the
country. The sweater he wore now had a few noticeable holes in it. There was a big hole close
to the right armpit which should have stopped him from wearing it, but not Mandala. He seemed
not to care about it. Sometimes, though, he was seen trying to cover it with his left palm.

Mandala was of average height, with rather narrow shoulders and prematurely curved back. He
had a plain face with an upper front tooth which stuck out between the lips like the blade of an
axe. It was impossible to cover that tooth, so it stood exposed, gathering dust and mildew.
Mandala’s skin however, was beautiful. It was soft, silky and dark. It made him look much
younger than his age. Most people thought that he should not have a stooping back, but he
knew, that he deserved it at the very advanced age of thirty five. In five or six years’ time, he
knew he would be dead forever. It was just the way it was.
In contrast Khweya, who was younger, looked more decrepit. Although his head of hair was
intact and there was not a single white strand in it, the man had a puffy appearance about him.
He looked silky and bloated like a rotting fish filled with water. If you touched him, you left
dimples in his skin. It was as if beneath his skin there were inflated pockets of air which made
him look swollen and fat in a silky way. His skin was scorched and gray. As the elders say, “his
grave lay yawning ready to receive him.

A discoloured red patch on Khweya’s lower lip showed that he drunk large quantities of the
potent maize spirits. Regardless of time of day, his breath was the smell of kachasu. He spoke
hurriedly in short, incoherent sentences. With each utterance, his face twitched and contorted like
he was swallowing quinine or pure castor oil. He finished every sentence with his tongue licking
his lips and when he was silent, his upper teeth bit the lower lip repeatedly. Although he tried to
hide it, his hands shook all the time as if he was anxious or nervous about something. Those
who knew, recognized the signs of an advanced alcoholic.

Khweya and Mandala walked abreast past Joni Fly restaurant, which stood at the comer of
Market Street and pine-lined Wenela Avenue. The tiny tearoom now looked old and was

4
boarded up closed with pine planks. They used to serve wonderful cocoa in there, Mandala
recalled with deep sense of nostalgia. He remembered the time when he was a secondary school
student and used to come here. He would sometimes come with his cousin Loyi. Under the
benign gaze of the savior of the Nation, They would sit down on the unpainted white pine chairs
with their backs to the open wooden shutters. Often it would be in the afternoon with the sun
warming their backs and bidding farewell before it disappeared behind the mountain in the west.
They would order very hot cocoa poured from a large black kettle which Joni Fly, the owner,
kept perpetually boiling on a log fire behind the canteen where the scones were baked. The
scones they drank the cocoa with were hot, long, puffy and delicious. They drunk the cocoa
slowly, savouring each mouthful, the tongue mixing cocoa with scones, both coursing warmly
down the throat into the stomach. At other times, Mandala would bring his girlfriend to Joni Fly.

Mandala and Khweya were now approaching the market. They crossed the open stinking gully,
which carried animal blood, cow dung, hooves, fish guts and scales, rotten fish and tomatoes
from the market to the river beyond the hospital graveyard. Now they were face to face with this
old structure with the name ‘Sitizeni’ written in red on the lintel. Khweya scrapped the sole of
his shoes on the upturned hoe planted next to the steps to the building. There was already a pile
up of sticky red clay all around the tiny hoe. The rain continued to fall. Mandala followed suit
and carefully scrapped the mud off his soles. The two trudged into the low ceilinged restaurant
where an ancient “radiogram” was screeching an old “high life” song. Centrally positioned in a
gold frame on the front wall, the president’s eyes stared into the future with invitation and
pronuse.

The restaurant was narrow and long, and the ceiling could barely be touched with the tips of the
fingers. The lime washed cloth ceiling was uneven, and sagged heavily in many places. From
the ceiling came the squeal, rumble and bounce of the rats as they chased each other in their little
heaven above there.

Three naked bulbs hang from the ceiling casting a dim orange glow on three rows of tables.
Each of the square, rickety tables could barely seat four. They were made from some unknown
cheap wood, perhaps light pine or wet blue gum wood and had been hastily painted in bright
plastic green, yellow, red and white. The gaudy colours shot through the tattered plastic sheets
that served as table covers. Sitting at the center of each table, were greasy white shakers, one
with the label salt and the other pepper scrawled carelessly on the side as if by a child learning to
write. The pepper looked the colour of brick powder.

