Good Morning London

He slams the door, to make sure it is closed, as Sheila instructed. The street is near empty and he feels exposed as he stands taller than all the picket fences and low brick walls. The street unusually quiet, given all the cars and lorries that charge round the bend all through the night. A young lady dressed for work saunters past the rickety wrought iron pedestrian gate, her waltz and urban dress an indication of another world, a world of the employed. The sonorous rhythm of her healed shoes cut the quiet crisp morning air, as they crash into the cracked concrete tiles of the pavement.

 

She is black. He is curious to know what kind of black. Is she a third generation from the Caribbean, a second generation West African or a fresh off the plane Southern African from
Zimbabwe. She could even be from Zambia. Perhaps he could rush up to her and say, in chinyanja, ‘Muli Bwanji’. He follows after her, quickening his pace to match hers. Would her eyes light up and embrace him or would she instead blast, in a London accent imbued with perpetual indignation, ‘en wot the fock is yoproblem?’. 

 

 

It is not an entirely ridiculous challenge, however. The previous evening, on a return train from the interior of the city, a lady spoke into her phone, for the duration of the ride, in fluent Bemba, another language of Zambia’s cities and slums. All the while he felt a warm sensation settle on him. A sensation of feeling close to home. He was not aware that he was homesick until he heard this dialogue, jibed endlessly into the mobile receiver. The conversation was complete with all the mannerisms and phrases of a ladies idle chat in Bemba. ‘Shuwa!’, ‘Nomba?’, and ‘Hmmm’. He did not follow all that she was saying. He never could speak Bemba himself. He could always pick up lots and understand a lot more than he could say, or so he thought. But now, it all seemed so familiar to him, the sound of home. After they alighted from the train, at the African immigrant nation of Thornton Heath, he was tempted to follow her home, all the way to her door step and them spring on her ‘Muli shani’, and be received with relief and a home cooked Zambian meal, complete with Nshima and relish. At least with her he was sure she would not retort ‘en wot the fock is yoproblem?’  But he let her go her own way home, though turning his head to keep track of her as if she might at last, before he disappeared down the dark street, realize that he is like her, from where she is from. She would not have defend against his presence with indifference, as all Londoners do.

 

He knows he will not say anything to the woman sauntering ahead of him, in her business siut. But he would just like to listen and watch. To concentrate on her long enough to somehow discern her origins. That is why he quickens his pace to keep up with her, as she makes the bend along the street, shouldered by a dark red brick rampart, insulating the street from the railway beyond. But then his mind races back, have I got everything for the interview? He asks himself. Passport, revision notes, wallet, cell phone, keys, London map, London street map – no! He has left behind the street map, without which he could never find the Deloitte London offices, three streets away from Oxford Street. Swearing and cursing himself, he turns back and storms back into the narrow semi-detached red brick house for the street map booklet. The house is empty and quiet, deserted in the name of school, income and bills. The booklet retrieved, found idly folded on the dinning room table, he slams the front door again. Now a car and a delivery van do motor past, their diesel engines fouling the air with noise and carbon gases. No nubile black lady saunters past this time. No one to dictate the walking pace necessary for the world of the employed. But he hurries down the street, nevertheless, with a new sense of panic, as he might be late, dictating his walking pace instead.

 

At London Victoria, sung like a TV advert by the ubiquitous train station information speakers, he emerges from the train, like a third world market, into the bustling busy rush of
London’s morning commuters. What a glorious rush! 20 trains pull up to 20 platforms with in 5 minutes of each other, under a massive iron and glass hanger. An army of thousands march at pace, armored with suits, brief cases, ipods and gelled hair, launched from the electric locomotives. A train to ground landing, Normandy 1944 played out every morning of the week, again and again. Soldiers of commerce marching on the inner city, sifted by automated electric ticket machines and monitored by sentries standing at attention in bright yellow polyester jackets, hat and visor over their forehead. The soldiers walk in columns, as if to the instruction of a drill sergeant, though really as a result of the row of ticket checking machines that sorted them into streams. The 20 columns of commercial infantry converge and conflate into a single tunnel, like ants returning to their mound. As the escalator regulated tunnel swallows this army, the pace slows down, shoulders smash and the frequency of pleasantries increases ‘excuse me’, ‘sorry’, ‘sorry’, ‘watch it’.

 

In the underground, columns of soldiers duck left and right, from one tunnel to the next, up steps and down steps. The sense of direction long lost, only the sign posts and navigation of routine directs them. People talk less in the tunnel. Their cell phones now out of signal, the only sounds now are that of thousands of footsteps, and business suits chaffing. The dreary march through the tunnels suddenly broken by the ring of a guitar. The sound carries well in the underground. The strum of the metal strings resounds strongly in his chest, like melody does when it relieves a month of grief. He is not sure if it is live music or tunes played through electric speakers. Above him he peers through the ventilation grids to look and listen for electric speakers. He cannot find the source of the melody, which is now accompanied by a mournful voice. Through the slits between the bodies of marching commuters he sees her, the musician. She is sat on the floor with her guitar with forlorn look on her face, looking into the distance as if she can see through the tunnels and into the future. Her sweet dirge wafts away behind him and is totally cut off when he makes the next turn into another tunnel, as instructed by the sign ‘Central Line’.

