mbotse | For my Son

FOR MY SON

The huge blanket of grey clouds had hung in the City sky for more than two days now. That afternoon, the blanket finally gave in, and the mass of grey clouds suddenly melted under the gaze of the hot sun, quickly diminishing into pelting raindrops that pounded on the hard tar road. They found themselves pelting over a little figure of a boy. Bonani was his name.

The boy shifted uncomfortably in his sleep, wriggling his feet away from the pelting rain. He hated this kind of season, were everything was wet and slippery and he could not even find a dry spot to lay his head. Worse was the situation with the bins because when there was rain, and the leftovers were soaked wet, they became very bitter to eat, or could not be picked at all.

Bonani pulled the cardboard over his feet and wished he had a pair of shoes. The nice dream that he had been having came back in a painful realisation. He had been engaging himself to a good and scrumptious meal during one Christmas day and then suddenly the raindrops had rudely disturbed it all.

“Sheesh!” he whispered angrily to himself and cursed at the feat of nature. In this weather, he could not afford to sleep. In this weather life was very hard. It needed someone who did not have a conscience, someone who could not feel anything anymore. There was the White lady who gave things to people every end of the month. She gave out things like blankets and porridge and sugar to the people in the street. And sometimes she would bring her little boy and he would distribute the second-hand things to those who were well behaved. Bonani stared into the dark grey sky, wondering if the White woman had too much stuff in her house. Why should she just give things to people just like that, without them paying anything? He wondered. She had to want something from them, or maybe she wanted them to vote for her, like what one man had promised them in the other year.

“Vote for me!” he had shouted when they had gathered around him and around his shiny car, “And I will make your lives better!”

Of course that had been another lie from one of them- the rich ones. Bonani later heard that he won his election and now was living in an even bigger house and his stomach had grown quite large. That was the way of it – all always wanted to win with them and then discard them like banana peels. None willed to work for them. It was all a fallacy.

Bonani wriggled under his cardboard, listening to the music that the raindrops were making over the plastic bag. They were jabbing the thin plastic, as if they were wanted to cut it open. Bonani smiled at himself, seeing the irony of the situation. His life was like these small raindrops that were trying to cut open the plastic covering his body. They were the emotions that he felt, and those emotions sometimes made him feel mad at the whole world and its creator. The emotions would fight with him and threaten to protrude from the head like they were little needles inside his small head.

“Go and steal from that rich kid over there...” sometimes they would tell him, and when the time was right when that voice spoke, he would be rewarded with his loot- a loaf of bread maybe, a couple of dollars, or sometimes it would be always a screaming white man’s kid. And then a bunch of people chasing after him. And then him disappearing behind a corner of an alleyway. With those chases he always won - no matter what.

Bonani cursed harshly, and then he roughly kicked the soaked cardboard over his side. For a moment, he let the arrows of rain jab him as they wanted. Pretence did not work here. He really did not care.

Underneath him was another plastic bag, this time a gift from one of the dry cleaning shops in the City. He placed this over his body and when he realised it was too small, tore it along its hem and then covered himself fully with it, leaving only his head so he could breathe properly. Then he remained still, and decided he would watch how the little innocent drops of rain spattered on the plastic and how they foolishly followed each other on the ridges of the plastic bag. For now he was at ease.

He could now wait, and go back in thought for a little while...

***

He had been born 15 years ago, behind twenty-two rusty vertical prison bars. He could still remember so vividly her screams as she finally let him free from her. For him, that place he had been encased in for those nine long months had been a prison, dark and floating. And so when he had come out of her, Bonani had been very jubilant in his first cry, announcing his stark happiness with a confident cry. The nurse had not even slapped his buttocks yet.

“My!! This is one huge one!” she had said weighing him on the scale.

He could not remember seeing her mother’s smile and she had seemed very angry with him and had refused to carry him as the nurse began to roll him with the prison garments.

“Take a look at him. Isn’t he a nice healthy man?” the prison nurse had pleaded. But Bonani’s mother had refused him. She had winced in agony and pointed with her fingers at the bloody space between her legs.

“Never from me!!” she whispered before turning away and sobbing quietly. “Never from me!!”

The prison nurse had shaken her head and looked at the guards who were enjoying the whole spectacle.