The queue at the front of the room was long and winding. Khweya shifted on his puffed legs and
smiled wearily at Mandala behind him. Mandala smiled back and scratched his beard. The
“high life” song stopped with a long screech, and the radio came alive playing the president’s

5
music, which, if interrupted and this was reported to the party could lead to many years of
detention without trial. And so the drooling sycophancy continued with the women from Dedza
villages praising the president for development which allowed them to drink coca0cola on
Independence Day at his palace. Khweya and Mandala moved forward, the service was fast.
The menu was not elaborate. It was permanently painted on the front wall. It consisted of fish
and chips, or rice with meat and salad, or nsima with meat or fish and salad, or potatoes with
meat or fish and salad. Next to the eternal menu was a painting of man sitting at a table across
from his woman friend. He had worn shoes with thick soles and huge heels. In left hand, he held
a big fork with a square chunk of red meat poised to enter his never closing mouth full of chalk
white teeth. Under the painting was the caption: welokamu. Sayini, Minija ofu Sitizeni.

Now Khweya was the third on the line. He thought that he should not be here but he needed to
save money. These official trips were only occasions that he came close to making enough to
look after his family. The responsibilities were enormous: his four children all growing so fast
and needing new clothes almost every two months. His daughter at fourteen was the worrisome
and overly conscious of herself. Sometimes he had watched her with pain in his heart, seeing her
pulling at her dress as if to stretch it. Her budding breasts were flattened by the tight dress. He
felt angry, but he was impotent; trapped in a situation he barely understood. Everybody seemed
to blame him for his incomprehensible poverty, as if he willed it on himself and his family.

“Can I help you?” The voice of the waitress rang out.

“Rice, meat and salad,” Khweya answered mechanically.
“KWhat plate size?” she creased her lips to attempt a smile under a face drenched with sweat.
The huge pot with yellow rice was placed on a low black table in front of her; it was steaming
and smelled of Asian curry powder.
“Give me a din…, a big plate.

Next to the rice pot, was a large pot of meat. The meat floated in warm water thinly flavored by
the meat and a few rinds of tomatoes. The waitress had big arms. She served a mound of rice
and poured two spoonfuls of a thin sauce on it with perhaps three pieces of meat scattered on the
rice. Khweya was not impressed.

“Could I have more meat. I’ll pay for it.”

Another three pieces fell on the mound of rice, and more lukewarm sauce was poured so that the
plate was flooded and the rice totally immersed. One of the pieces of meat was certainly sinew
with suet on its side. It was obvious that the pieces would not add up to much.

6
Khweya moved from the queue to look for a table, and then saw what he had never thought
possible. A mass of rags, shiny grime was slowly and quietly advancing into the restaurant
through the doorway. It was moving with its back bent forward. The entire figure was encrusted
with dirt the colour of soot. The eyes looked like new ice in the face of indescribable filth. All
at once, a profusion of smells hit the restaurant: the heavy smells of rotting beef or milk; the
acrid and penetrating smell of ammonia from accumulated adult urine floating, almost apart from
these other smells, was the repugnant odour of a mouth full of decaying teeth.

Khweya dropped his plate next to the billy-can and dashed out of the restaurant. He jumped over
puddles where the Zambian women were huddled, drinking “chibuku” beer, laughing loudly,
trying to get men who would take them home for the night. But men were afraid, the new
disease was widespread in Zambia.

He found Mandala across the street, laughing and pointing at “Sitizeni” restaurant. Khweya was
too preoccupied with the incident in the restaurant to laugh. They decided to drink a few beers
and forget.

