We Kiss Them With Rain Read online

  Copyright © Futhi Ntshingila, 2018. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews.

  For further information,

  write Catalyst Press, 2941 Kelly Street, Livermore CA 94551

  or email [email protected].

  Originally published as

  Do Not Go Gentle

  by Modjadji Books (South Africa)

  FIRST EDITION

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947778

  ISBN: 978-1-9463-9506-1

  Cover design by Karen Vermeulen, Cape Town, South Africa

  To children living

  on the fringes of society

  whose dilemmas are colossal.

  Your voices matter.

  We Kiss Them With Rain

  BY FUTHI NTSHINGILA

  We walk amongst the living

  We, the departed

  We left before our time

  We left our young—the children

  We died heartbroken

  We succumbed to AIDS

  We died fighting and angry

  We left with many unsaid “I love you’s”

  We don’t rest in Peace

  We wander the earth

  Wondering about the orphans we left behind

  We kiss them with rain

  We caress them with gentle wind

  We warn them with thunder

  We warm them with sunshine

  We chase their nightmares with moonlight

  We love them with the stars

  We, the departed

  We walk amongst the living

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Afterword: by Futhi Ntshingila

  Q&A

  Discussion Questions

  CHAPTER ONE

  After Sipho’s funeral, things became progressively worse for Mvelo and her mother Zola. Mvelo was young, but she felt like an old, worn-out shoe of a girl. She was fourteen with the mind of a forty-year-old. She stopped singing. For her mother’s sake, she tried very hard to remain optimistic, but hope felt like a slippery fish in her hands.

  They had been in this position before, where someone in the pension payout office had decided to discontinue their social grants. One grant was for her being underage, reared by a 31-year-old single mother; the other was for Zola because of her status.

  The thought of having no money for food, to live, drove Mvelo mad. “Why are the grants discontinued? My mother is still not well enough to work,” she demanded from the official with the bloodshot eyes, who was popping pills like peanuts into her mouth. Her bad weave and make-up made her look like a man playing dress-up. It was obvious to everyone in the queue that the official was hung-over.

  “Hhabe, hhayi bo ngane ndini, ask someone who cares. You’ll see what it says here: DISCONTINUED. You will have to go to Pretoria where all your documents are processed. Now shoo.” She waved them away. “It is my lunchtime.” The official’s mind was on a cold beer to deal with her hangover.

  Zola stopped her daughter from engaging the woman any further. “It won’t help, Mvelo, let’s go back home. We will make a plan.”

  They were a sad sight. Zola was a shadow of her former athletic self. Her tall frame made her look even worse than she was. People in the queue gossiped behind their hands as usual.

  The sight of someone obviously sick seemed to excite them to talk about what was no doubt true for many people waiting there, even if you couldn’t see it.

  Mvelo and Zola had borrowed money for taxi fare to come to the pension payout hall. Now they would have to walk, and the Durban heat was suffocating. Hot tears stung Mvelo’s eyes; the lump in her throat burned. She drank water and began to navigate through the crowd towards the road, heading back with her fragile mother. And just then an unlikely angel in the form of maDlamini materialized from the queue.

  “Mvelo,” she called out to them.

  For once Mvelo was happy to answer maDlamini’s call. She nearly fainted from a combination of relief, hunger, and heat. “They said our grants have been discontinued, and now we have no money to get home.” Tears of anger and hopelessness about their situation kept coming.

  Cooing, maDlamini comforted them and offered to give them the taxi fare they needed. Her act of kindness was fueled by the attention she was getting from the onlookers in the queue.

  It was that day, when her mother’s disability grant was discontinued, that Mvelo stopped thinking any further than a day ahead. At fourteen, the girl who loved singing and laughing stopped seeing color in the world. It became dull and grey to her. She had to think like an adult to keep her mother alive. She was in a very dark place. One day she woke up and decided that school was not for her. What was the point? Once they discovered that her mother couldn’t pay, they would have to chuck her out anyway.

  Zola insisted on them going to church even at her weakest. Physically she was weak, but her will to live had not left her. When things got too much, she would say: “Well, what can I say, Mother of God. We, the forgotten ones, we scrounge the dumps for morsels to sustain us through the day to silence the grumbles in our stomachs. We are armed with the ARVs to face the unending duel with that tireless, faceless enemy who has left many of us motherless. We, the forgotten ones, know that rubbish day is on Mondays.”

  She was not strictly conventional in the ways of the church, though. She prayed differently from other people.

  “We come out in our numbers on Monday mornings to scrounge in the black bags that hold a weedy line between life and death for us. We search for scraps to line our intestines, shielding them from the corrosive medicines we have to take, lest we die and leave orphans behind. We dive in with our hands and have no concerns for smells of decay. Maggots explore our warm flesh as we dig into the rubbish to save ourselves, to buy time for our children. We live off the bins of the wealthy. Some of them come to the gate, offering us clean leftovers, while others come out to shoo us away. We are the forgotten ones, shack dwellers at the hem of society, the bane of the suburbs. We move from bin to bin, hopeful for anything to buy us time.”