“I don’t know what to do then.” She had sighed. “Who is this woman anyway?”

The men shook their heads. Nobody seemed to know and every woman whom they asked all shook their heads.

“But we know her story,” they instead said solemnly “ and we know why she is here. She used to live a normal life with her man, until one day he got a promotion at his work. He started to come to the house very late, and sometimes even brought some women with him. It was even worse when he brought the women because he would make sure that he beat her, entertaining the other women. So one day this woman planned for him. And as usual he came, shouting and filling the house with beer stench and demanding that she was his wife and he wanted to have her for the night. When she refused he loomed over her and bashed her too good with his fists until she fell down and lost her consciousness. But the woman still had her plans- for she had had enough of him and the monster in him. Later, she woke up to find him snoring and then she proceeded with her plan. The pains had subsided and she poured all five litres of petrol over the only man she had ever loved - and then struck a match and threw it over his amazed face.”

“What is her name?” The nurse asked.

“Jane.” They said.

***

Bonani stared thoughtlessly at the rolling rain on the plastic bag. The rain was becoming lighter now. On his right side, only a few metres away, he caught the voices of two boys in the same circumstance as him. It was like that. You either chose to survive or not to survive. There was no other way. Life was like that. A choice.

***

The judge who presided at her case did not think twice. He put her away for good, saying that a woman of her calibre did not deserve to live with ‘people’ who were normal. She became sad all through out her life, although she was happy for being taken from the house she had been living in. For that house had reminded her of him, him and his face of pure cold crudeness. Him and the naked whores who had screamed and laughed at her as her beat her with the sjambok. Inside the jail, she had hoped for a better life, but soon her wrong hopes turned out to be her very worst nightmares. They got the better of her. Hope is a strange thing. It gives you sheer strength at the oddest of times. But also hope is a weakness, derailing whoever is entangled by its web to keep on thinking that things will change. For Jane hope became a sheer cloud of darkness and she became blinded by its whim. She thought of the other children that he had fathered, and how they were doing at his uncle’s house. At least they were away from his influence. As the days sank below the horizon each day, Jane let her tears dry and held on to the bars of the prison in front of her face. These would be the walls that would encase her until her days. Prison life was a hell without fire. In prison, you had no soul, no character, no friend. She could not bear to think of the fact that her growing stomach was brimming with a baby, and that baby would have to be born behind the steel bars. So one night, when all was quiet in the prison, she took a long stick that she had found in the prison yard and inserted it inside her. But the guards heard her, and rushed to her bloody figure that was lying on the floor. From that day onwards, they had kept her under close watch.

***

Bonani glared at the opening sky once again. The rain had ceased, and had become light flakes that danced solemnly in the afternoon day. They hit his face gently and he rubbed them away, before standing up and ruffling his wet mass of uncombed hair. The plastic he folded after he had vigorously flapped it in the air. Bonani approached the sound of the other voices that he had heard. They were there probably because they too had heard that the White woman was going to come. Who does the White woman think she is? Bonani began asking himself. Does she think that she can just tell everyone to do what she wants? Or maybe she wants to prove to them that they have been hopeless and are failures in life? Maybe she just wanted to help, he figured.

***

Childless, Jane began the rigorous cycle of prison life, and the prison bars etched her character intricately. Each day waned before her, and the walls that surrounded her swelled in until she could not breathe anymore. Prison is like a sad ceremonial song, and you sometimes end up singing along when in the first instance you had vowed never to sing. For Jane, this thoroughly became her home, and she ennured herself to it, to its daily routines. The morning showers infront of sex starved women who groped at her, demanding unnatural sex, the guards who taunted her, and fixed her with lustful sexual glares. The screams of women being raped in dark rooms by other women. Days on end without food but water to lap like a hungry puppy. Everything was a routine, they told her when she asked why she was being mistreated.

“Woman, do you think you came here to play, heh?” the guards had asked, their faces full of sarcasm. “Here you will learn how to become a woman- again!”

And Jane did learn the way of things, as they had told her. She was talking to herself most of the time, or talking and laughing with an invisible child. Sometimes, when she held the ‘child’ to her breast, the women looked at her and spoke.

“Jane is beginning to get very crazy.” they said.

