didn’t expect what followed next. Things took a different course, that summer. It started with a fire in a small garment factory downtown, a blaze that left a hundred people out of work and colored our skies black for three days.
There were the PPMs, too, as reported in The Daily Dispatch— small prepaid power meters that were being rolled out in our neighborhoods that year. Most people were suspicious of the devices—imagining themselves trapped in blackouts until they got paid—but we were powerless against the change. The government had decided on installing the machines as far back as 1993. Tata wasn’t pleased; he spoke on it often. He liked to lament the government’s wasteful expenditure, and their eagerness to trammel their own people.
My aunt and I listened.
Having watched the smoke rising over our backyard that summer, the three of us were bound to spend the following weeks discussing the fire at breakfast. Or Tata was. He commiserated with the workers, he told us, given the negligence of upper management and how the government had failed to assist them. Then he’d move on to the prepaid meters, before my aunt and I could catch a breath.
Most of the time, we would follow his argument in silence, a familiar one-sidedness. I don’t doubt that Tata cared about the fire, and the power meters, and all the other things he talked about, but the complaining itself seemed to return his strength to him, I thought, and that’s what encouraged him to keep on with it.
For this reason, although we never spoke about it, my aunt and I stopped ourselves from showing impatience with his complaining. Each time Tata brought up a grievance, the two of us would begin our morning ritual, which was to absorb his unhappiness at the breakfast table.
RTR: 010 / Date of Recollection: 05.30.2002 / 3 min
I still need a sick note for Mrs Linden. I think of Rohan, who could help me with it, but whose number I’ve never dialed.
I remember when Litha introduced us. I’d headed to Mr Movie to find him. He was standing outside the entrance with a guy I didn’t know, pinching the tip of a dead cigarette. I crossed Alexandra to join them.
“This is Rohan.”
He was tall and stooped, with hair that grew down to his neck. He wore a white t-shirt with loose-fitting jeans, and thick, frameless glasses.
Litha flicked the cigarette on the road and watched it get chewed under the wheels of a flatbed. “Rohan was telling me about this new game he has. It’s on Game Boy. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.”
“I think I’ve heard of it.”
“I got it at a pawn shop in Maritzburg, but it’s the best one.”
Litha placed a hand on his shoulder. “Tell her about the plot.”
Rohan grinned. “It all starts with a shipwreck,” he said. “There’s a storm and Link, the lead character, washes onto an island called Koholint. He meets these characters, Tarin and his daughter Marin, who take him in. The daughter’s fascinated by Link, having spent all her life on the island; but Link has to set out to look for his sword. Then he meets up with an owl that tells him he must wake the Wind Fish if he wants to go home.”
“It sounds like most RPGs.” I knew that much from Litha and Tom.
“I know, but that isn’t the best part. The best part is that Koholint Island doesn’t exist. It’s all in Link’s dream. He’s still floating on a piece of driftwood in the ocean. That’s after 30 damn hours of game time.” He grinned, revealing his braces, and I laughed.
“Right? I sometimes think this town is Koholint Island,” he said.
“I like that.”
Rohan offered to lend me the game and we exchanged numbers. Later, Litha told me he was good at school, like I was, and that his dad was one of the doctors I’d been to. I nodded, but I never called.
Now I scroll through the contacts in my phone and text Rohan that I need his help. There’s no response, the message pending.
There’s no call from Kiran, no visit from the machine. I listen to music until I fall asleep.
When I wake up, hours later, I hear a bulletin about the missing girls on the radio, meaning my aunt’s back.
November 19, 1999
My grandmother, who we all called the matron, died without her right leg when I was too young to recall most of who she’d been. It was from diabetes. She was living with us then, but we drove back to Zeleni for her burial. I was nine years old.
The village was silent during the funeral. Walking back to the homestead from the burial grounds, we formed a wide procession that waded through the autumn mist in song.
Later, I couldn’t eat the meal we’d prepared to honor her; my throat closed up at each attempt at swallowing. Instead of greeting relatives who’d driven down from Gauteng, or joining the children who’d gathered from the neighboring huts, I volunteered to pass plates to the men sitting in the peaked tent. The plastic plates, worn enough to feel slicked with grease even after being washed, were stacked with samp that had been cooked over a wood fire in large three-legged pots.
But Mama first had to look for me. She found me staring at the ceiling in the matron’s room. She took a seat on the bed and touched my arm, smiling down, then stroked my forehead. Her mourning regalia was beautiful; I’d never seen her cry, I thought.
“Tell me if you know the answer to this one,” she said. “The year of your grandmother’s birth?”
I remembered it from the service.
“That’s correct. Now tell me how she got her name.”
“I don’t know.”
And so she told me.
•••
Three years after the matron, a teacher from the Transkei hinterland, followed her husband to settle on a plot he’d inherited from his father in Zeleni, she was promoted to the position of headmistress at the local school. That same year, two escaped convicts from St. Albans stalked into the region. They were feared. The villagers spoke of how the convicts walked with their knives on show—and how they paid shopkeepers with counterfeit money, grinning at them with lips burnt from spirits.
My grandmother, still an outsider in the village, didn’t share their caution. She concocted a plan to lure the bandits to a lakeside meadow, on the pretext of celebrating the return of a rich man’s son from ulwaluko. The two men caught wind of the news, and arrived at the meadow to exuberant singing, but no meat. Instead, they found a tall woman half-submerged in the lake, a Bible in one hand, beckoning with the other. The crowd fell silent, cleared a path.
The bandits complied and approached her, allowing her to baptize them as the village pastor gaped. It must’ve been her lack of fear—the men would attest to having known inmates of lesser mettle in the cages of St. Albans.
That afternoon, she enrolled them at the school, determined to teach them to read, and it was under these circumstances— in a room with two broken windows and one uneven, rocking desk—that the two convicts, in gratitude, first called her “the matron”;