 

He flunked the interview with Deloitte. He did not know this immediately after the interview. He thought he did well. He spoke about himself confidently, which is something he was not raised to do. He cited examples from his life, as a mathematics tutor, a lecturer, as a mathematics researcher that conveyed team work, communication and determination. It was what he thought they wanted to hear. It was what the website asked him to say. Perhaps they did not like his £30 nylon suit. Or maybe they could tell that his uneven hair was a result of a self help barber effort. Or maybe they had noticed him accidentally walk into the ladies room before the interview. He can only guess, since feed back for unsuccessful candidates is not their prerogative. After the interview and before he knew of his most recent failure, he walked London along the Thames river and around St Pauls Cathedral, before disappearing back into the underground and back again to the black country of Thornton Heath.

The Lying Days, by Nadine Gordimer

This is only Gordimer’s second novel. Reading it is like a time travel to a South African from before most of the events that make up the contemporary memory of South Africa have taken place. Before democracy, before the 1976 uprising, before the Rivonia Trial and before Sharpville.

In the story, the central character Helen comes of age, and so does Apartheid South Africa. A girl grows up knowing nothing but the mine she lives on, in some sort of fantasy. She has then, the sense to realise, however, that the fairy tales in her English story books have no place in her mine town, and that there are other worlds beyond, where the ‘natives’ live and the businesses that serve them, instead of the white employees of the mine.

As South Africa goes to war, Helen goes to love on a Durban beach, and finds a world and a frame of reference with which to abhor the little world her parents are so careful to be part of. From there a rift between her and her parents only ever grows.

At University, she eventually cosies up to a coterie of people she thinks a liberal and suitable anecdote to the mine town she is happy to escape fro m every day of the week. Soon the disconnection with her parents and the mine is complete, however she soon finds herself trapped again.

The story is told with very nuanced strokes, and every little thought and impression is weeded out. Every tangle of emotion is untied so as to leave every contradiction clear. The style is verbose, yes, but not with tedium and description of static surroundings [ala On Beauty, Zadie Smith]. Instead, it is emotion and changing moods, perspectives and misunderstandings that get immense attention. Only in forcing my eye to read at speed could I take in enough information at a go to make out what point was being made at each step. Like an intricate baroque wedding cake made from thousands of small intricate baroque wedding cakes.

The social commentary and the constant conscientious reminder of the racial inequality that the South Africa of then depends on, is injected intermittently and some times seems almost inappropriate to the drama of the story. As Helen matures through the story, so do her liberal convictions, allowing more liberal commentary to gently proselytise through the text. Helen chooses heroes, some of whom are indeed are heroic, but never ventures to be very heroic herself. The social political climax is at a great nation wide mine strike, which her boyfriend is deeply involved in, and she observes for her self the mindless violence of the townships.

In comparison to Gordimer’s later work, A World of Strangers, this is a very gentle swipe at the political and social system of the time. A World of Strangers is a lot more damning of the excesses and naivety of the white well to do classes. Here, it is merely acknowledged. This novel seems world away from Gordimer’s Burghers Daughter, where she takes full attack on the evil system by following the aftermath of a destroyed communist activist family (I think loosely based on Bram Fischer).

What does this say about lying? It seems, that by the end of the story, everyone is living a lie, her hero boyfriend (and he is just that, a hero. Someone who both supports and fights the system), her family and the mine town and her liberal friends with their lofty communist ideals. It seems that only the natives are true to their existence. Already she has acknowledged that white South Africans must be born and die with guilt (something that is every day discourse about race in contemporary South Africa). However, Helen never seems to decide on a philosophy of life. She only admits that in her desperate attempt to avoid a life of lying (avoiding the mine town for instance), she had been living a lie more than anyone.

The book, as all good books should, has a momentous dramatic climax. The climax so sweet, this book must have been meant only as a vehicle for the colossal clash. Helen pitted against her mother. The clash is over Helen having a black friend over to study, but turns out to be the premise that reveals all the assumptions on class and race that have been gradually building between her and her mother and it all comes out at once. The battle is fought in classic conventional warfare, over the dinner table, right past the hapless non committing father. It is simply wonderful, and so it the book as a whole.

It is interesting to read a book of a transforming character, of a transforming (for the worse) country by an author who had obviously transformed her writing and political outlook since.

An Exit to London

Geneva

On the Thursday before, Ms Reena Punja had told him, the recruiter with Human Resources at Deloitte London, that the interview would be on Monday, or not at all. This sent his little tedious world of fruitless job hunting in Geneva spinning. On to the internet for online tickets, phone calls to friends for credit card facilities, phone calls to South Africa for links to old friends for accommodation in London and a sense of panic in realisation that an opportunity to tarnish his job chances is a lot sooner than he had originally hoped. That he was crippled with a cold and mild flu symptoms that Thursday night was also less than encouraging for him.