But she was more than crazy and her head had begun to travel on a turmoiling road, spinning and turning. Soon headaches took over her days, and then she began to talk at the bars of the prison, giving each of the bars names. When she began to hide herself under the mattress, and cut her thighs with little glasses, the other women became very alarmed. They went to talk to the Prison Warden.

“Jane has done terrible things. Its her ancestors who are punishing her.” The warden said.

***

Bonani approached the two boys. They had been under their ‘plastic’ but had since come from under it since the rain was stopping. They seemed to be arguing about something. Bonani was close now and he could hear what the argument was all about.

“I have jus forgotten what she is called. Anyway she is called the White woman here…” one was saying.

The other boy let out a laugh, which was followed by a crisp cough. “Mfana! They call her that because they want to worship her! You don’t know the white people.”

“Come on!” the other boy put in. “It is the same white people who help you that you want to shun in the end.”

Bonani looked at the two boys busy arguing on a useless topic. At the end of the day, all that mattered was whether you had a full stomach or not. That was all that mattered in the end. Before, he had always worried himself about such useless things. These things had wasted his energy. Why worst energy when you can use it to look for more food for your stomach? He had asked himself. He looked at the boys infront of him.

“Do you think she is coming, today?” he asked, breaking their talk. They both shot him up with annoyed glares, and then they continued with their argument. Bonani asked again, but this time he sat down with them. The one who seemed not to be supporting the white woman looked at him sharply and simply said,

“She had better.”

“Don’t talk like that that,” the other boy warned. “There are people here who can tell such things and you would starve here.” he said giving Bonani a hard stare. Bonani smiled at him.

“I’m not that kind of person.” He said.

“So you too, are waiting… for her?” he asked, the lines on his face engraving a perfect Vee. He had a very greasy face, set in a stern had look. The

look talked of his hard life, how he had fought against it and had not yet won, or would never win at all. His eyes looked lifeless, and there was no light in

them. The shirt he wore, if it could be called a shirt, resembled someone mauled by a hungry dog, or shredded by an office machine. It draped around his thin

bony shoulders like an old oversize curtain, its once black stripes faded into a dirty grey colour. Here was a boy who had seen the other side of the world. Here

was a boy who had been troubled and let go by the world. Here was a boy shunned from embraces of the society. His head was small, like some sort of

dilapidated caricature that had beheld massive oddities in its time, and it was all hidden from

view by the uncombed mass of unkempt hair on top of it.

“Why are you looking at me like this?” he suddenly asked, his eyebrows raised.

Bonani did not speak. He turned his head to look at the sky once again. The clouds had entirely cleared themselves, and they now danced merrily like two wedded people.

“I asked why you are looking at me like that!” he asked again, and Bonani remained silent, still gazing up there. The other boy also looked up.

“Do you think there is a God, up there?” he asked, and turned to look at Bonani’s face.

Bonani studied the second boy. He looked tired of life, but yet there was pure determination in the lines of his face. Bonani had realised that one could tell a lot from the way someone's face looked from a long time ago. He had seen his mother’s face then, and he had always known that he had not been wanted. He had always tried to imagine his father’s face, whether it was the one he always hoped for. A face that was loving and happy. A face that would smile when it saw him. But he knew his heart told him something else about the man. It was the irony of it all. He had never seen his father, but in his heart he could feel that he was not a good man, especially to his mother. They had once told him during his days in the prison.

“Your father is the one who killed your mother’s soul.”

He looked at him again and then said,

“A God is there, but for us I think he sometimes is too busy.”

The other boy looked at him.

“Or maybe He is found only at the church. But I think we must have hope.” He said. Bonani looked at them quietly, thinking whether there was a man called God. He had to have saved his mother. In that prison if he had really cared. He stared at the two boys in his face and thought about his mother and how she had felt about God, when inside the obliviousness they had put her in. She must have despised him, or prayed even still, hoping for redemption that never came. Hope could be a dangerous thing, Bonani knew for himself

***

Beside the grey walls, Jane begun to succumb slowly to everything that was happening. She began to lose touch with her mind, and the food she ate all started to taste the same, and the water began to have a peculiar smell and the air around her smelled of thickness she could not understand. Her eyes would see him coming towards her in her dreams, and she would wake up screaming and sweated all over. The other women said prison was not for her. For in prison you become tougher as the days sink by. For Jane, this was all wrong. She sometimes thought she was in a bad dream, and hoped it would all end when she woke up.

