Zimpapers Logo

Isdore Guvamombe Reflections
Whether a melon falls on the knife or the knife falls on the melon, the truth is the melon still suffers the same fate. Back in the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, 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.

Totororo tried to cook, but did not have anything to cook. His mother, once a bouncy woman, lay in a sorry state, 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.
An old, bachelor, Totororo was a huge man, dressed in oversized jeans and black T-shirt. Rolls of fat rolled on over his belt and trembled 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!

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.
In the first days he walked her to the toilet door on her spindly feet. As the illness got 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 the soothsayer, the ageless autochthon of wisdom and knowledge not say whether the knife falls on the melon or the melon on the knife, the melon suffers? Call it God’s case, no appeal! Before his mother’s relatives arrived, Totororo’s mother died. On death, 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? 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. His mother’s relatives refused to budge and walked away, without buying 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 any one 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.