It’s still early in the morning and his boys are making all sorts of noises, running around the house, with the sound of breaking glass and the screams, disturbing his beautiful sleep.
“Skhumba … hey Sandile, what’s going on there? Can’t you see I’m trying to sleep here? Your mother’s trying to sleep! Please guys, please!”
“It’s Skhumba … haaaaaahaaaa! he pushed me against the table … yho-yho-yho!” cries Sandile.
“I didn’t do it on purpose, tata. It was a mistake,” protests another voice.
He rushes to the lounge, where the boys are. Sandile is sitting down on the carpet, crying out loud while holding on to his left knee, claiming pain.
“Don’t play rough, boys maan, please. Skhumba, you see, Sandile could have been badly injured,” he warns, while massaging the knee.
He then decides he can’t go back to sleep and so goes back into the room. He takes out the glass with the water and his false teeth and walks out to the tap outside. The boys follow him out.
He shares greetings with his neighbour Mrs. Mphahlele. They briefly talk about her eldest son Humphrey’s matric exams which will take place less than a month from now, with the initiation into manhood following immediately thereafter.
He brushes his teeth, cleans his mouth and goes back to the house. He calls the boys, gives them a R2 note and sends them to go get a loaf and half-dozen eggs at Jali’s.
They come back about fifteen minutes later and he begins preparing the breakfast: peeling onion and tomato and starts frying sausage and the eggs. Mama gets the breakfast in bed, accompanied by a refreshing cup of coffee.
He dines with the boys in the kitchen in the midst of talk, laughter and promises of chips and sweets when he comes back from town a few hours from now. Sandile asks for balloons too.
He finishes up and immediately gets up to the boiling kettle and pours its contents into the waskoom with cold water and quickly washes his upper body. He then goes out to the tap,
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empties and cleans the waskoom, asks Sandile to take it back inside, fills up a 5-litre bottle with water, opens up the bonnet of his shiny, khaki-coloured Ford Granada, pours the water and then gets inside to turn on the ignition.
“Zway, Zway, please drop us off at Xolani’s. We want to go play with him,” the boys ask. He sits down on the doorstep and cleans his white, leather tekkies.
“No-no, boys, it’s still very early for visits. Later.”
He then invites them to come sit next to him on the stoop. The boys rush to him. They each sit on a lap, facing each other. He then gives them a lecture on why they should from now on stop calling him by his name and start calling him tata. He even suggests that if that’s so difficult, they could at least put a “bhuti” in front of the name so he could, to them, be “bhuti Zwayi.” But the boys engage him robustly, naively telling him that they could not even imagine that because everyone calls him Zway and that it was, after all, his name. In resistance, the boys further argue against the idea and summarily inform him of their total rejection of it. Going forward, he dips a hand into the back pocket of his Bermuda shorts, drawing out a few brown coins and offering them as an incentive, if not a bribe, for a buy-in.
He stretches his arm and hands over to Skhumba the big two cent coin and to Sandile two one cent coins. Yho, he had never before seen his little boy so possessed and in so much rage before.
Sandile throws the coins down onto the ground, runs amok around the yard, crying out loud,
“Ayithengi le mali!” Being more mature, Skhumba is immediately asked to hand over to him the big coin and accept the two cents Sandile declares “fake”. With a smile, Skhumba does as he is asked and Sandile stops crying while being wiped the tears and getting a sarcastic apology.
“So, gents, am I now bhuti Zway?” Skhumba runs a bit further and shouts, “Iwee, ndikuqhathile, igama lakho nguZway, awungobhuti. I got you, to me, you are still Zway, not bhuti!”
So, to Skhumba and big sister Thash, who, at this time, is visiting their granny in KwaZakhele;
their father remains Zway; but to Sandile, his lovely lamb, he becomes bhut’ Zway. What a disciplined boy Sandile is.
He tells his wife he is going to town and won’t be long and that boys will be playing in the yard.