At 6:09am, Saturday, he was stood on the pavement in Geneva, cursing at a number 9 bus for being 2min late. How an African so quickly comes to expect such punctuality from a public transport service that, on the other hand, knows no schedule in his own country. The street is dark, quiet and empty, the city far from rising this matin Samedi. In a moment of panic, he frantically digs into his knapsack to check that his passport and electronic ticket print out are on him, not willing to venture back into his latest lodging and wake his slumbering benevolent host. His back pack is bursting to capacity, enormously heavy on the shoulder straps and large enough for him to have to keep a full 2 feet clear of all objects behind him. Astronauts have less on their back on a space walk and US marines have less bulk invading middle eastern states. All is well, alas. The number 9 arrives and connects him with the number 10 to the airport, without losing a minute in between.

On the number 10, the passengers suffer, as does he, with their luggage, most heading for the airport. He notices that among them are not business executives but the collection of flyers that can only afford the plane tickets that get them flying at seven in the morning. In the bus, is Spanish, of the South American flavour and old ladies.

London

The plane dropped out the clouds straight onto the runway. It seems that in London, there is little distance between the cloud and the ground, or at least at London Gatwick this Autumn.

Into the Gatwick terminal from the plane, through the telescoping portal, he follows the sign posts to be reunited with his baggage, as does everyone off the plane, curiously speaking in hushed tones, perhaps thinking it still it so early in the morning it is important not to wake people up. The circuitous path to baggage collection is arduous, up and down escalators, along conveyers, through bridging tubes and with multiple lefts and rights, all sign posted. Twice he wondered off, the journey so long, into a day dream, where he was in a different country, with the hushed French still quietly buzzing among his co-travellers to support the illusion. Otherwise, he could just follow along with everyone else to the baggage, as all passengers seemed bound for the same place. Finally, the labyrinth coughed them into the customs lobby, with an uncomfortably low ceiling, a confluence of travellers from all manor of flights, going and coming. He feels lucky to be in the European Union queue, though the customs official does not afford a smile or as much as a good morning.

Finally in the arrivals lounge and beyond all check points, the immediate challenges of his arrival came to his mind. Money to change, phone calls to make and directions to obtain and decipher. On the payphone to a cell phone, the long time close friend of his elder sister, a Zambian who has put her stick in the sand in London, he takes the details of her land line phone number, as the public machine swallows whole pounds. However, on trying her land line, there is no answer and her cell phone diverts to an electronic voice mail, all the same chewing over half a pound coin. The frustration flushes a quick rage over him, 5 pounds gone and no directions to his promised accommodation. On a second attempt however, the land line number is quickly answered (it turned out her land line was unplugged at the wall) and the directions iterated. “Take a train to East Croydon, and then one to Thornton Health”. The names familiar from a previous visit, 4 years prior. All the while the arrivals lounge is crowded, trolley to trolley, in a continuous milieu of cultures and skin colours.

After £31 pounds to weekly pass, £7 to East Croydon, more than a quarter of his cash in hand decimated on the first day, he was not too pleased to be ushered out of First Class, where he has accidentally landed himself and his man size luggage. Still, at least he was allowed to relocate without a spot fine, as was his experience in Switzerland [see Slovenia]. Still, the tone afforded by the tall lean square chinned train official conveyed a frustrated annoyance. The boisterous two Africans (with their dark skin and colourful accent) from across the aisle, who were proudly detailing to each other some curious feature of the ‘ablution’ facilities they had observed, relocated noisily by fawning and applying to reason and flexibility, though delivered as some sort of a rebellion, and it was by not relocating quietly as I had. Once again, as was with a previous train encounter [see Slovenia], it was the Africans being tossed out of first the class coach.

East Croydon was wonderfully grimy. It had the rusty colour scheme of a disused mortuary, completed with yellowing tiles and thick peeling paint on rusty cast iron. Six train platforms with connecting grotty pedestrian tunnels. TV screens over head constantly updating on the next 3 trains for each platform, unknown destinations mechanically repeated on speakers all around and trains gushing past at terrific speeds on all sides. Train marshals in luminous yellow jackets speaking to odd travellers, telling them which train, platform and time goes to which destination. “The ‘10:17’, platform 4, the next one after this ’10:15” The Marshall’s give curt and concrete answers, as if the price of words and smiles has been rising with petrol.

Thornton Heath, instead has the feel of an overused vet nary. Its train platforms, tiles, benches and staircases that much more grimy. With that much more graffiti. It’s red bricks that much more stained black with smog. The cigarette buts and discarded drinking vessels in that many corners. On the street outside, the usual hustle and bustle of any Saturday morning in a satellite suburb of London plays out. Only here, most people are black. The London buses roar past and the pedestrians, the drivers, the passengers are mostly black. It was a refreshing sight to him. So many black people, marching to their own rhythm. Accents fly. London accents with undertones of something richer. Now and then an out right western or southern African accent bleats. Indeed, African materials can be seen on the odd Saturday shopper.