One day the Prison warden called her to her office. Jane’s heart almost leapt from her chest. The light was finally coming at all. The Warden told her the good news.

“We have reviewed your time here,” she said “and you shall be freed in the next 12 coming months.”

Jane was elated, save for the thing now growing inside of her. It was the only thing that would remind her of him when she was a free woman. It was the only image of him that she would see in the little thing. She did not want to have such kind of a baby. The others had been born when things between him and her had been sweet and those children reminded her of those days. This coming one had no space in her heart. It was he being reborn in her womb. But she could not attempt anything now, for they had seen her intentions and were always at close guard, always beside her at every time of the day.

One night, there was terrible scream in her cell, and when the nurse approached, she was horrified to see that she was in heavy labour, and her sac of water had already broken. When the boy came out of her, she had already lost a lot of blood. And the nurse tried to let her hold him, but she refused, and whispered at her, pointing at her bloody legs,

“Never from me!! Bonani, see what you do with him!”

And those became her very last words.

The Warden was very silent when she heard the news. “What do we call him?” she finally asked the nurse who was holing the tiny bundle in her hands. He was covered in the grey prison garments.

“The mother said bonani, which means we must see for ourselves what we call him.” the nurse said. “What do we call you then?” the nurse gently asked the quiet baby.

***

Three days later, they took the boy to a Children’s home in the midst of the City. It was one of those dilapidated ones, with an old Victorian look and a red brick wall that mounted around it like a battalion of soldiers. Its front gate was a hugely painted sign in black, with an apt solemn warning embedded on its face ‘Welcome to the Haven of Peace’. Two dirtily clad children with very shiny stomachs were playing in its playground. The prison nurse went in to the office, the bundle in her delicate hands. She did not like what she was doing but there was no other way. Things had to be done, and after all he was being put in a home when other unfortunates had been met with even more undesirable plights. She placed him on the desk when the patron asked her the purpose of her visit.

“What is his name?” the patron asked, unveiling the uncrying little boy from the prison garb.

The nurse looked at her and said,

“The warden says you shall call him Bonani.”

***

Hope was dangerous, Bonani told himself, looking at the two boys. He had strayed too far because of it. He had been softened by it. It had made him think that the day when all things became gold and honey was going to come. It had made him wait for an absolution, one that had never come...

“Where do you live in?” he heard the question from the one who had supported the White woman. His teeth were richly yellow, and another layer seemed to have embedded itself on those cavities. Yet the smile was still there, and Bonani was quick to notice it. This one will make it, like I am doing, he reassured himself.

“I live right here the street.” He replied. “I ran away from the place that they had put me in. It’s a place they call the Haven...”

***

The Haven of Peace became his refuge, and the one and only place were the most dangerous of his hopes almost drove him to insanity. There, they told him that his mother was very sick, but when she got better, she would come and take him away. He would spend hours on end, imagining whether she was as beautiful as some of the women that he had seen in the magazines. Sometimes he would dream he was with her, but always her face was very dark and he could not see her at all. Sometimes in the dreams, she would refuse to hold him, and he would cry for her as she disappeared into the orange horizon. One night, when one of the other boys said she did not love him, and had dumped him by the Haven’s door, he became very furious like never before and pounded on the boys face until his small fists became numb. But later, as he served his punishment ‘digging the hole’, he thought seriously about it. Maybe it was all true. She had not bothered to visit in the 12 years he had spent in the Haven. That evening, as he re-filled his hole with the pile of sand next to him, he resorted to a different thing altogether. He would never wait for her again, because she was never going to come for him.

Soon, he began to change. And the Patron of the Haven noticed instantly. Bonani was becoming too angry with the other children, especially the girls. He was very quick to hurl out an offensive insult to anyone, and then laugh it off. But sometimes, the Patron, as she did her night rounds, would be startled to hear sobs emanating from his room. She sought to talk with him but he did not want and would nod at everything she said. Bonani told her he did not want to live like he was in a prison. He vowed that ‘one day I will run away’ to her. He said the Haven was reminding him of prison, and he wanted to free himself from it and its people. The patron was lost for words when the boy opened his heart for him. Bonani was all too grown up, she told the other women whom she worked with.