This morning Mandala’s mouth felt as if he had eaten ashes. There was a bile taste on his tongue.
He recalled with a shrug of the shoulders the quantities of the beer he had drunk the previous
night with Khweya in the township. Having decided they would not spend money on a resthouse
room, the two had attempted to stay awake the whole night by moving from ”Whayo Bar” to
“Dedza Hotela”, and then to “Che Brown” and back again to “Whayo” and so on and so forth,
endlessly. They had been forced to drink to stay awake. It was while they were at “Che
Brown’s for, perhaps, the third time and feeling rather hungry, that they each bought two boiled
eggs to eat. Khweya was cracking his eggs against the concrete pillar when Mandala noticed this
other man. A silent man who was obviously listening to their conversation, although he tried
hard to appear not interested. Mandala had wanted to warn Khweya about his suspicions, but his
drunk mind drifted away to something else before he could do it. Meanwhile Khweya spoke
with the brevity and profound conviction of a drunk that he saw absolutely no point in giving the
president money gifts when the later’s salary was probably a million kwacha a month. This was
theft. What did he do with the cattle, goats, chickens and thousands of kwachas that heforced
people to give him. Wasn’t he ashamed to steal from the poor? What kind of person is this who
always receives, even from very old? Women in their eighties have to give him.presents or face
detention. Is this freedom? What kind of freedom. Khweya had gone on a for a while, until
Mandala had remembered about the silent man and whispered something in Khweya’s ear. That
stopped him instantly. Like a movie in reverse, khweya tried to undo the damage. He started to
lavish praise on the president for the development, for the schools, hospitals, fertilizer, clothes
and roads. He started a praise song which compted with the music from the “radiogram”.

7
Khweya fished out his party card which he made a point of showing everyone in the bar. At this
point the silent man walked out of the door into the rain and the darkness outside.

They had continued to drink. And soon forgot about the silent man as they danced to East Africa
rumba and kanindo. “Che Brown” offered the best variety of music even though the dance floor
was old and full of holes.

Soon after Khweya landed on a woman whose behind completely filled the light pink floral
patterned skirt. She was about average height, neither tall nor short with a tiny voice and eyes
which tended to look down, giving her an air of innocence which she probably did not deserve.

“Do you have children?” khweya asked and put his arm around her shoulders which were so
narrow compared to the fullness in the skirt.

“No. I just finished form four last year.” She obviously lied because when he touched her
breasts, they were not firm and cupped like a tennis ball. They were long, thin and flaccid: a
definite sign that she either several children or had been pregnant several times. Khweya had a
strong suspicion that she was a veteran prostitute, which pleased him under the circumstances.
He would not have to worry of having corrupted an innocent school girl.

The record Wazazi (parents) came through the speakers. The Kiswahili musicians were
strumming vulnerable chords with their appeal to kindness to an orphaned child. Khweya and
his woman, whose name turned out to be Lozi, floated to the dance floor, to join the thronging
multitudes of couples who were fused together and barely moved. Khweya held his woman
similarly. His practised right hand immediately went to work, massaging her waist. And then
his hand felt one buttock, moving up and down feeling the skin beneath the thin skirt. He
discovered what he expected: Lozi was completely naked under the skirt. His loins caught fire.
Later that evening, as he entered an ancient cave without challenges, as he struggled to touch the
walls which seemed weak and unresponsive, he had to focus his mind elsewhere to complete the
journey. When he emerged, he quickly left the tiny room behind the bar to look for Mandala. He
found him slumped in a corner and snoring with his mouth open. It was dawn, they had to go and
wait for the bus to take them home
Mandala disliked Khweya’s lust for bar women. Especially with the killer disease so widespread,
it was bound to cost his life one day. But Khweya was fatalistic. He always responded with the
title of a famous song Zonse ndi nthawi basi “everything has its time’, it was worthless to argue
against him when he said that.

8
Suddenly, Mandala remembered the silent man. He trembled with fear of the special bench. He
assured himself though that he was safe., especially considering that he had personally thanked
the president on a certain occasion by giving him hos entre one month salary. He was sure that
people would remember that and not consider him disloyal. Besides, he bought his party cards
every year for all his children. He also had the president’s picture framed and hang in the living
room. In this picture, the life president is shown sitting in an enormous chair holding a pen and
writing in a big book open a large brown table. To his Excellency the life president’s left is a
small globe with a map of Africa and Europe clearly visible. The lines of concentration. His
Excellency the Life President’s forehead indicate deep concentration. Aa around the picture are
cloud like formations which suggest that the father and founder of the nation descended from the
heavens to fulfil this onerous job of ruling his people.

It was all khweya’s fault, Mandala concluded as he contemplated the frightening prospect of
detention and death. The fool liked to indulge in the deadly games of politics whenever he was
drunk. Perhaps, for my own good I should stop drinking. His armpits felt cold and wet with fear.

