The ritual cleansing after a loved one dies takes place some few weeks or months after their funeral. During that time, there are some few things you should not do, like drink alcohol, or you will not be able to stop doing that thing. Even if you don’t want to do that thing, you will just keep doing it. You have no reason left, you are just an animal, doing what you do. So the cleansing has bought me some time to shield myself from Little Man’s request.
“Anyway, that’s why I’m giving you this dog,” Little Man says. “You and Zi are too much alone. She will protect you. And did you know this dog chose us?”
“Eh? Is it?” I kneel down and call the puppy over with my tongue, tch tch tch tch. She joggles over and sits in front of me, tongue protruding, head tilted to examine us. She licks my hand as I look her over. She’s nondescript, clearly a mutt, brown hair with black markings around the paws. She looks like she will grow up to be fat, one of those dogs that lays in the sunshine and barks ferociously at whoever walks past but then, if someone actually comes in the door, she’ll waddle over to lick their hand. “Why do you say she chose us?”
“I was driving to Maqongqo to visit Baba yesterday,” he says. “I was sad, thinking about your grandmother’s death, and the funeral today. I didn’t have my mind on driving. You know that part in the road when there’s nothing but bush surrounding you as far as the eye can see? One of those bends in the road when you know you’re kilometers away from where anybody lives—and you think maybe just now a lion will jump out in front of the car?”
“Yebo,” I say. I love roads out in the middle of nowhere like that. It makes life seem wide-open with possibilities—not the closed-off feeling I sometimes get here in Imbali, with so many houses and people, you can’t even see past your neighbor’s house.
“Well, it was just then that I realized I had a flat.”
“Haibo! Did you have a spare?”
“That’s why I stopped. I got out to change my tire. And there she was, on the side of the road, poking her head out from the bush.”
“Shame! How did she get way out there?” I ask.
“Who knows? Maybe somebody abandoned her. Or she walked there, but it must have been 50 K to the nearest house. Let me ask you, why did my car stop just then? At that exact spot? I will tell you why. Because she was waiting for me. For us.”
We look at each other and then we look at the dog. And this is the thing: she looks guilty, like we’ve caught her out or something. Like she has chosen us, as Little Man says, but we weren’t supposed to figure that out.
Gogo, I know you didn’t like dogs. You said they were dirty creatures and belonged in the wild, on the savannas, not in our homes. Dogs and Zulus, you said, do not belong in the same hut. But I always felt vulnerable the way we lived, an elderly woman alone with two young girls. And now you’re gone. What am I supposed to do? I need protection.
I know that tsotsis could just shoot a dog and come inside two seconds later and we’d have to face them. But I hate most the idea that I will have no warning, that death will be a surprise. I’d rather know I’m in danger than never see it coming.
“Will you take her?” Little Man says. “And it will make me feel you are safer, until the day when you say yes, and I can live with you.”
Zi comes over and stands by the puppy. She tangles her fingers in the puppy’s fur, looks at me with dark pleading eyes. How can I say no?
“Her name is Nhlanhla,” I say. Lucky. She is lucky after all. Just because Little Man came along the road that day, she escaped certain death in the bush. She would have starved or been eaten by something bigger than her.
“Zi, don’t just stand there,” I say. “Go get her something to eat.”
So her first night with us, Nhlanhla feasts on funeral food. “Don’t get used to it,” I tell her. “This is not how we normally eat.”
She seems so smart, and her brown eyes—they look just like yours, Gogo.
“It’s time for soapies,” Zi says, hopeful.
So we turn the TV on. The three of us sit on the mattress, backs against the wall, the light flickering as we watch Generations, Isidingo, and The Bold and the Beautiful. Nhlanhla cavorts around the living room as Little Man reaches behind Zi’s back to hold my hand, and I sit there with his hand in mine, feeling not quite so alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CLEANSING
The empty house feels even more barren, stripped of most of the furniture and all the wall decorations and the crocheted lace that Gogo draped in various spots around the house. I hope Auntie is enjoying everything she took in her already over-decorated house.
When I think enough time has passed and I still haven’t heard from them—not about the cleansing, not about life, not about school fees or help with what what, nothing—I visit my teacher, Makhosi. We must talk about launching my healing practice, especially if I must begin to earn a living.
Outside of the hut, her granddaughter Thandi stands in front of the washtub, plunging her arms deep into the sudsy water, apparently washing a load of clothing. She drips water on my shirt as she gives me a quick hug.
Thandi’s little girl Hopeful is running in circles in the courtyard just inside their yard. Her mouth is sticky, stained red with some kind of candy.
“Are you coming to see me or is this a professional visit?”
“I’m sorry, I came to see your grandmother.” I smile ruefully at her.
Thandi used to be my best friend. She and I have known each other almost our entire lives. But then she fell in love with an older man, Honest, who was anything but honest.
In truth, I haven’t been the best friend to Thandi since Hopeful was born. First, I was training with her grandmother and going to school at the same time. Then Gogo got sick and died and now, it’s just me and Zi, so I don’t see how it’s going to be different—I’m going to be responsible for a whole lot more now that Gogo isn’t the adult. All this time, I’ve been trying hard just to manage everything. Besides, Thandi’s entire life is so different than mine now. She quit school long before I did to take care of her baby. She and Honest stayed together for a short while but then he returned to his wife so she came back home. And now she’s raising Hopeful alone, with her family’s help, of course. It sometimes feels like we’re both hiking a steep trail but the path is taking us up two completely different mountains.
“I’ll tell Gogo you’re here,” she says.
“Ngiyabonga.”
“Maybe after you can stay for a cup of tea and play with Hopeful?”
“Yebo.” I nod my agreement.
Makhosi taught me everything I know. She trained me to be a sangoma. When she gestures, I enter her hut and breathe in the rich scent of impepho.
“Makhosi.” I greet her with the honorific title.
“Makhosi.” Before I became a full sangoma, when I was her junior, her student, she called me thwasa. Now she greets me as makhosi, her equal. Sometimes, now that people greet me the way they greet all sangomas, with a strong “Makhosi!,” it feels as though my given name “Nomkhosi” with the nickname “Khosi” was nothing more than a prediction of my calling, of what I’d become someday.
I wait a few seconds in silence, out of respect. I expect her to ask me what I’ve come to ask her. But before I can talk to her about launching my practice, she reminds me that it’s time to do the cleansing for Gogo.
“It’s your duty,” she says. “You must perform