Immediately he notices that a large number are Ghanaian. Their thick dark frames of muscle, with a high tight buttocks, strong necks and heads that do not extend back much further than their ears. His suspicion is confirmed when a car parks besides, with car keys dangling a metal alloy key holder, in the shape of the map of Ghana, decorated with the map of Ghana.

Sheila

She arrives in a 4 by 4 monstrosity of sort, black with sun roof. He is taken aback. 4 yours before, when they had made a rendezvous at this very spot, she had shown up with a tiny hunch back (perhaps a Renault). This time round, my man size back pack has ample space to nock around the boot. Some wealth must of come her and are husbands way. Their mind numbing toils for a day job, finally paying off. Just as well, he thinks, for their hovel of fours ago would not be suitable to host him this time around.

She is glad to see him, and he her. She is like family and her face does not seem to have aged a day, maintaining its fair complexion. In fact, he has to admit, she is not on the whole unattractive. Her eyes light up, the whites showing, as she emerges from the car, arms spread out. For a moment he is worried if he is to deliver the three cheek kissed he has come accustomed to in Geneva. The embrace is short and gentle. He had to stoop over to receive it, as she has seemed to have grown taller only as much as she has aged.

Only 5 blocks away, they are at her home. The two or three streets on the way quickly reminded him of how much the British love their cars and their red bricks. One or two cars parked outside each house. Each house with a front door and a bay window. The little patches of grass in front of each house a wild shrub of struggling grass or weed, sifting the air and collecting beer cans, crisp packets and random bits of paper. Though the city streets of Geneva have no front gardens (they have no gardens at all but public ones) it is clear that Thornton Heath is not as clean as Geneva.

It is Sheila’s middle child’s tenth birthday party. The house is already overrun with only four toddlers. Restless rascals that see need to run into another room every two minutes. One of them is chubby thing, Natalie, with blond hair and shockingly pink lips. She is ever hungry and Sheila believes that she has an eating disorder. Then there is Thomas, ever the clown and sometimes actually funny. Bwenmbya, the birthday boy and Sheila’s second, wears the attention of the day with a certain pomposity, plying his mates with little wise cracks. It is amazing, however, how quickly he looks to me as a proxy authority figure.

The house, as with a lot of England houses, is a semi-detached narrow stretch, on two floors. The landing was so narrow, and my back pack so large I could not turn around to close the door behind me. The kitchen however had some breadth, was well lit and supported by the ‘conservatory’, which is like a green house added on the end of the kitchen. Beyond, the garden, which you well observe from the kitchen, stretches a convincing run, terminating only after you have lost interest in its final resting place. It is blessed with apple and pair trees that bear edible fruit. Beyond it is the rail tracks and trains rushing to and through Thornton Health trains stations. However, the garden is so long, you soon forget to notice the distant din of a train whizzing past.

He met Sheila’s husband of some 14 years, Chola, her eldest daughter, Kay, and the youngest, a sweet little angel thing by the title Shoko. All the children seemed twice as large as they were fours before, and in the case of little Shoko, it was probably accurate to say so. Kay fourteen and filling out into a woman, though perhaps cursed with her mothers lack in height. She speaks confidently with her London accent, which seems to have matured ahead of her body. Chola, a dark man he never really got to know, from an era when his sisters were dating and he was just a boy of Bwembya’s age. Now Chola is a pleasant family man, featuring a paunch and still maintaining the moustache. The pleasantries bounce back and forth and soon run dry.

“Mmm, Jumani, long time” calls Chola.
“Yes it has been a bit hasn’t it? I do seem to pop around every four years”
“So…. How are you?”
“Well, I am still ticking along, wasting away in Geneva letting all my chances pass me by”
“Is it?….oh, okay, you were in Geneva? How was that”
“Well….it is a tough place, food is expensive but nice”
“So what brings you to London?” This is a question with a twist. That he has come for a job interview they know already. However, they have forgotten with whom and are trying to feign interest in the job opportunity.
“Job interview of course, on Monday, with Deloitte”
“Oh, okay. Tell us about that”

And so the morning progressed and matured into afternoon, when more children arrived and so did Sheila’s elder sister, Lombe. Before that however, Sheila and he did some shopping at the TESCOS, right next to the Thornton Health train station from which he had emerged 3 hours earlier. There, he found a suit for his interview, stealthy black and coarse like a school uniform, for a shockingly low £30, and Sheila took on confectionaries and extra presents for the kiddies party.

All the while, he was delighted to see so many fat, angry poor people. Enormous women, somehow the women get to be fatter, swallowing whole aisles of the shop, chatting away on their cell phones. Geneva is instead sparsely populated by affluent black girls, flaunting high French and designer clothes, with their collar bones pocking out and holding a necklace. Here, however, women only had things poking in, not out. He related this to Sheila with glee, causing her small fits of laughter and alarm at being over heard. She afforded a cheeky smile at the audacity of the observation, but still her eyes went searching from side to side as if someone might be listening or perhaps, to catch another glimpse at these bloated urban mammals with a new point of reference.