Mandala moved the tip of his tongue against the roof of the mouth and felt stabbing pain run the
length of his tongue; he had a raw blister on the tip of the tongue. He smell his own breath and it
was foul.

He needed to clean his mouth now. He went to the window and pulled aside the square faded
green piece of cloth which covered the. rattling four panes in the window. Outside was a sheet
of gray, the rain was falling. It had been pattering relentlessly for the past full week. This is
Saturday, should stop, Mandala asserted with distinct hate for the cold, and never stopping rain.
It did not come as a huge down-pour, but grudgingly and forever like an old woman’s tears. In
his mind Mandala saw the cold rain streaking down the robust gray gum trees that tower over his
house, keeping the surrounding and his house perpetually damp. Things in his house always felt
damp and soggy. Mildew flourished in everything including shoes, clothes, blankets, food,
paper, and even toothbrushes and mildew growing in the bristles. the mildew was as inescapable
as the rain and poverty. The children always, coughed as if they also had mildew growing in
their lungs, but it was probably TB.
Mandala moved from the window and the rain. But his mind was concentrated on the incessant
which seemed like a punishment for a mysterious crime his family, only his family had
committed. He seemed always to be just at the boundary of abject poverty. Always not having
enough to feed his eleven children. Mandela wondered bitterly about the cruel fate which always
appeared to place him at periphery of things. It seemed as if he was condemned even before he
was born to live this life. He looked at his mattress where the wife was sleeping. He wondered
about the joke he had perpetuated these many years of using that mattress. The cotton mattress
gave as much comfort as rocks and bricks of different sizes and laid out on the bed. But he had

9
clung to the idea, the idea of sleeping on a bed with a mattress was important. The mattress was
like the snake necktie and the threadbare faded green jacket he was forced to wear everyday.
Everything about him was a pretence, a façade to mask the grim poverty and sordidness of his
life. As a teacher, it was important that he did not sleep on the floor, but on a bed because
teacher stood for the new era of prosperity and must be seen to sleep on beds. His back, and his
wife’s had paid the price of many years of clinging to the illusion of success spawned daily by
the radio.

He will get wet, and might even catch a cold. Mandala thought. But what was to be done? Two
umbrellas had been lost in that latrine; falling in through the hole and sinking. When they had lit
the torch down there, all they saw were the different shapes and sizes of people’s faces on a
steaming dark greenish bed.
Why should it rain on Saturday? How does one go to Galioni’s to drink, drink, drink and play at
being the well to do teacher? Deceive everybody, except oneself, about the fruits of
independence and an education. He picked up his toothbrush and a bar of Lux soap from the old
shoe container. Quietly, he walked out of the bedroom, skirted the small pine table where
remnants of last night’s food were still in a plate. The small pine table doubled as a dining table
and as a place where things were kept. There was an assortment of things here. A huge bottle of
shell Vaseline body ointment, old free magazine from South Africa like panorama which lied
with glossy pictures of smiling Africans about how wonderful life was for black people in the
republic. There was also the family mirror on the table which could fit in one palm.

Mandala heard some noise from the boy’s bedroom. Pitala emerged, his stomach swollen and
lined with veins as usual. The skin on his face clung to his skull making his eyes look sunken
and pale. There was a vacant stare from his pale eyes as he slowly looked trying to see what he
might eat. Mandala knew that until the porridge was ready, there was nothing the children could
eat. Oh well, unless they wanted to eat the beans which their mother would not allow.

Patala’s shorts hang heavy on the sisal string threaded through the belt loops to hold them around
the waist. The seat was tom again in spite of the dense and intricate network of patches, patches
and more patches with thread upon thread crisis crossing like a fish net. There were blue patches,
khaki patches, yellow patches, white patches: any colour was there. Pitala’s big navel has
worked a hole through the mosquito T-shirt. Really what remained of the T-shirt were the collar
and the shredded front. Net
“How have you woken up son?”

“fine.” The young voice was croaky with sleep and the morning cough. He moved his hard and
cracked feet in the small room which combined as a sitting dining, and store room. He kicked

10
against an earthen pot. Full of red beans, Mandala instinctively knew. Pitala turned the long key
in the door-knob and was gone into gray rainy morning. The smell of dampness came into the
house. Mandala moved quickly and slammed the door shut.

