LIFE – Page 4 – PurplePretoria

Scovid or Scovida, as the child had named her, walked in through the front door; head bowed like someone who had been caught red-handed being herself. Although her name was Scovia, she had come at a time when the word COVID was ever present around the house and, the little boy learnt new words by rhyming them with old ones he already knew. We found her new name hilarious. I thought it was by chance that I had heard him connect some words this way before but it really came to me, this technique of his, when I found out one of his first friends at school was not called Bathroom but Jethro [-om].

The braids that Scovid chose were just like mine. I knew they would be similar because she had asked me what my hairstyle was called. I thought a pencil Kiswahili would suit her, since she spent most of her time in the house cleaning it or within the compound walls running after the child or gossiping with the other maid.

She did try to make hers a little bit distinctive from mine; with light brown streaks running through the off-black fibre in a shoulder length and wavy fashion. The last time I had suggested that my house-help should go to the salon and have her hair plaited, she had left within a month. Something told me to just watch and see.

That very night, I heard her, for the first time, hurl an insult. I think she had probably hurled insults at me before or at least at the runaway father of her child but she always spoke in her language when she was on the phone. This time, I was walking past the counter on my way out of the kitchen when she re-entered, after an intense phone call to a village mate and said with an unusual forcefulness, in an accent that made the word sound a little less English and a little more African, “Nonsense!”

After that, I saw a small red hand-mirror with melted flowery plastic petals glued onto the round edges lying by her bag. I had not known that she owned a mirror within the only one cloth bag that held all her belongings.

She regards me with suspicion every time I tell her to do something. She observes me with a focused gaze to see whether I will treat her differently now that I can see that we are both women. It is for this same reason that I don’t tell her my age, because it might be hard for her to accept that we are the same age but we were born in different lives. It reminds me of my first maid Carrot. For her, it had not been because she felt we were equals, it had been because she had judged herself better but that life had dealt her a bad hand.

Becoming a mother for the first time was like getting a new hairstyle. While I had feared that it would diminish me, and in a way it did because I have little time to be my ‘self’, it had instead broken me down into pieces and rebuilt a more resilient version of me. I finally understood the meaning of time, how it slipped through the cracks, how to measure it- in blocks- the time when the baby was sleeping, the time when baby was awake- the time to drink water so I could pump milk- the time to pump- the time to eat- time when the house was quiet. Time.

It no longer went unnoticed. Now, I would know the pain of stagnation, the pain of waste.

When I came here, I had just turned 23. It was two months after University and the memories of my quiet life between my residence and the University lecture halls were still fresh. The law building was all glass. They said it was because they wanted to show that the law was just and transparent. I think I have always felt safe just focusing on the current, what I could see, what I could do. I hadn’t thought about what would I do when I left Hatfield, so he had thought for me. I would go to an internship in a nice country, and after that, work in a community organisation. I was after all, malleable, soft, kind, peaceable. I didn’t go.

A haggard insecurity haunts this place. The discomfort brought forth by my presence alters something in the atmosphere. I’m not a disrupter. I had always been content to flow behind the wind that blows the curtains. I suffer under its gaze, this expectation, this fury, this separation, this isolation, this fight.

Today, as I walked out onto the greyish parking lot of the mall where I had taken refuge, it dawned on me, in the hot heavy undertone of the air before a storm falls, that the most difficult part is, I had wanted to stay. I had wanted it to be the one. I had accepted any kind of treatment because, I would be the one who did not stir trouble. I would be the one who dwelt overburdened and unseen- like a sea creature under still water. I had wanted to be the one who stayed.

It’s a morning like this one. It’s cold and breezy and I’m up early. The panadol has worn off and I’m fighting the nurses. I’m reaching out to hold one of them so I can shake her. The askari comes in and tries to hold me down. They are pulling me away from the balcony where the din of my mother’s guests was rising and falling just outside of my room several hours ago.

I had thought it through; about how long it would take me to walk home. The paling deep sea blue sky reveals that it could be early morning, maybe 5:00 a.m. I’m in a town hours away from home in distance if I walk on foot. Even if I’m not killed by iron rod clad men on the roadside, I won’t be able to climb over with my new born.

He is awake and in my double bed of this special room; a bed too low and too wide for me to slip out easily from. I should be on the small metallic raised one my mother in law is sleeping on. She’s been asking me the same question for hours now. “Do you want me to do this? Do you want me to do this? Do you want me to do this?”

“I have never had a child before, how would I know?” She’s the only one remaining. I have kept the protocol this long and now it’s broken. She says nothing and calls the nurses when I run to the balcony.

“This one is a stubborn one. What is she doing now?” one of the nurses on duty asks in a comic tone- in the same way one would speak to a child. The nurse has been seated in the corridor for hours talking to another nurse. The water dispenser is next to them and I have been there once, and then couldn’t make it half way back on my next attempt and they had ignored me; in my starched faded yellow-flower hospital apron tied behind my open back staggering through the corridor at night.

“You have been giving her panadol. Why would you give her panadol? You should have given her something stronger,” I hear my mother in law tell them. The ground is further down than I had estimated. If I could just climb down, I could run. I see them rushing towards me. And now, I want one of them to reach me, just one of them, any, and I will tug at their dark blue uniform and pull them down to the abyss with me.

My head balances on my shoulders like it’s not my own. A sharp stinging heated claw curls around my neck and races down my back unrelenting. I can’t tell whether it’s resting in my shoulders or my bones. I can’t remember what part of the hospital I’m in or how I got here. I woke up in a bright room with fluorescent lights. I called out and there was nobody there. I had asked them to give me my baby, twice, but they had dressed him and taken him away to show him off. And then I had gone, somewhere- to the unconscious- and woken up in the white light room. Then there was the sound of wheels and I was here in this room, surrounded by murmurs.

“Eehh, bambi. Yatidde … C-section… anti bambi…” Somewhere in the room, a baby cries with a shrill little cry.

I don’t want the askari to touch me and I’m too weak to wring his neck so I get back into bed. Technology is cold comfort but it is still comfort. I ask my mother in law to help me get my phone. There’s no one on the other side. Blood rushes through my body. There’s one last person but she’s 8 hours away by time. I hope and plead with life that she’s awake. She picks up and I talk without waiting for her to answer. I talk until morning when I see the nurse coming in with a pessary.

“Eh ono yasuze kusimu?” she says sarcastically. The she speaks to me. “Don’t fear. This will not hurt a lot.”

I am briefly amused by the shallow magnitude of despair that she considers pain.

The doctor comes in a few hours later and observes me from the door way. In the dim light of the room from behind my mosquito net, I look back at him. “Oh! You’re awake? How are you feeling today?” he says. He has been briefed.

“Is the baby breastfeeding?,” he asks sharply. He walks straight towards me and twists my nipples matter of factly and then he is gone. There is no one else in the room. For a second I feel almost numb. I stare straight ahead. The first time a stranger walked towards me and grabbed my breasts, I was 14, in S.2 walking with a friend at prep time, from the girls’ toilets. It was an A level boy, a prefect and just like that day and twice afterwards, I had frozen. I felt empty inside.

My body reminds me, even if my mind says it is time to let go. The baby who was crying that day is up with cough. I’m awake under the covers of a warm douvet looking straight into the darkness. This time I’m not alone.

“It was a morning like this,” I say, but only in my mind. The shade of the night and the breeze passing by whispers a memory of another day when I could not sleep.

Category: LIFE

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