Searching In The Water

We arrived in Zimbabwe on 27th September 1994, with our hearts still searching in the water. Father had found a five-bedroom house in Harare, too big for a family that had arrived with heavy hearts and something missing. The walls were freshly painted, the floors clean, the windows wide enough to let light in, but none of it felt like home. Not with the silence that followed us from the ship. For the first time, as the oldest, I would have my own room and not share with my 2 little sisters. Having my own room would give me the freedom and privacy not to hide my cotton pads whenever my flower was in bleeding season. It felt like a victory, a first step to womanhood. Uchizi, being the only male child, would have given him the license to not share a room, but Fumanikile and Nyembezi would. Mother stood in the doorway the first day we arrived, holding his folded clothes to her chest. “When he comes back,” the mother said, her voice trembling but determined, “he must find his place untouched.” Mother ordered that Uchizi’s belongings should be placed in his room because he would be found, and when he did, he needed to come home to an already-made bed and room. Father did not argue. He simply nodded, then handed me Uchizi’s bedsheets as he stood on the other side of the bed. Deep down, my father knew, we all knew, and with a deep belief, my mother too knew that Uchizi was never coming back. Still, father helped me smooth and cover the mattress corners, tuck the sheets, arrange his small clothes as if he had only stepped outside and would return at any moment as if nothing happened. Deep down, we all wanted him to walk in as nothing had happened. Father left for the post office that same afternoon after he helped me make Uchizi’s bed. He said he needed to write to both his and mother’s families in Khwawa Village to explain what had happened to Uchizi. I sat down and deciphered how he would explain something like that. Father barely said anything after it happened. What words could hold a loss that large? Mother stayed behind, seated on the floor of the living room, her body folded into itself. She could not stop crying, and Fumanikile’s voice never brought solace when she cried. Mother cried quietly at first, then louder, until her sobs filled the house. “Mama, don’t cry,” Fumanikile whispered. Fumanikile climbed onto her lap and wiped her tears with her tiny hands. Fuma’s tiny fingers swiped mother’s wet cheeks as if they were trying to absorb the sorrow themselves. Mother’s tears only seemed to fall harder, dripping into Fuma’s hands rendering all her efforts futile. That first year in Zimbabwe was a year of waiting. Waiting for a miracle that did not happen. Waiting for a mistake to be corrected. Waiting for a child who had already been claimed by the water. Mother commanded that we speak of Uchizi as though he still existed somewhere out of sight and just beyond our reach. Mother insisted that he was alive, that perhaps someone had found him, that perhaps he would grow up somewhere else and one day find his way back home to us. So every evening, mother lit up a candle and prayed. Every night, she cried herself to sleep, and father held her and soothed her till her sobbing vanished in the thick walls of the house. However, father stopped talking about it after a while. He buried himself in work, leaving early in the morning and returning during the night just on time for bed. I think he did that to keep the tradition of being besides mother as she sobbed. When he was home, he sat in silence, staring at nothing, with his heart still searching in the water. Grief had carved a space between them that no one could cross. Grief knew us, and it knew us well. For me, there was no waiting, only remembering. Every dream I had reminded me of the day Uchizi disappeared. I remembered the cabin door being slightly open. making it evident that Uchizi had sneaked out like he always did. I remembered the big clock that clung to the wall for dear life pointing at 04:13 a.m. I remembered the silence that hugged my ears The cabin door was slightly open. I turned to look at the clock that clung to the wall for dear life, and 04:13am was not an hour I wanted to be outside searching for a two-year-old toddler who was not even mine to begin with. Since I turned sixteen, taking care of my siblings had become a full-time, unpaid job. One I had grown used to. Every morning was a struggle of getting Fumanikile and Nyembezi out of bed, helping them bathe, and dressing them for school, while Mother handled Uchizi, her precious boy. I stood by the cabin door, my head turning left and right in the hope of spotting Uchizi in the corridor. When I saw no sign of him, I called out his name, but there was no reply. I was tempted to scream louder, but my voice seemed to trap itself within the echoes it created. The Ilala ship remained silent, a sign that the hundreds of people on board were still resting peacefully with their silent dreams. Not wanting