  This was Zola’s talk with Jesus’ Mother at the end of a long hot day, while standing in the middle of the shack that she shared with Mvelo, and washing dishes in a bright blue plastic basin.

  “Tomorrow is another day for us,” she would say, switching from Mary to Mvelo.

  Sometimes Mvelo craved that her mother would just be normal, and wished that she would say “Dear God” at the beginning and “Amen” at the end like other people do. But Mvelo and her mother were not normal, she had come to that realization soon enough.

  Mvelo felt sorry for Mary when her mother prayed. Zola didn’t believe in the frilly language that most religious people use. She went straight to the matter that was on her mind. She was like Jacob, that ancient man in the Bible, who wrestled with God through the night.

  By this time she was not physically strong any more. Even the wi
nd blowing could have pushed her over. But her inner resolve was made of steel. Her inner strength could turn a lion into a gentle purring cat.

  After taking her ARVs that she had picked up from the clinic, every evening at eight o’clock on the dot, she would lie down on their single sponge mattress supported by bricks. Mvelo would listen to her mother dream out loud about how she wished that her daughter would one day be a singer. She would get a faraway look about her. In the candlelight, Mvelo would see her eyes shine with the dream of reaching for the stars through her daughter. They would drift off to sleep, lulled by the voices of drunken neighbors, singing, laughing, swearing or fighting, depending on where the mood took them.

  Zola’s despair was particularly potent on the days when she came back from piece jobs without any food for supper. Even when Mvelo tried to comfort her, by telling her that she wasn’t hungry, Zola wouldn’t stop blaming herself for their situation. Zola was very sad on those days, and the heaviness that she felt was passed on to Mvelo, who found herself pulled into the darkness of her mother’s mood.

  But the next day they would start again, with the signs of life pulsating around them once more.

  One day the two woke to the buzz of a new church revival tent that was pitched near their shacks. Loudspeakers and microphones were being tested and prepared for a week of revival. Zola was excited because she thought maybe one of the church leaders would discover her daughter’s voice and try to promote her talent. “Start the choruses and give it all you have. Don’t hold back, belt it out like your life depends on it,” she coached Mvelo before the services. She would only join them after eight because she had to take her ARVs first. Mvelo did as she was told, and each time she sang, she could feel an electric excitement in the tent.

  Leaders started asking questions about the young girl with the gift. The replies were always in whispers. “She is the child of Zola. Yes, the one who is sick with the three letters,” the fast-talking maDlamini would go on to whoever wanted to listen to the miseries of their lives in the shacks.

  Besides insisting that Mvelo attend church every Sunday, Zola also urged her back into joining the girls who went for virginity testing. “Mvelo, I know that you are not doing anything bad with boys, but I want you to go, for my peace of mind,” she pleaded with her when she refused. Many mothers encouraged their daughters in this way to ensure that they had not been sexually abused and were keeping quiet about it.

  Mvelo relented and went on the testing trips, but it was for survival reasons. She was able to return with a lot of food, hidden in plastic bags, which she collected and saved for Zola. Despite not having enough to eat herself, she was growing and beginning to look like a woman. She had curves in the right places and was tall, but not quite as tall as her mother. A wild flower, growing without proper nurturing, watered by rains and warmed by the rays of the sun, she grew.

  Zola’s persistent cough grew worse, especially at night. Sometimes deep in the darkness, Mvelo would hear her crying quietly. Those times were accompanied by other heartbreaking sounds as well: a lonely, howling dog seeing restless spirits move about, or crickets calling out, and frogs responding with strange croaking from the swamps. The worst was the mosquitoes, whining for their blood and circling them like vultures. The only night sounds that gave Mvelo hope for the light were the roosters crowing, signaling the approach of morning. Then the wrestling with the night was over. They had lived to see a new day.

  They first discovered Mvelo’s singing gift when they joined a church after Zola’s results came back positive. They had slept very badly the night before because Zola was having trouble breathing, and they both drifted in and out of sleep. Mvelo had to feel out in the dark for her mother to give her water to drink. They did not have enough candles any more. Through the cracks of the shack walls, using moonlight, Mvelo found Zola’s bag of pills and got Panados to ease the pain for her.

  When the roosters crowed, announcing the dawn of the new day, Mvelo was grateful for the morning light. They got up and went to church where she sang as if the heavens were opening. When she sang, she felt no fear. She drifted into a world where there was no sickness. She sang to free herself from the dank shack they called home, from hunger, from disease and Zola’s pain.

  Her skin tingled, her eyes closed, and she sang God down into the church. By the time she came to, she was singing alone. The congregation were gazing at her and Zola’s face was shining.

  “You were no longer with us when you sang like that. I felt a cold shiver down my spine. I swear God was with us. How does it feel to sing like that?” Zola asked her daughter.