Every so often, Sheila would relate a child hood memory to him. Most of them he does not recall. They were from so long ago, from when he was even less than a boy. He was raised by his sisters, in truth, and his sisters friends, one way or another, who shared in the parenting. She retold stories of his grumpy moods, of teasing her with silly songs, of jumping around or crying for this all that. He had lost recollection of most these tales, for he was so young when they happened, though they all sounded quite plausible for their hilarious shameful tone. Also, both of them had been separate for over a decade, and so have since reconstructed their memories selectively.
 

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

I would like to say first of all, that the writing is not my preferred style. The style is verbose to the hilt, and it takes the pain, willingly and often unnecessarily, to describe every little detail of the characters surroundings.

But still, in this voluptuous cushion of descriptive text, Zadie’s characters bubble up to the surface quite naturally, making you feel as if each of them is an intimate friend you have known for years.

The drama of the story plays out across two families of a new England university, with its accompanying little campus town. The characters are many (too many perhaps) and each flawed in a nuanced way. Each has a compelling argument for their politics, but their actions remain inexcusable never the less and shockingly embarrassing.

However, through all the icky and sordid drama (because that is what it gets towards the end), the two matriarchs of the two families come out with their images unscathed, which in my opinion unbalances the story unjustly.

At over 450 pages, I still wonder if it was worth the effort to read, for a semi-literate African like my self.

Politics, in terms of conservative or liberal, does filter into the story slightly, but not as much as one would expect, given that the story is a stage for a battle between two families, ensconced on either side of the conservative-liberal and agnostic-religious divide.

What does it say about Beauty? Well, not much in my opinion. However, the highlight of the book is a loud Husband and wife row over infidelity (by the husband of course) and obesity (by the wife of course), 30 years after true love and the inception of marriage. From then on, you read on longing for comparable drama, but only manage partial satisfaction.

The Shack

It is early evening and the sun is still bright. I stand against a steel balustrade next to the kiosk for the boat crossing. The boat that facilitates the crossing is a shocking mustard yellow and visible across the lake about to deliver its current payload of passengers. Beyond the ferry boat is an army of sail boats in the dock, their bare sail masts towering above them like the pikes of an ancient Greek unit of Phalanxes.

I am a little too warm in the sun, wearing a khaki trench coat with nylon inner lining (chosen in response to the cloudy morning), though I look cool in my thick and large brown ladies sunglasses, nap sack over my shoulder. I am heaving heavy breathes of relief from a day of toil at a laptop computer suffering the fickle whims of my employer. My lips however, register sorrow, their ends turned down as if pulled by an invisible weight.

My mind is tracing back to another place far away and a time not long ago…

The salon Ford Meteor is near overloaded with its five passengers. With its cracked windscreen, rusting frame, bolding tyres and two substitute doors on one side from a prior collision, it is however, one of the better looking cars on the streets of Khaylitsha.

It is a surprisingly warm afternoon, for the middle of winter in Cape Town, if you can say that Khaylitsha is in Cape Town, a whole 30 km out of town and most the way to the next town, Strand. Within the capsule of rust is Matthew, Jumali, Anita and Sindiwe. The boys both best friends of mine, Sindiwe the one that smashed in the two doors and Anita Sindiwe’s cousin.

Anita, after much coaxing from me, is to show us her house, or in South African terms, her shack. Sindiwe lives in a house proper in Khaylitsha, not a shack. It has a steady foundation, walls of brick and mortar, a tiled roof, garage, fitted kitchen and even a street address. She lives in the suburbs of Khaylitsha that are perhaps beyond the stereotype of the Khaylitsha township. Anita, on the other hand, lives in a shack, one of the skew whimsy structures visible from the highway, or so I thought.

Anita, from the cramped backseat, directs me on how to navigate from the spacious suburbs to the crowded, goat ridden, bustling shack-dom of her part the township. Over speed bumps and crossroads, I am once again taken aback by the frequency of Toyota Cressida motor vehicles to be seen in the townships of Cape Town. Quite, quite accurately, one in every three cars on these streets is a Toyota Cressida. Invariably, they are run down, battered and a lot less symmetrical than they were when they rolled out the Japanese factory floor, 18 years ago or so. Sindiwe points out, as she always has to when I make this observation, that they function as taxi’s for hire, though never explaining why taxi’s for hire have to be a Toyota Cressida.

Street by street, the sidewalk gets more populated and at the same time a lot more narrow, both in the width of the road, and in the width of the pavement. More frequently, there are wood blank kiosks on the pavement. The kiosks are either a grocery store, a ladies hair salon or mans barber shop. The latter blasting a cacophony from poor quality speaks and displaying their ubiquitous, yet continent wide standard, of colourful, less than convincing assortment of colour pictures depicting the African hair cuts on offer. Soon, the mongrel dogs and goats make their appearance. Past the ever busy market place, the dusty streets are crowded with people mingling and idly crossing the tar road. The plots are densely packed with wood-plank hovels, pushing up against the pavement, most skew, giving the appearance of being caught in motion in a sea of shacks. The street is so busy, Europeans would call it a fête.