Shivering from the rain, Pitala came through the doorway. Mandala then realized he needed a
bath. He walked out of the house with the faded threadbare orange bath-towel barely covering
his shoulder. He was brushing his teeth vigorously. He took a sip of water from the metal cup in
his left hand. He swirled the water in his mouth several times before spitting it out. It came out
in a white jet and landed on the grass on the path to the bath fence. On reaching the bath fence,
he put his shirt over the doorway and eased himself sideways into the fence. He carefully stepped
on the bricks before putting both of his feet on, the huge uneven stone which formed the floor to
the bath fence. When it had rained so much, mandala knew, the stone tended to rock rather
dangerously. On a number of occasions, he recalled, he had been thrown off balance on stepping
on the rock found one or both of his feet in the dirty water beneath it. That water left you
smelling like the sewer of the entire day. Today, he was extra careful. The trick was not to resist
the emotions of the rock, but to go with it until it settled down. So for, perhaps, a full second, he
let himself roll with the rock. As he was rocking, on this stone island surrounded by the heavy
and faecal water, Mandala felt a sense of entrapment. He had a vision of himself always
confined to stony soil and completely pervaded by decay and filth. The rain continued to fall,
beating him at the back when he bent down to scoop water from the basin. His clothes were
getting soaked at the doorway. He needed to hurry up, but there was this matter of balancing on
the rock. So he took as much time as the rock needed before he emerged from the bath fence
dressed in wet clothes which would dry up on his body.

When he returned from the sitting room it was full of his children. Each one had a bowl of
maize porridge that they were quickly polishing off. After which they would return to their
crowded bedroom to try to spend the day because outside there was the rain.

He put sugar on his porridge and eat it silently. He was thinking about how he was going to go to
Galioni’s bar to drink and try to forget when there was a knock on the door. He rose up, parted
the dirty curtain and saw Khweya standing on the other side. Khweya’s face is frozen. Mandala
opened the door

He sees that on khweya’s either side are beefy looking men. They are clean shaven and smiling
in blazer jackets with shiny metal buttons and the president’s face on the lapels. Khweya has his
hands together in front. Oh Lord, he is handcuffed.

“Are you Mandala:” one of the fat men asked.

11
“Yeees” Mandala’s voice was faint and rather hoarse when it came out. He looked at khweya,
but khweya was looking down, expressionless. He had heard about arrests, but never thought it
would happen to him or his friend khweya. Somehow he had thought that his poverty made him
invisible to the special branch police. He had known that the police were often after educated
university professors whom they considered a distinct threat. As for himself, Mandala couldn’t
see how anyone could be interested in his life which was really a lice infested bundle of rags.
But here they were. Special branch police!

He must have drawn attention to himself, even as he scavenged like a cockroach among the
refuse at the bottom of the human heap. Perhaps the very stench of his poverty had annoyed the
great leader.

“We’ve a small matter we would like to talk to you about at the division office.” The same fat
man said, visibly happy as he smiled flashing his white teeth. When Mandala looked at the fat
man’s eyes, they were the colour of ashes, dead and cold like eyes of a frozen fish. For a brief
moment Mandala thought the fat man regarded him like a housefly buzzing helplessly in a
window screen.

“I must… I must.. tell my.. my.. wife.” The wife was standing right behind him. Her arms
folded across her chest; each hand clasping firmly to the opposite shoulder. Behind the narrow
door, twenty two eyes had popped out in fear and were trying to make sense of the obscenity.

Mandala was turning… turning to face his wife and do what only he alone a man with eleven
children and a pregnant wife on the brink of being abandoned could have imagined. The two fat
men grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him towards the jeep. He careened forward like a
stuffed doll and fell with his face in a puddle. When he stood up, his face was covered with
water and sticky red mud. He was handcuffed and led to the jeep. Behind the narrow door,
twenty two tiny eyes mourned and cried for their father whom they would never see again.
There was a full moon. In this part of the river, the water is slow and has formed a deep pool.
Forever circling and barely visible above the tranquil water surface are numerous pairs of tiny
nostrils. Beneath the water surface the giant crocodiles waited patiently for the usual evening
feed. Soon enough wriggling bound bodies hit the water surface and were instantly shredded to
pieces and gobbled by the enormous jaws. The tiny red coloration where the bodies had fallen
quickly dissipated. The pool became serene once again as the river continued to flow
downstream.

12