to wake them with my panic, I slipped into the pink flip-flops Mother had bought before we left the village and quietly stepped out of the cabin to search for Uchizi on the deck. The air whispered cold in my ear that September morning, filling my heart with regret of not putting on something warm before stepping out. I screamed on top of my lungs till I could feel the tingly thing inside the top of my neck shake with stress and anxiety. The darkness felt unfamiliar, even though I had grown up chasing shadows back in the village. The moon hung above, watching me as it shone brighter aiding my attempts to find Uchizi. I shivered in despair. The silence was a sign; Uchizi was gone. Fear begun to erode my heart. My heart beat to the rhythm to the tune of the sound that every wave I heard but did not have the courage to search in the water. I panicked, I thought of Mother. of everything she had endured to have her precious son after enduring 2 miscarriages only for her womb to award her with fruits of female children. I thought of Grandmother’s voice “These girls will marry and carry other family names. Your husband’s name will die with your womb.” Grandmother blamed mother just like everybody else from the village. Mother had never responded. She simply pounded cassava harder, as though she could grind the words into silence. “That is why women need to give their husbands a son. To shelter his ego from other men thinking he is weak. You know, to give his family name a reign. “You know how our culture is, I don’t need to teach you these things” Grand mother always had an emphasis point for her argument, one which mother would not argue because she was born and raised in the same culture as father was. When Uchizi was finally born, the village celebrated. He was more than a child he was proof, pride, and redemption of the family name. In fact, Mother’s late father, Chisalanda, was a man who owned more cattle than the combined number of heads in Khwawa Village. His wealth was spoken of across Karonga and the surrounding districts, stretching as far as the borders of Tanzania. He sold milk, meat and cow skin in Karonga town, his name was carried by trade and distance. Though he could not read or write, he worked closely with Father’s late father, Kabunduli, a primary school teacher at Khwawa Primary School. The two men built a quiet empire together, their lives so intertwined that even their families learned to share their absence. They spent more time with each other than with their wives and children, yet they ensured their households never went hungry. Still, much of what they earned dissolved into African wine and the women of local bars. And so, their wealth did not survive them. It ended the moment both men died from alcohol poisoning. That was when poverty arrived, not as a visitor, but as something familiar something that entered both families as easily as air fills a balloon. For the first time, two widows and the children left behind learned what it meant to chase food for survival. The same hands their husbands had once helped now pointed at them in ridicule. Father was nineteen when he let go of his hopes and dreams of pursuing higher education of becoming a teacher like his father and chose instead to marry Mother, who was sixteen and already surrounded by peers who had become mothers too early, laughing at her delay, questioning her worth through the language of fertility. What made it heavier was the years she spent trying to conceive me. She was twenty-two when I was finally born. I was told only Father truly celebrated my arrival, while the rest had waited for a boy. He carried me everywhere except to the lake when he went fishing. At two years old, he even let me drink from his beer bottle, until Mother, furiously pulled me away from him. “It’s okay, you will try again,” Granny said when Mother later gave birth to my sister Nyembezi, her words carrying disappointment rather than comfort. I was five then, and I remember how Father’s family stopped speaking to Mother until he warned them into silence. They tried again. Fumanikile was born soft-faced and quiet, a child who mirrored Granny’s childhood in ways no one could ignore. This time, no one complained. Granny loved Fuma the moment she saw her, and love, in that house, often decided who was allowed to matter. Bottom of Form When Uchizi was finally born, he was the entire village’s pride and joy. Everyone in the village came to see and hold him. Everyone held him except father, who had left for Zimbabwe with a white man he had made acquaintance with. He left when the seed mother was carrying was only thirty days old. The white man he left with had visited Malawi touring all the districts it owned, till he found himself in Karonga. Since father was a man who attained a good level of education, he was capable of having a conversation in English, which impressed that he offered father to be his estate manager in Harare which was a decent, well-paying, and fulfilling job.