But for Bonani, the only life he could live had to be outside of the Haven. So instead, during the school lessons, whilst the others were busy studying, he would look up at the roof and tell himself the days of freedom were very near. Bah! Who liked a life that was lived as if you were a tiny-programmed machine? Who liked to be paraded infront of television cameras and be catalogued as ‘underprivileged’? All this would change, he vowed to himself.

***

“And you,” Bonani said, “Where do you live?”

The boy looked at him, and then released a wide smile. “Same as you. The street is where I have been living for the past 10 months.”

“10 months?”

He laughed. “Yes. It is better than some places that I have lived in.”

Bonani stared at the marrying clouds again. “So, the woman is coming, heh?”

“Are you new to this?” the other boy against the white people went over his words.

Bonani did not respond, but instead asked. “What do they call you here”

“Bravo!” he said with enthusiasm. “This one,” he said, putting his arm over his friend’s shoulder “this one, I call Danger!” he continued and let out a laugh.

Bonani joined in reluctantly, feeling a sense of belonging that he had never felt before. “Why Bravo? Why Danger?” he asked, wanting to know.

Bravo studied him for a while, folding the shreds of his shirt against his arm. “That,” he announced “you will be told later.” Bonani laughed again, a thing he had almost forgotten during the days at the Haven.

“It’s ok.” He told Bravo. Time to know such things would soon come. Bravo stood up, and Bonani and danger did the same.

“Do not worry about the White woman. She is coming. Always does.” He said, brushing dust from the outside of his thighs. “I hate the way people now think of her. They think she is a god. Just because she brings lousy food! A lot more is needed on the streets.”

Bonani nodded his head, and Bravo let out a smile. “I like your thinking,” he said.

“At last! Someone who is on the same boat as I am. The rest are on sinking ones, you know, the sinking boats?”

Bonani nodded. “ I think I get the language.” He said earnestly. Bravo smiled again, and then moved closer to him and put his arm over Bonani’s shoulder.

“You will survive” he whispered at his ear. “You are very sharp, and you grasp things like an eagle’s talons. Are you knew to this?”

This time Bonani nodded his head. He felt some trust for Bravo. Danger was still weak, he realised. Weak like when he was during his days at the Haven. He still hoped. Hope was a dangerous thing.

Bravo nodded his head. “Yet you do not look like you are new here. You are destined for great things mafana.” He said, taking his arm off his shoulder. Bonani smiled at him.

“How long?” Danger asked.

“I came here only last night.” He replied after being silent for a little while, feeling they would laugh at him, which they did not. “I ran away from the Haven- a children’s home.” He added.

Bravo was silent. “Last night?” he repeated. Bonani nodded. He felt like Bravo was beginning to measure him.

“What do they call you then?” Danger asked.

***

That night as he sat on the mattress, he thought about his plan. He had decided he had had enough of the Haven. He could not stand it. He could not stand its rules that breathed all over him. Or the eyes of the Patron that were always all over him these days. He had overheard her saying that he was a threat to the survival of the home. Threat? Bah! That was all nonsense. The only threats he saw were the almost falling roofs that threatened to crush them in their sleep. The only threat were the meager meals that endangered their stomachs and had them vomiting on a daily basis. The only threats were the security guards who peeked into the little girl’s toilets as they bathed. A threat! Bah! He would prove them very wrong. There was a life amongst those tall concrete buildings of the City. There was cleaner air amongst its people, and amongst the noises from the traffic and blasting stereos, a better life peeked at him. Behind those dilapidations of the City, he would get the life that he deserved.

So that night, he collected his ‘belongings’ and put them in a dirty sack. His mother’s photo was the only thing the Haven had given him that mattered. He took that also, and put it into his sack. The other children were busy snoring as he carried on his plan. For that night, he was a determined spirit, and nothing could derail him from his decision. Escaping was an easy thing, and he was doing the home a favour by reducing the mouths to be fed. He did not even need to hide because the guard was always sleeping at that time. But he wished he could spit at his face as he passed by him.

Minutes later, he was out from them forever. He felt like a bird feeling its new wings brush against the breeze for the first time, and for a moment he stood quietly alone, shadowless in the night, and let the air of freedom fill his lungs.

Ahead, there stared at him, the welcoming lights of the sleepless City...

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