A series of lefts and rights, down dusty narrow streets, flanked by urchins and chickens, the road, now with intermittent pot holes in the old tar crust, a dozen people crossing the road ahead at any given time. Finally we arrive at a low dark blue structure, seemingly constructed from firm chip wood sheets, under a huge tree (a rare sight in a township). The structure has an assortment of iron sheets for a roof, held down with bricks and discarded tyres. Next to, on either side are contemporary structures, not much different but of different colour and shape altogether, with not enough space to smuggle a chicken in between them. One of them blasts a poor quality noise and full volume. It is a shabeen. From my spinning sense of direction, I figure that the N2 highway cannot not be far.

Anita emerged from the car sounding triumphant, having successfully navigated the voyage to her doorstep and finally, it seemed, assimilated the spirit to accept the curiosity these boys have in her own living quarters, a place not unlike any of the other thousands of homes currently surrounding us. Dressed smartly in dark and tight fitting clothes (her church gear I presumed) with neat oily and straightened hair, Anita now plays the role of tour guide, displaying her best English in a somewhat forced but pleasant accent.

Into the living room, that welcomes you from the street, it is immediately evident how dim the interior is. This room has no exterior openings but the low door we entered through. The walls indoors are also a dark blue, sucking up light. The floor is a carpet of linoleum. The ground is uneven and the ceiling low and sagging in place.

In the living room we met Anita’s uncle of sort, a dark thin quiet man, and her voluptuous younger, though bigger, sister. This however was where the expected ended.

Before was a four piece lounge sweet complete with three seater and two seater couches and an arm chair. The lounge sweet is arranged around a glass coffee table and presented before a grand polished veneer display cabinet, hoarding a 54 cm TV, beaming SABC 1.

The kitchen is lit by a long fluorescent tube (the whole shack is electrified with light switches and plug points) and has both a double door fridge-freezer as well as a chest freezer. A four plate electric stove stood in the kitchen, between a couple of counters suffering under the usual display of electric kitchen appliances.

There was a flushing ceramic toilet in a room of its own, ceramic sink with stainless steal taps and a full size municipal garbage bin, kept in doors for security, that is emptied by council once a week.

Going through all theses details, Anita was most eloquent and visibly proud of her families middle class assortments, although the tour is delivered by her with a certain tongue in cheek and with a sense for the ridiculous. For instance, when presenting the chest freezer, she explained to us all the things that can be stored in it, with examples produced, as if we had never seen a freezer before.

Out the back was a little shack of a storeroom and a bench where, Anita explained, here father would smoke his pipe. It was he that has built the shack in the mid eighties wit his own hands, adding to it bit by bit as time and resources permitted, detailed Anita. Her father had passed away some three years ago. There was no mention of the mother.

At this point, it was worth wondering if the house was a shack at all with its living room, 3 bedrooms, kitchen, electricity and running water. However, the roof clearly leaked and the walls and door ways were visibly skew. Worse than that, with all the bedrooms bolts (one them opens onto the street) the wood structure ultimately is little defence against forced entry. Also, though warm enough on this sunny afternoon, Anita told how hard it is to keep the house warm on cold nights, the structure vulnerable to little nooks and openings. The electric heaters employed a clear fire risk too.

For most of the tour Sindiwe sat on the couch and watched the television, less than amused by the familiar surroundings, and not quite sure what to make of this interest in shacks, about which I suppose she grew up. In the lounge we were treated to cake, potato chips and orange juice. Still in a cheery mood and perhaps taking things a bit far, Anita produced the family photo album, which included shots of her parents wedding (her mother very dark and thing under her veil and neither the bride or groom smiling) and shots of the families homeland in the Eastern Cape, about spacious green rolling hills with cylindrical brick huts.

The tour over and the novelty passed, we proceeded to the rust bucket of a vehicle, parked under the old shady tree. We bid fare well, leaving Anita behind, and gave thanks for the tour. Anita, smiling, stood by her overweight sister, who was still beaming with excitement in her everyday surroundings.

That was Khaylitsha and the first time Jumali, Matthew and I walked in to a shack.

A couple of days ago I got this in my gmail account.

sindiwe mbiko to me
More options Aug 23
Anita (my cousin from the shack) passed away.

Jumani Clarke to sindiwe
More options Aug 23
wait, you mean the girl who gave Matthew, Jumali you and I a tour of her house/shack? No. How? Why?

I am shocked?

Are you dealing with it?

sorry,

J

sindiwe mbiko to me
More options Aug 25
yes that her.she died of pneumonia….why ? i dont think you askin the
right person that question…and yes i’m dealing with them…
- Show quoted text -

As the mustard yellow boat arrived to collect me and a few other passengers, I held the grief in the corners of my lips as long as possible. Although I am always quiet on this 7 minute boat trip, today my silence was a tribute to Anita. Running my most lengthy encounter with her through my head, I was hoping that some aspect of her character would rest with me,

The Balcony

So I am in the apartment on a hot afternoon. I have just escorted Claudia back to the central bus station near here (Rive, after another successful exchange lesson). I am happy to find that she did not finish her beer, for my financial woes reduce me to such petty frugality.

