Chanda's Secrets (2 page)

I swallow hard. “Mama would like to hold off until the weekend. Our relatives need time to come in from the country.”

“I'm afraid there's no discount on weekends,” Mr. Bateman says, lighting a cigarette.

“Then maybe next Monday, a week today?”

“Not possible. I'll be up to my ears in new customers. I'm sorry. There're so many deaths these days. It's not me. It's the market.”

I
SIGN THE CONTRACT AND RUN OUTSIDE.
Biking into the morning rush hour, I recite the alphabet over and over to make my mind go blank. It doesn't. I keep seeing that coffin with its pink pressboards, staples, and plastic sheet.

“Esther!” I think. “I have to see Esther!” Esther's my best friend. She'll give me a hug and tell me everything will be all right.

I veer left on the off chance she's at the nearby Liberty Hotel and Convention Center. Since her parents died, Esther's hardly ever in school. When she's not working for her auntie and uncle, which is mostly, she's posing for tourists in front of the hotel's Statue of Liberty fountain.

By the time I pull up, the circular drive is already plugged with buses, limos, and taxis. Bellhops are hauling the luggage of tour groups en route to safari. Chauffeurs are opening doors for foreign businessmen here to see the diamond mines. UN aid workers are catching rides for government buildings. But there's no Esther.

“Maybe they shooed her away,” I think. When Esther gets the boot, she goes down the road to the Red Fishtail Mall. Usually she hangs around Mr. Mpho's Electronics, watching the wall of TVs in the window or listening to the music pumped over the outdoor
speakers. After about twenty minutes, the Liberty's security guards are off doing something else and she drifts back.

I zip past a row of new offices and casinos, and into the mall parking lot, dodging cars and shopping carts as I ride by fancy stores selling kitchen and bathroom appliances. It must be nice to have electricity, not to mention running water.

Today there's no one in front of Mr. Mpho's except Simon, the beggar man with no legs; he has a bowl in front of him, a battered skateboard at his side. His eyes are half closed. He taps the back of his head against the cement window ledge in time to the music.

I peek inside the Internet cafe next door. Last week I saw Esther at a keyboard. I thought I was hallucinating. There she was in her bright orange flip-flops and her secondhand sequined halter top, popping gum and clicking the mouse.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Getting my e-mails,” she replied smugly.

I laughed in her face. There's a computer in the main office at school, and we've all been taken down to see how it works, but the idea of using one in real life seemed as bizarre as flying to Mars.

Esther patted my hand like I was a baby and told me her e-mail address: [email protected]. She whispered that the cafe manager lets her use leftover time on his Internet coupons because he likes her. She winked and showed me her collection of business cards. “They're from the tourists who take my picture,” she bragged. “When I'm bored, I send them e-mails. Sometimes they write back. If their friends are coming to town, for instance.”

“‘If their
friends
are coming to town'?”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Guess.”

“It's not like I go to their rooms, or anything. I just stand in front of that fountain and let them take my photo.”

“Make sure you keep it that way.”

“Meaning?”

“Don't play dumb. I've seen them get down on one knee to look up your skirt.”

Esther rolled her eyes. “They go on one knee so the top of the statue will fit in the picture. You and your dirty mind. You're worse than my auntie.”

“It's not just me,” I pleaded. “Kids at school are talking.”

“Let them.”

“Look, Esther—”

“No,
you
look, Chanda!” she snapped. “Maybe you want to be stuck in Bonang having babies, but not me. I'm getting out. I'm going to America or Australia or Europe.”

“How? You think some tourist is going to put you in his suitcase?”

“No.”

“What then? Marry you?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or hire me as a nanny.”

I snorted.

“Why not?”

“Because. That's why not.”

Esther shot me a look. She got up from the computer, stormed out, and marched across the parking lot.

I ran after her. “Esther!” I shouted. “Stop. I didn't mean it. I'm sorry.” I wasn't sorry, but I hate it when we fight. I caught up to her at an abandoned shopping cart. She gripped the bar and stared at an advertising flyer in the basket.

