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Isdore Guvamombe
Saturday Lounge Reflections
TOTORORO sat in the hut, on a stool polished shiny by years of use — staring blindly on the soil plastered wall. The hut was small and cluttered.
Tired, he stirred the fire with a stick and the resultant flames leapt upwards, showering sparks left and right. The embers glowed richly red, gold and bluish.
To beat the spewing smoke, Totororo squint one eye, wrinkled his face and subsequently, wriggled his nostrils to accustom the two breathers to the irritating smoke.
Back in the village, in the proverbial land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, do elders with cotton tuft hair not say, whether a melon falls on the knife or the knife falls on the melon, the truth is the melon still suffers the same fate?
Totororo tried to cook, but did not have anything to cook. His mother, once a bouncy woman, lay in a sorry state on the floor, illness having cruelly carved a skeletal figure out of her.
She lay heaped in a corner, breathing slowly and so quietly that, at times, Totororo, feared she was breathing the last. For the past three weeks he had not slept for more than five hours in a day, attending to his bed-ridden mother.
His two siblings had illegally crossed into South Africa, never to return.
A seasoned bachelor, Totororo, was a huge man, dressed in oversized jeans and black T-shirt. Rolls of tummy fat trundled from the pot-belly over his belt and juddered with every movement. He had thick black hair, heavy eyebrows, dark eyes, small angular nose, and a petulant, turned-down mouth. His outlook seemed to declare, nothing had worked for him his entire life. His home was on the outskirts of the village and his mother and himself had not been in good books with rest of the village, due to their political affiliation
No one really identified with them, or worse wanted to be seen associating with them and their political party.
That made things worse.
Totororo stared on the wall again, trying to blink away the weariness as he waited for his mother’s relatives to visit and deal with the situation. They never came. Day after day, he had kept his eye on three things: his mother, the wall and the road. Troubled, troubled, troubled!
It dawned on him, his mother had not bathed for days. Her bed smell was engulfing the hut. On several occasions he carried her to the pit toilet to relieve herself. This was a strange chore indeed.
In the first days he walked her to the toilet door on her spindly feet. As the illness grew worse and her feet became jelly, Totororo literary carried her on his back and oversaw her relieve herself. Strange but back in the village, does Karitundundu, the ageless autochthon of wisdom and knowledge not say the more a monkey climbs up a tree, the more it exposes its genitals? Call it God’s case, no appeal! Before his mother’s relatives arrived,
Totororo’s mother died.
When death visits, the village becomes united. People trickled to the homestead and the woman’s relatives came too. But in the village, no woman is buried without trouble. Totororo, found himself in big trouble with both the spirit mediums Karitundundu, Chidyamawuyu, Nyamapfeni, Gumboremvura, Dumburechuma, Mutota and Chingowo.
His crime was he saw his mother’s naked body. In the village it is taboo, bizarre and unthinkable for a man to see his mother’s naked body even in the worst of all scenarios.
There, the elders with cotton tuft hair say, it is an untold abomination that angers ancestors and invited calamity after calamity. They demanded that he paid a beast. A live one!
His mother’s relatives were much more incensed. How could he? How dare he? How did he bath his own mother? He should have waited, they argued.
They even refused to bury her for two days. No one sided with Totororo, except the young and educated. Grey-haired elders concluded the young were educated but not learned. His mother’s relatives refused to budge and walked away, without burying the dead. It took the whole village to convince them to come back and sit under the tree for further negotiations.
Totororo pleaded for mercy and clemency. They could not hear him. They wanted a beast from him. That was the minimum they could take, that four-legged animal, which he never had. He did not even have a chick. In the village, even if a man finds his mother committing adultery, it is him who should run away and not vise-versa, they argued.
The extenuating circumstances were not a factor, they declared!
Totororo, asked to be excused from the heated meeting for a few minutes to see if anyone of his fiends could assist, with at least a beast. Minutes passed into an hour and hours turned into nothing and he never came back. Later he was found hanging from a tree on the banks of Dande River. He left no note.
And so the village was faced with two funerals. It became complex. It became a burden. It was intractable.
Dande River flowed with a little muttering as water ran over stones, polished smooth by years of current, but watched defiantly as the villagers removed the hanging body from a tree on its bank. It never said a word. It had seen much more than this, since time immemorial.
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