Scribbles

  Waiting (Pt. 1) For a long time, we only had the veranda. When the sun rose, we would polish it, and when we were younger, my mother would polish it. She always woke up earlier than my sister and me, and by the time the sun was high in the sky, the veranda would gleam. Dazzling with a silvery glare. We would sit on the edge, drinking tea, having lunch, or watch the neighbours go by. Sometimes we would watch the peddlers sell their wares, " Bhodhoro zai! Bhodhoro puti!" But we were not allowed to sit, but merely perch on the edge, for fear it would undo all of my mother's hard work. I perched on it when I waited for the boy from down the way. The boy with the broad shoulders, tapered waist, and white shining teeth. He lived five, six, seven houses down and made me wait. For a glimpse of him as he came back from school, as he came back home from boarding school, from the university. Made me wait to see him, but most of all to grow up from when I was seven to the day I t

  Auntie grew up in a far-off communal land, the youngest in her family. Her parents were past their fifties when she was born. Old and past the age of chasing after a newborn and changing napkins. The moment she arrived, her mother passed her on to her older sister, Chido, who was twenty at the time and ready to start her own family.  Save for the occasional drop-ins to breastfeed her child, her mother remained a distant stranger whose sustenance flowed full and rich into Auntie’s eagerly suckling mouth. Auntie was a pitiful looking child always hungry. Hungry for her mother’s milk, for her visits were few and far in between, hungry for a mother she never truly knew. A mother who until the day she died remained a stranger a mother she never knew. At the time of her death, she had been dead to Auntie for a while. She had been dead for twenty-two years exactly.   To Mai Chido, the day Auntie was born was as far as she was concerned, an unburdening. It was not that she did not care for h