“I know I talk crazy,” she said. “It's just... sometimes I like to dream, okay?”

Esther's not in the Internet cafe today. She's not anywhere at the mall, for that matter. Maybe she's running an errand for her auntie. Maybe she's at school for once. Or maybe she's met a tourist and—

I hop on my bike and pedal as fast as I can: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP...

H
OME WASN'T ALWAYS A SHANTYTOWN IN
B
ONANG.

Our family started out on Papa's cattle post, a spread of grazing land near the village of Tiro, about two hundred miles north. I shared a one-room mud hut with Mama, Papa, an older sister and three older brothers. (There would have been two other sisters, but they died before I was born. One from bad water, one from gangrene.) My aunties, uncles, and cousins also had huts in the compound. My papa-granny used to live there too, but since my papa-grampa died she's stayed in the village with a couple of single aunties.

Life on the cattle post was slow. In winter, the riverbeds dried up and the sparrows' nests hung like straw apples from the acacia trees. All the plants shriveled to the bare ground, and only the mopane trees, and a few jackalberries kept us from being desert. Me and my cousins would spend the days helping our mamas collect well water, or herding the cattle with our papas.

But I also remember how the rains came in summer, the rivers ran, and overnight the reeds and grasses would spring up over
our heads, and the cattle would graze untended while we played hide-and-seek. The cattle always knew when it was time to return to the enclosure, and how to get there. Us kids weren't so lucky. Getting lost in the grass was easy, so we learned how to recognize the top of each tree for miles around; they were our street signs.

I was little, so I didn't understand why the fighting started. All I knew was that Papa was the youngest of his brothers and he and my uncles quarreled about our share of the harvest. As a result, when the diamond mine here in Bonang expanded, Papa signed up and we came south, except for my older sister Lily, who stayed behind to marry her boyfriend on the neighboring post.

At first I was homesick. I missed playing with my cousins. I also missed the country and the big sky: the way the sun grew fat when it went to bed, sinking below the horizon like a giant flaming orange; or the way the stars turned the night into a canopy of wonders. In the city, the sky closed in, and the magic of the night dwindled in the spill of the light from the mine and the downtown streets.

Still, Bonang had advantages. We had a new home made of cement blocks instead of mud, and there was a standpipe with fresh water on every street. There was also a hospital in case we got sick, and Papa said the company ration cards meant we never had to worry about going hungry. What mattered most to me, though, was that my aunties and uncles couldn't snoop on me. And while I missed my cousins, I made friends with the other miners' kids.

Like Esther. The first day I arrived, I was sitting in my yard feeling lonesome and thinking about running away back to Tiro. That's when Esther skipped up. She had the biggest combs in her hair I'd ever seen. “Hi,” she said. “I'm Esther. I'm six.”

“I'm Chanda. I'm six, too.”

“Hooray, that makes us twins. I've lived here since forever and ever. Watch me get dizzy.” She spun around in circles and fell down. “Guess what? My papa's a foreman. We have a flush toilet. Want to see it?” She grabbed me by the hand and yanked me down the road to her house. Her mama was shelling peas on the front stoop when we arrived.

“This is Chanda. I'm showing her our toilet,” Esther said, pulling me inside before I had a chance to say “hello.”

At first, I couldn't believe that I was looking at a toilet. I thought it was a fancy soup bowl. “Watch this!” Esther crowed. She yanked a chain. There was a roar like a giant waterfall. I screamed.

Esther giggled. “When boys give me a hard time, I tell them I'm going to stuff them in my toilet, and flush them into the river with the crocodiles.”

“Can I try it?”

Esther nodded. “But then we have to disappear fast, because Mama will be after us for wasting water.”

I yanked the chain, the waterfall roared, and we ran out the back door as Esther's mama came down the corridor yelling, “That's enough flushing, Esther. It's not a toy.”

A couple of houses away we collapsed in laughter. “I thought our outhouse was special, with the cement shelf to sit on,” I said. “But your toilet—it's like magic! You'll never guess where we had to pee at the cattle post.”