I have a mute neighbour. She sits on the balcony of a building across the road from this one. She is on the 5th floor, and I on the 4th. She just sits there, most times, looking out at the view, from under a low umbrella, to shield her from the this rapacious European sun. She can see every inch of this one roomed apartment, but for the bathroom (when the blinds are up of course, and I have them up most times). She can see my every movement in the kitchen, from the waist up. She has dark brown African skin, and is often sipping on a bottle of water. I never see anyone with her. She seems to be either in her 20’s or 40’s, I cannot be sure. Some times she is attractive, some times not. She has permed and straightened hair, that some times hangs over her forehead, in that ubiquitous caricature of European hair.

I find it hard to be ambivalent about her presence. She is not there most of the time, yet I always feel she is watching. And when she is on her balcony, I cannot not help making less than furtive glances at her. Some times I catch her looking right at me, other times not. But when she is looking away, revealing her seductive profile, I know that she can tell that I am looking at her. She catches me turning to look at her, eye to eye, so often, I am convinced she finds this as much of a game as do I.

We never explicitly communicate. I never wave or even nod my head, and neither does she. I cannot not even afford a smile. And she, she seems too graceful to afford a smile. She makes no sudden movements and makes no noises I can make out from here. Maybe she is like me. Maybe she is an African, locked up in a friends flat seeking impossible dreams in fortress Europe. Maybe she too spends fruitless hours bashing at the internet, rehashing a cv with wishful online applications.

However, I know that she is better than me. She is better bred, and better skilled. She may have a fledging self made career that does not force her long hours at the office. Or she could be a writer, bashing away critically acclaimed polemics on her little expensive laptop. Though, she does not bring out any accessories, but bottled water. Perhaps it is too hot on the balcony to bring out work. Maybe she only comes out to mock me.

Or could she be a successful mans lover? An overly educated (for her waltz and well held and graceful dour must be a result of the best of educations) wench, who spends her days loafing around in a tiny flat, playing with neat little digital applications to pass time. Maybe she comes outside to escape his madness? To escape her world by entering mine.

Maybe she can see my hunger. Perhaps she can see my financial worries. Perhaps she has noticed that I eat nothing but bread, butter and cheese. She might even worry about me. I am not sure that I would notice her on the street. But when I turn to look at her umbrella and her little balcony, and she is not there, I am definitely lonely and miss her.

Slovenia

“Do you speak English?” I asked.

“Yes I do” she answered, with a start. Her pronunciation was flawless, though with an eastern European accent of sort. My question seemed silly. Only then did it occur to me that at the train station, a larger proportion of travellers are foreign, and thus more likely to speak English.

With an emerging confidence I then inquired “Is this the platform for the train to Bern?”

“Yes it is”, she responded, also more relaxed in this second exchange.

Only then did it occur to me how outrageously attractive this young woman was. My ticket clearly indicated platform 4 B, 18:37, Geneva – Bern, Bern – Basel. The information board over head, above the platform, clearly confirmed this information, adding that the train was due in 6 min. Never the less, I was doubtful, hence the inquiry. On the bench next to me, was a tall, thin, brown frame of a woman, with thick framed spectacles, jeans and t-shirt and flanked by three items of bulky luggage. Across the bench, was a wry, wrinkly, freckled octaganerian simulacrum of a woman, decorated with a white spotted blue frock. Choosing between the two for itinerant advice could not have been easier.

She stood up to confirm her advice with the electronic board, hanging above. She erupted to a height a full inch above my own. Turning her head left and right to assess the information around her, she revealed both her slender profiles, exemplified her long neck and more of the bread brown soft skin of her shoulders. Her loosely tied brunet pony tail swung left and right.

“So where are you from?” I fired, trying to keep the inchoate discussion alive. My guess was Germany , for her consonants rang with a heavy and low base.

“Slo-venia”.

“Oh, where’s that?” I fumbled back. “Is that like Slovakia?” In fact, I did already know where Slovenia is. I just didn’t realise it then. A moments thought would have reminded me that Slovenia is a former federal state of the now defunct Yugoslavia, between Croatia (also a former federal state of Yugoslavia) and Italy . Only, under the spell of her emerald green eyes, I was not doing much thinking at this moment, however. She confirmed my, albeit currently lacking, knowledge of Slovenia’s location and pointed out the vast differences (and distances) between Slovenia and Slovakia. I was smarting from a wasted opportunity to show off my knowledge of European geography.

The train arrived to the minute. A double storey slick white aerodynamic triumph of 20th century engineering. The Slovenians mesmerising gait was corrupted by her backpack, drag-along hard body suitcase and knapsack. She gracefully declined my offer to help. She assured me that there was no difference between the 1st class and 2nd class carriages, with her prior train ride experience as evidence. I accepted this absurd claim without a second thought.

Light headed with excitement, I followed her down the train passage and sat across a small neat table from her, with her permission. The carriage was air-condition cool and a great relief from the humid and warm outside air. It was surprisingly spacious, austere and severely under populated. The second, and only other party on the cylindrical carriage, seemed to me, by the brightly colored dress, to be from Somalia.

