Random Drowning In A Cup Of Tea

“So, write it down”, a thought rang at the back of his skull.

“What is to be of my past?”

That, among a million questions he asked himself before, assailed him still.

Tired, the name of all his quarrels with life was himself.

“You one again make the mistake of blaming yourself.” Thought said.

“You best be sure, it is I”

Thato sat quietly behind his cluttered desk, more an antique table from his mother’s heydays of inherited kists and porcelain cups.

A Wooden chai that bit into his bony ass gave comfort only when a cushion was placed on its plywood seat.

Time was clearly not on his side, everything felt urgent, similar to that edgy nausea of wanting marriage without knowing why.

Could be facing an early death also, considering that hordes of his peers were being summoned to graves by exhausted ancestors and bad charms from illicit witchdoctors.

He was about to enter a day of reckoning with fate, and felt not ready, a leper at his own bed surrendering to the lie that each man can have a chance to begin again.

There are moments that resemble a first ride on a train, a world curtaining to the rear, a bird in flight and earth receding into an oblivion of sort.

And it meant forgetting and remembering what to recall; a time of reckoning with the best of life’s set of cards dealt at the eternal night of a fading manhood.

And as he sat down, filled with awe at his losses, Thato could only pick his story from where pain begins.

After a night of gentle sheets and broken heavenly trips, he was not satisfied with dreaming a better world.

He knew something was wrong in this world ruled by sycophants walking in harmony with owners of monasteries.

Wars raging everywhere, as though men were on a sorority mission to dislocate himself from his roots, decimate his mother, his wife and bargain his daughter to peddlers of favors gained through sperm and sweat.

Men, warring over last frontiers and reclaiming lands lost only to find them radio-active and sterile.

 Sons opting to drown in second slave trades, voyaging to depths and accruing illicit wealth for foreign lord.

Back home, death is here always knocking at the door by rancid fists of juveniles drunk from pain and hatred for their fathers who are incomplete.

Here, many are dying without refusing the writing in the death rider’s handbook. Television aims are killing flowers, wrecking homes and sobriety is a sin in a world tearing itself to shred under tables of the affluent.

He was among those hordes, a retarded prophet of an age where life expectancy was a fallacy and fog-clad illusion embraced by the learned.

Here, we die by hands of our exhausted mother we raped and stabbed for the last Rand on the welfare card.

Here we are all fifteen and prison is not for us yet, but we rehearsing orgies with meaty men in abandoned houses and shacks under candlelight, vaping to dampen the putrid air of piss brimming buckets and stale bones.

On this night, a darkly clime clung to dodgy clouds of a slow summer, he knew that these spates of electricity blackouts, was camouflage for rude urges for broke youths.

To put things mildly, these were time were new gangs were brewed in passageways of squatter camps, and knife crimes became a favorite rite of passage for uncircumcised boys lusting after their middle aged aunts.

Such a night was ripe with sex and forced recklessness, mid-month boredom, cravings and random fits of rage.

Thato knew many such snappy types who seem unaware of sincerity of manner, nor the common decorum of a humane interaction.

These boys were brutes, trousers cut high above ashen ankles, failing in life thus devising their own coded languages of a digital generation gone bizarre.

“Tonight would be a night to kill myself by another’s hand. Suicide by an urchin.”

That thought nagged his frowning face reflected on the screen on power-saving mode, his beard minding its blackness within the grey space of a rectangular plane.

Death by an urchin; well, at least that was the plan. As he contemplated his sordid plan, a dust-waxed picture of his daughter clung on the wall just above his pile of outdated books stacked on box of memorabilia and slips of after-thoughts and hopes.

***

Undoubtedly, what often triggers his bouts of self-loathing are those half-cooked indulgences in cheap wine, coupled with marijuana and thoughts of lost loves and other failings.

It is then that self-annihilation looks enticingly into his mirror-eyes and says: “To be, is but a burden.”

Tonight was on of those nights, slight hiss of static from appliances, sounds of children at play after a day spent learning to how loose this rigged rat race of replicant hopes and empathies.

“Is it our fault that the earth is pillaging our vanity with heat blizzards and storms?”

Earlier he saw a grandmother searching every yard for what eventually turned out to be her skirt.

Whirlwinds had snatched it from a drying wire, days of multiple strings rattling shack roofs and sending plumes of dust giving flight to the contagion of discarded plastic bags and cheap diapers.

Perhaps those events were an omen, a prelude to deranged form his day was to take, slithering into another loadshedded night of possible death, fake loves and dread.