“Where?” Esther's eyes danced in anticipation.

I scrunched up my face to make it sound as awful as possible. “In a tiny reed hut. All the women had to squat over a hole in the ground.”

“Eaow!” Esther squealed in delight. “What about the men?”

“They peed on the walls!”

“Eaow! Eaow! Eaow!” she shrieked.

“They had to,” I roared. “Too much liquid in the hole made the sides collapse.”

“And you could fall in!”

“Maybe even drown!”

“EAOWOOOO!!!” We both howled with laughter and rolled around hysterically. I tried to explain that when the reeds got too stinky we threw them away and got new ones, but I couldn't get past the word “stinky” without setting off another explosion of giggles.

Esther and I went to the same school. It wasn't like the cattle post school where I sat under a tree and my aunties taught me how to sew. And it wasn't like my school in the village either—a school with only a blackboard, and a schoolmaster who used hard, white hyena droppings when the chalk ran out. No. This school came with a library, a science lab, geometry kits, a set of encyclopedias, and working pencil sharpeners.

Some of my teachers came from the local university; others, on two-year visas from North America. I “soaked up everything,” as Mr. Selalame would say. He's the English teacher I have now, not to mention my favorite teacher of all time. Esther teases me. She thinks I'm sweet on him. I tell her not to be stupid.

It's just, some teachers get mad when I ask them hard questions. Not Mr. Selalame. If he doesn't know the answer, he'll wink and say he'll get back to me. He does, too, not only with the answer but with a book he thinks I'd like. Something by Thomas Mofolo or Noni Jabavu, or Gaele Sobott-Mogwe. I read them as fast as I can so he'll lend me another. Mr. Selalame
says if I keep at my studies I could win an overseas scholarship and see the world. The way his eyes light up, I think he really believes it.

“Why wouldn't he believe it?” Mama says when I tell her. “There's nothing you can't do if you set your mind to it.”

Mama and Mr. Selalame believe in me so much I get goosebumps. I hope I don't let them down. What they say sounds impossible. But what if they're right? What if I could get a scholarship? See the world? Become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher? Dreams, dreams, dreams.

My brothers would laugh to hear me talk like that. “Don't get your hopes up,” they'd say. “Scholarships and good jobs only go to the rich.” They dropped out of school as soon as they could to join Papa underground. Every day a bus would drive them to the mine before dawn and bring them back after dark, or vice versa. They had one day off a week.

Pit-mining can give you lung diseases, but Papa and my brothers didn't live long enough to get sick. Just before I turned ten, a blast misfired and their tunnel caved in. They were among thirty miners who died. There were rumors they suffocated slowly because the company's rescue equipment didn't work. I had nightmares of them gasping to death, until Papa came to me in a dream to say that they died in the explosion—“It was so quick we didn't feel a thing.” I tried to talk to him some more, but I woke up. He's never come back.

A week after the funerals, a man from the mine drove by. Mama was hanging laundry. She always used to wipe off a plastic chair for visitors to sit on. But not for him. She just stood there with her hands on her hips.

The man hemmed and hawed: “The company's very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Kabelo.”

Mama kept staring.

“Nothing can replace your husband or sons,” the man went on, “but the company wants to offer you a little money to get you on your feet again.” He gave her an envelope.

Mama threw it at his head. “Blood money!” she said. “You killed my man! You killed my babies! Get out of my yard, you sonofabitch!”

The man scrambled to his car. He yelled that our yard was company land. It was only for miners. Since Papa and my brothers were dead, we'd have to leave or pay rent. Mama threw stones at him as he sped away.

Next day, our ration cards were cut off, and we got an order to pay rent or have our belongings seized. Neither Papa nor my brothers had saved a penny. They hadn't made a will or taken out insurance, either. They thought those things were bad luck. So we had to use the blood money, even though it wasn't much. I thought for sure we'd be heading back to Tiro.

“No,” Mama said. “Not even if it's the last place on earth.”

“Why not?”