  The only way Mvelo could explain it was that it felt like she had gone into a trance. “I saw a rainbow of colorful lights flashing in front of my eyes, and when I came to, I felt free and happy.”

  On their way back home from church, Zola went into a spaza shop and used her last money to buy Oreos. They were her favorite biscuits. Sipho, the man who had been in her life for thirteen years, used to buy them often in their happy times. Zola and Mvelo continued on to their shack, where they sat outside and dunked the Oreos into their tea. In silence, they ate the brown mush with white cream inside, savoring the sweetness, and Mvelo could tell that her mother’s mind was far away, remembering the days of abundance at Sipho’s house.

  Zola chuckled softly as she recalled one of her funny stories. “Do you remember Khanyisile, my friend who worked at Skwiza’s shebeen? It was around the time when the former white schools started allowing black children to attend.” She pinched her nose to mock their Model C accents.

  “I think she was named Khanyisile because she was so light skinned. Anyway, she was asked to be a bridesmaid by Skwiza’s neighbor, Dudu—the one who married the policeman who ended up using her as a punching bag—and off we went to a salon to have her hair done, to straighten it out from the steel wool of kinky curls.

  “Khanyisile sat down on one of those black leather chairs on wheels, with her head tilted back into the basin to wash her hair before the long process to get the desired effect.

  “The woman on the chair next to her was having long braids woven into her own hair. She was dressed to the Ts in killer red boots, tight black pants, and an all-eyes-on-my-cleavage cream top. The woman working on her had short plain hair, and her skin was the dark shade that would call the attention of the police who would make her produce her identity document to prove she was not an illegal immigrant. She quietly worked that woman’s head like a true professional, separating the long silky pieces and bonding them to the woman’s hair with a weapon of a needle. One mistake could lead to permanent brain damage.

  “Khanyisile had Vaseline smeared around her forehead to protect it from the burning chemicals. The foul-smelling white stuff was applied to her hair in sections and then she waited for it to untangle her kinks. The indicator of the chemical working was a burning, itchy sensation. After some minutes she waved at her hairdresser to let her know that the burning had started.

  “Two teenagers walked into the salon, chatting loudly in their new accents. They said they were going to a classmate’s eighteenth birthday party and they wanted to look ‘fab’ and ‘fly’ for the occasion. They asked the hairdresser to please do some touch-ups to their peroxided yellowish mops that were meant to be blonde hair.”

  Zola’s attempt at the accent got Mvelo laughing as well. Her hot tea spilled onto her lap, she jumped up, and they roared with laughter some more.

  They both wiped away their tears from laughing so hard and Zola continued her story. “So they said their black roots were growing out and they would not like to look like raccoons at the party. The woman who was getting a weave next to Khanyisile could not contain her disgust for what she called the nose brigade. ‘These fake Oreos from Model C schools. They walk in here speaking through their noses.’ There was an awkward silence as we watched her vent in front of the teenagers. Meanwhile, half her head now had long silky hair, imported from Korea, and the other half was her own
short chemically-treated hair.

  “Tiny beads of sweat were forming on her face from her venting. As I looked closer, I saw that this more-African-than-thou woman had a face that was much lighter than her hands and ears. It was obvious she was using a skin lightener.

  “The Oreo girls couldn’t be bothered by the woman. They sassily chewed their gum and waited their turn.

  “By now sniggers were coming from all directions of the salon. As we left, we burst out laughing. I looked at the newly-made-over Khanyisile and said, ‘I need an Oreo.’”

  Mvelo loved seeing her mother laugh. She didn’t do it often any more because she was always thinking and worrying.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On the last day of the revival, Mvelo was asked to stay behind by Reverend Nhlengethwa. He said he needed to pray for her and to strengthen her with the Holy Spirit so that her gift would grow. In the privacy of his makeshift office, he read from the Bible and placed his hand on her head and prayed. Then he embraced her gently. His kind act reminded her of Sipho, the only father figure she had known. The act brought back all the pain she had had to endure during the past two years. It was a relief to be held. She let her head rest against his broad chest, a sign he took as consent.

  What came after was like a bad dream to her.

  His hands worked fast, finding what he wanted. He plunged hurriedly and brutally, tearing her world and her illusions to pieces. The eye, her innocence, was gone. Deflowered and destroyed. The thought of a virginity-checker looking at her with disgust distracted her from the burning pain coming from between her legs.

  She imagined a pained look of disappointment, shame, and helplessness from Zola, as Reverend Nhlengethwa towered over her with a look of satisfaction while he tidied himself up. He had the smirk of a man content with himself, and did not say a word. The color of life left Mvelo from between her thighs onto the floor. An iceberg of frozen water formed in her chest, freezing her tears and her heart.

  She had leaned her head to his chest, and so when he turned from protector to wolf, the shock paralyzed her. Her soul folded and nestled in a hard shell that formed in her breast. In her mind, she erased her predator from life, sending lightning to suck out all his life force, leaving him as a dried-up lifeless scarecrow in the fields.