Then he remembers; his neighbor Bongani had invited him to an ancestral ceremony, dedicated to cleansing his uncle who just returned from prison.

He saw the ex-bandit, clean-shaven, a glistening skull, leather clad in the height of a desert -noon.

Thato could tell that this brother must have been a man of his times, now broken and mind-boggled, celebrated by his nephews filthily grown among pangas and smashed bottles, whose firstborns died before their uncle could set eyes on freedom.

It was sounds of a wailing goat, voices of men binging on beer and blood as elderly ladies giggled to gossips of younger maids, unmarried and disdaining men nevertheless, that he came to recall the ritual taking place while he contemplated the impermanence of things, and being.

He could not stomach the echoes of a chant brewing among the excited hoard in the darkness lit by a bonfire.

“Abagulayo, bayeza kusasa, bayeza,” repeated as vocals merged from tones of people who are calling on spirits.

And yes, those spirits somehow called to him. His grandmother grave peered through his mind, mingled with his father’s scarred face crying after being abandoned by his fourth wife.

The night was too full of ghosts, and wine was paling from his veins.

He wanted out, yet remembering the goal of his fatalistic adventure planned from birth, perhaps.

Would his killers’ minds bear record of his mangled throat giving up breath?

Will some stranger stumble on that massacre and break his bones away from clutches of wild-dogs carrying spotlighting smartphones for capturing of moments of their grandeur?

Or will his body be found with slashed genitalia dangling, a nose-less face beneath a pile of stolen half-bricks looted from abandoned government building?

As fate would have it organized, his morbid musings were serenaded by chanting outside his window: “Abagulayo bayeza kusasa, bayeza.”

Soon he could make out a voice loudly speaking, summoning and supplicating with the departed to visit their homestead of rusty shacks patched against a dilapidated government rationed house.

She called for blessed paths and prayed as others mumbled their acquiescence, and strange how even praying to the gods for work and promotions was part of the mix.

In no time, prayers switched their destination heavenward, towards a bearded god, with an incurable disdain for tradition of the black folk. And Thato wondered if he even gave a damn.

At least he knew that even god never shows up for jumpers who regret their actions midway from smashing on tarmac, no wind sweeping them up to prove the existence of life’s love for life.

“These are truly the lost days, when ends and beginnings explode in rooms of governance, a people led towards torpor by fiery minds sold to profit and oil.”

Smelling the burning wood and fur drew his sacred thought to the charmless monotony of sterile morality of those who beg for life when plundering it with unwarranted brutality; religious psychopaths maiming children and artifacts to un-build the past.

***

“Plus ke funeral ya daai autie man, Mkrenko.”

“Say what? Mokrenko otakile?”

“Two weeks ko hosie after he went to danyane for 6 months my boet.”

“Then dood? Moer dis gif hierso mokasie.”

Thus continued Msheke’s ramblings in a medley of generator roars power the single spotlight in the tavern and overlapping chatter of bored revelers crowded about the one car playing a one-time-hit on repeat.

Thato could see that it was the last beer the click was hogging, a couple of sips to seal the night for some.

But he was intent on three afforded by his pocket, and that was when Msheke continued in nostalgia: “Kana  nna and Mkrenko used to make this kasie small.” “Especially ngamaWeekend. We knew our phofu from a distance.”

Guffaws creep through the inebriated crowd listening to reminiscent anecdotes from a drunken loan-shack muscle turnedm’Rapper, but Thato could not get the gist of the story.

Well, as is, no story ever waits for its listener; like a dream, you stumble into it and leave without knowing the end.

And so Thato went to queue at the window on the metal grid among lotion odors and raised arms for his ration of Zamalek to ponder the day and his mission more intently.

“We used to target amaChangaan mfethu. Plus, they were the ones who worked. Bevuka early in the wee hours of the morning beyothesha.”

“Besibabobela daai tyt, and just pounce. It was me,Mkrenko and Bullet.”

“Bullet was the muscle, Bullet was the knivesman and I did the ransacking, from pockets to shoes, my bra. Leaving your socks inside out on the dust with your bloody nose sniffing sewage, broer.”

“But I remember one morning. Fok! After binging hardcore kwaNkana, and we were walking back suckling on our last quart and there pops out another phofu.”

“We were like DAMN! Wena uthunyelwe zizinyanya.”

“Plus when we caughtumChangane, we used to strip them naked and sibashaye i45 ezigroot zabo. Sivithiza daai ding.”