He gets into the car and off he drives.
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The boys keep playing, happy they are not in church today. It has been sometime since they have been to church. They don’t know how, but they seem to have convinced their mother not to insist on them going. They have never been keen anyway, only that their mother thought it was good that they be founded on religious spirituality.
When they are to go to school, they are ordinarily given lunch money for church too. The sermons are normally boring and meaningless and the instead spend the time playing leysi around the lawn with other children. They fight them at times. But their sister Thash is always there for them, giving a lesson or two to those who dare touch them. They use the lunch money during the sermons, buying those crunchy magwinya, fries, chocolates, sweets, and every other thing they feel like eating at Willows’ and Goduka’s. They hope their mother has realised School is enough misery. So they spend the day playing with other children out in the streets.
After all types of games in and around their street of residence, together with friends, the boys only stop their shouting, racing, teasing, falling, laughing, crying and munching, just so they have a praising look at their father’s car penetrating the driveway.
He greets the children and takes the shopper bags into the house and his boys follow him in.
They scratch in the bags and, yes, they find a lot: balloons, other toys and some snacks. He kisses his wife and tells of the payment at Town Talk’s and the few rounds he made in music shops looking for Caiphus Semenya’s latest album, in vain.
He then boils water and washes his boys while their mother is doing laundry. He sits in the lounge and reads his Sunday newspapers. They have lunch while watching a gospel programme on TV, chatting and laughing just about everything there is, exactly the way happy families do.
The whole day.
Just when they are finishing up their supper, he goes to receive a call from their Telkom line in the bedroom. He comes back a few minutes later and tells his wife it is Kototo, his closest friend, asking that they quickly meet at a friend’s place for a few minutes. He seems keen; but his wife is not interested. She doesn’t want him to leave. They have a long-standing deal, Sundays are a no-no for friends; they spend them as family, quality time, she calls it.
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But he apologetically begs and tells her it must be something very important Kototo wants discussed and that he will not be long. So after a fight that proves futile, his wife agrees, albeit reluctantly. He promises to be quick, kissing her in both cheeks and lips and then his boys on the foreheads, and the leaves. After a long wait, the boys and their mother go to sleep.
The boys get down onto the bed and quickly maneouvre into dreamland. Very early the following morning, the boys abruptly wake up to their mother’s screams. “Yho-yho-yho, Mzwandiiile!” Still half asleep, they try hard to regain consciousness. Then one of the two men standing next to their mother comes closer to them and scolds, “Vukani, vukani, utata wenu ufile!
Wake up, wake up, your father is dead!” They don’t know exactly what being dead means, Sandile and Skhumba show no emotion and a Humphrey’s mother joins in. Neighbours start clogging the house.
Later on in the morning, the boys get to hear that their father’s lifeless body was discovered by the two men who came to alert them of his fate, lying just across the fruit and vegetable market opposite where he claimed to have been meeting his friend, with a gaping hole to the heart. They also hear too, that the friend, and another of his friends; are the suspects.
Time goes by and prayer services are held every evening, with neighbours assisting by all means and ways possible. The boys also get introduced to family members they have never before seen or heard of: grannies, aunts, uncles and cousins coming to empathise.
The funeral service is held the following Saturday and the relatives and neighbours come to pay their last respects, including the friend and his alleged accomplice. The boys are allowed the last glance at their father’s body through the coffin. Their mother hopelessly cries out loud, posing questions without pausing for answers. “Why, why, why, Mzwandiiiiileee!” Thash joins in, and others join too. Sandile and Skhumba are not sure how to respond and so they don’t cry. Tigers don’t cry, they have learnt from their friends.
The mother spends the rest of her days blaming herself for not having insisted on keeping her husband home. The police did not follow it up and the two friends are never proven guilty, but the community believes they killed him. The mother does want to hear anyone asking about her husband’s murder and whether it was solved or not.
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