Mind Plays

Everyone was laughing and crying. I think even the floor was slippery with my friends' tears. I was in pain, I was in shame. I am finished! I thought. I felt like a rotten potato at the KFC factory. Yet I was the righteous one,  the pious one among the pack. For the eighth time I asked myself why I hung out with him, with her, with them.They were savage, loose, savage! I ran out of words which was something rare for me. This world is so broken that even poets run out of diction and resort to fiction to try and mend it. Everywhere there are broken glasses, broken hearts, ugly faces, broken economies. Earth! Eliot must have been depressed after writing the Wasteland. But here I was, in the Wasteland, without hope. The laughing got louder. James coughed. I am sure he had coughed blood. I couldn't look up. A drop of water escaped from my eye. It was not a tear, I was a man and men don't cry. At last l shouted at the brutes who had invaded the room I was :You bunch of Mongrels!

I had always been a quiet, disciplined and ambitious young man. I wanted to be a lawyer and was sure I could perform the feat. Everyone thought I was either super smart or super crazy. It is only now that I realize that these words mean the same thing. As I said, I wanted to be a Lincoln, to stand for the forgotten, the down-trodden and the voiceless. The funny part is that I was also in that bracket of society. It was a bracket written on a dirty paper by a jugged dirty index finger. I was poor, my parents were poor and everyone I hada personally met was poor. It was a rotten dark circle of poverty filled with smaller green circles smelling like sewage. If I was asked to draw a perfect portrait of my life I would say, "I can't draw." But if I was a Michiengelo, I would draw a dark skinned, shirtless boy with a big head and a swollen, cagey stomach. Hopkins was wrong, It is a sin to be poor. All the girls from my ghetto are either harlots or married to tramps with a bunch of naked kids. The boys are no better, they are the husbands. It is only me and Ticha who are not married yet. The guys didn't know they were ways of preventing unwanted, unwarranted Kunta Kintes. Bataí is now a father of three yet he is only twenty one. He dumped his family at his father's five-roomed bangalow and went to work at a mine in Shamva. I am not sure if he found it,( jobs are scarce!) but he was suited for the task, grotesque, hairy, hard-handed, mindless man. He bullied me and my friends before I got my scholarship. Now life was bullying him. Simba drank until he messed his pants. Vengai had died of drug overdose.

Growing up was hard. I had two tattered shirts and a trousers which I had inherited from my brother. They had no colour. I think the once long sleeved one was sky blue and the other one was yellow. Now they had two buttons each and stains. Brown stains. This is before I went to school. I would play with anything we got from the dump pile. We would make cars from empty milk containers and drive them. We didn't care about the big green flies we called green bombers or the songs the sang. They sang mostly "Green like me garden" and some sungura melodies. Rangaí knew how to make cars from wires so we would trade food for cars. His family was as poor as the rats at our house. He ate in the evenings only. So we gave him sadza and salt, sweet potatoes and Maheu for the cars. We named the cars Datsuns. That was the only car in our street and it was owned by Mr Katsuro. He owned the local bottle store. He sold death. I had a friend who didn't the reception of the school (he never paid fees a single day) because his father drank beer all day. I hated him as soon as I understood poverty. Sometimes we played pada or nhodo or tsoro or soccer on the dusty road of my street.Still,childwood is my happiest time. My father got a job as a clerk at a government school just before I was due for education. What luck! Things at home got better : We ate bread twice a week, meat for the first ten days and better clothes. I had eaten sadza for breakfast, for lunch and supper. Sadza cubed. Now life was easier. If our house had not been destroyed because my father had been scammed by a house cooperative of a famous businessman, I would have a rural background yet living in Harare. I lived at Epton Park. I grew up seeing crops and cattle. I heard that our neighbour 's maize had been eaten by baboons.