The Story of My Childhood (2)

 14/2/23 

The Story of My Childhood 

Kim’s choice

Genre: Genre Switch

 The sun hung loose in the sky, it could have been midday or late afternoon. It was hard to tell when the sun never set. Instead, it dangled in the bright sky, so loose and flimsy that my mother worried it would fall to the earth all of a sudden, leaving us in total darkness. Not that that could ever happen. Not now anyway, Sekuru Jo had long ago secured the sun with, if you cared to listen to him, ‘nothing but his wits and good looks’ or if you listened to my father, tricks and lies, for he had bargained with the sun and won. For 600 days the sun would neither rise, nor set. Instead, it would hang midair, halfway between setting and rising.

Mother was one of those people that considered the worst thing and turned it to reality. Take the time she convinced us, Maidei and me. That I had a pair of horns growing out of my chest and proceeded to strap my chest down in layers of white linen. For days and nights she danced about me, chanting madly,

“ The Devil leave you! he shall not have you.”

“ The Devil leave you! he shall not have you.”

 she would punctuate each part with a hard blow to my chest. Using her cooking ladle made strong by a thousand dips into the cooking earth she cranked up each morning.  So powerful were her blows that air raced through my lungs and out through my nostril in rapid little whistles. I could not decide what was more painful, the blows or, the horns’ slow retreat back into my chest. 

The blows were delivered with such abandon they seemed to belie who we were. A mother and her child, the very child she had brought into this world of endless suns wailing and protesting against the injustice of birth. Torn out of the loving arms of The Creator. Into the dark clutching hands of her mother.

I thought about this and other things as blow after blow rained. Hope springing feebly in me each time she took a break to gather the momentum she needed to wind me. Each blow could have been the last. It felt like the first. I would surely die here.

It was my grandmother that rescued me. 

Putting an end to my mother’s nonsense as she put it. Wasn't it that even she had had the same horns growing out of her when she was 5000 days old? Crying when the other children made loud suckling noises when she crossed the yard to do the dishes? Hunching over if only to still time.Why then would she try to beat them back? Instead of gently coaxing them out with fingers covered first in olive oil to soothe the pain of pulling, then in soot to ensure no infection goes through the pores of my skin to my budding chest? For was that not the beginning of womanhood? The shedding of my ganda-diki made me a woman like her, to be treated as an equal by not only her but all the women on our plain. No longer would I be Mudiki a title reserved for those whose hips were still narrowed? Their buttocks unripened and flattened from passing through the birth canal. Features tight and pinched from having to wear the ganda-diki from childhood till now. I was 6551 days old, the last of my batch. Unfinished, stooped, and stretched. 

I looked over at mother, the ladel still in her hand, breathing hard and nostril flaring. She did not say anything. Instead, she fixed her gaze on my chest. Her eye was half closed, mind made up. I moved closer to grandma who pulled me into her side. Her earthy, sweat-tinted smell hitting my nostrils as I breathed in her safety. With her, I felt safe. Felt cherished and wanted. It would not last of course. I could see the promise of more radiating from my mother’s pupil. Was it me she saw or the very Devil? Could she through me, wrestle The Accuser? Beat him to submission? Was I him? I turned away from her then. 

She could never have me now. I could hear the silent tears of my ganda-diki as they gave way to the smooth ebony hue that lay beneath