“That was iPlane whe we saw this idoot walking to baas’ plantation.”

Msheke’s story draws gulps from Thato’s open beer and as soon as it hit the floor, another hand has grabbed a turn.

He was beginning to get annoyed, but inquisitive to the gist of the story being brandished like a badge of honor for the deceased.

“Kanti lom’Changani ngamasimba nje! Mfethu, he said to us: Nami kudala nginifuna.”

“Usho so, his backpack slide to the ground and falls beside his work boots.”

“So, our trick was Mkrenko goes in full force and throw three two punches while Bullet pokes a knife anywhere and I do the searching, right”

“Not on that ffucked up morning after we waked our selves sober from ouKasie.”

“Mkrenko didn’t even have a chance to throw a punch, because he took three fast moers to the gut and chest, he coughed stumbling and grabbing Bullet by the pants.”

“Next thing I know, Bullet is naked and Mkrenko bleeding, then I was like fuck it and ran mfethu.”

We snap to a slamming boot, and a rackety car shoves its rear through the gates and silence is once again fills the remaining space with residues of murmurs.

Without recalling his first moment of inexhaustible laughter, Thato had inadvertently joined a chorus of happy boys in a tavern after dark, slowly forgetting that he wished to be caught in the crossfire between beer bottles, crates and pangas.

He glanced at the sky ever more soften, watching the moon glow yet not outshining the stars.

And Thato wondered of future times when the moon would have departed from the earth’s grip, another dot in an ever-expanding expanse.

He recalled hearing speculations by men of science that the earth would then experience day lasting half-a-month, as well as night, if the lunar cycle would still be used to measure time.

What would such a night be to a man-child such as he, who found even 8 hours beneath the suede of darkness a burden of near-death quality?
He was here among other fools, thinking of the fallacy of inter-planetary colonization and an unwavering instinct that everything was a ploy.

***

When electricity returns in the township, people welcome its creepy buzz with jubilant screeches and ululations.

And so it happened that others devotees of this hell-well tavern managed to send their staccato voices in screams as floodlights and florescent bulbs flicked to enliven the moods of worried night spenders.

Women dashed to the sales cage, poking their fingers through the mesh and namedropping, exposing their true natures devout to the detestable.

Beverages of colorful decorum were seized beneath armpits of slaves to the rhythm, bulky women with make-up which would otherwise have been a wasted on a black hour passed.

Everyone was raucous at that hour, even the chatter about muggings and fistfights were remixed and coins collected with excess bottles to hustle another round of booze for a bright night ahead.

Yet, Thato felt exposed in this harsh light, his head burning with froth of quick beer gulps coming up for air, and the loo became suddenly crowded, its stench bursting like invisible pollen in an air filled with stale smoke and renewed strength of night-crawlers.

‘Ndovana, ihlanya leKasie’ was already dancing half naked in an orange g-string, wagging his erect penis at women he labedled ‘boSlender-By-Night’.; an immaculate twerker, with beat and rhythm in his marrow.

Other cling-on seductresses were flocking through crowded red gates, their men frisked for weapons by bored security guard as the orgy of excess went brimming streetward.

Thato started to find the luckless situation morbid and disgusting, flaccid exhibitionism of mine-worker grandeur, of plundered ‘severance packages’.

And while more giddy girls scoured the dance floor flaunting promiscuity and broken bellies, ears and eyes on silver-tongued men, fingers scrolling infinitely on glowing screens; Thato snuck out, without telling anyone, a crowd drawn back to a chatter of more kasie misdemenours.

***

Dawn’s newsfeeds salivated with protests, streets of a crazed world gone ablaze with raging youths and blind cops, leaders in carpeted corridors puking promises of a better tomorrow.

And as Thato drowns in his second cup of tea, he recalls that in a world already on death’s wish-list, one best wait his turn for it truly approaches with tanks and ships loaded of radioactive foodstuff and rations for a scheduled apocalypse.

So why would he feel compelled to end his life when all life is already being decimated by humanity whose soul’s indulgences leave scars on clay?

He stares intently at the bulgy eyes of an infant sprayed with pesticide and other tools of biocide, households made rubble under boots of heavy laden men, bullets whizzing in their wake.

Oil wells dry up as younglings dream of fast cars and dying young, and oceans scatter garbage on cruise-ship docking ports while whales scream to Saturn’s moons to unknown gods and devils.

Another day, and its chance to make more grudges against life, he watched through yet another screen, a future dying, many on suicide’s list.