Without a sound, the train disembarked from the station, emerging into the bright sun light, beyond the shade of the platforms. Soon, the apartment blocks and city structures were quietly whistling past. Brilliant sunlight gleamed bright yellow at an acute angle on the decorated navy-blue Swiss railway seats.

“We are moving fast enough” I remarked. She agreed and added that we were moving as fast as the ‘Speed Train’ she had travelled with earlier. “Dey call it a spid train but it goss just as fahrst as theees one” she rang in her eastern accent. Outside, the Swiss country side sped past. Bicycle paths, bridges, footpaths, fields, lakeside, backyards, boats, hills.

“Ah don know anything about the war. It happen befo I was bon, so………” she retorted. There went all my chances to dazzle her with my political insights.

Our conversation, however, went from strength to strength. She flashed beautiful little smiles as her emeralds darted in and out of the coach, back and forth from the scenery to my face. She told me of her 3 weeks of language school in the south of France in the heat of 38′c. I told her of my hopeless job ventures in Geneva of the previous 2 weeks. She told me of her conception in Kenya, where her parents went for a honeymoon after their wedding. I told her more of my hopeless ventures searching for a job in Geneva, and the maths lessons I give in exchange for French.

My luck eluded self belief. Isolated in a luxurious train with all the promise of a young journey while having undisturbed conversation with one of gods most prised possessions. And then the Swiss train ticket official arrived. I had heard him interrogating and extorting money from the Somalians behind me, but paid little more attention, as most of my senses were bound for Slovenia. When he arrived we proudly showed him our tickets. I was proud, having not lost my ticket, as I have done many times before. With an unemotional and curt manner, coined with a Swiss German accent for English and avoiding eye contact, this robot of a man told us that we were to pay 13 francs each to the next stop Lausanne, where we were to move down to the second class carriages. That is where we were supposed to be in the first place. It was a spot fine.

We were taken aback. I had thought my journey too good to be true up until this point (though the 2nd class ticket has already cost twice as much as I had originally expected). However, I was so mesmerised by this Slovenian gift to mankind, I thought it a rather forgettable tax. Understandably embarrassed by this incident, she did not, however, lose her composure or her grace. She was short of 3 francs and made her payment balance.

Our conversation recovered well, nevertheless, and we where soon back in our groove. To my surprise, her youth turned out to be in excess. Only sixteen. A whole nine years from my own birth. A whole two years to the completion of her high school. It was just as well my head had gone too giddy with excitement to flush out the long list of implications of this revelation. On the other hand, she did point out that she was as old as her little country, Slovenia.

At Lausanne, we trekked, clumsily, with our bulky luggage through the passenger carriage towards the back of the train, with its more populous lower classes. We were too cautious, now, to venture out of the train at the current stop, to make this pedestrian journey to the rear, for fear of being left behind altogether. Swiss rail had shown us little sympathy, up to this point, and so we were not going to take any more chances. Through the dinning cart, up steps and through automatic glass doors that separate carriages, we arrived at the more compact 2nd class quarters. We emerged into a quagmire of grainy pierced and lumpy teenagers, challenged single parents (toddlers attached), a jumble of voices and the summer smell other human beings.

Though not half full, it was two to three coaches down before we found two opposing seats together with suitable space for her bulky luggage. She was perspiring and awkwardly bashing down the narrow corridor, her luggage in tow and continued to refuse my offers to help. We sat down and she was ballooning her mouth with air, blowing it on to her own face, to cool down. Her shiny brown face was incapable of anything but beauty.

We had settled along side a mother and son, embanked along side the large and sealed window. When settled, we picked up our conversation where we off, as loudly as we had before, as if we had a first class passenger car to our selves.

Now the lake was close and shimmering with the evening ochre sun rays. The land dropped suddenly, over grape vines and village towns and plunged quickly into water. Across the lake was an equally steep climb, only shaded, cool and grey in a mountainous silhouette. Thousands of years prior, a glacier had ripped through these mountains, only to melt in the mediterranian. The panorama was enclosed in the ramparts that are the Swiss Alps.

The train silently glided over the scenery, as if floating, ducking in and out of tunnels, over rivers and slicing through valleys, effortlessly.

“I haf bin to Nameebiah. My father was shooting hiz travel documentary there” telling me what she knew of Africa. We agreed on the beauty of Nambia and I encouraged her to see more of the continent. Instead, she told me of her extensive travels though India and east Asia. Her father is something of a celebrity in Slovenia for his travel journals. Her mother is a newspaper editor. No wonder I was captivated. She was no less than a prime example of one of Slovenia’s young middle class elite.

She insisted she pay me back some how for the 3 francs I held bailed her out with over the tickets. She guessed at changing money at Bern (an impossible alternative) or making some sort of exchange. In the end, I settled for the excess load chocolates that had overburdened her knapsack. “Plees, tek them, I have had more than ah can eet”.

The city of Bern, was drawing near and I was fearful of never meeting this charming specimen of human life ever again. I meant to ask her email address, even if just to say that I had enjoyed her company. Knowing that our exchange had a live audience, I was unusually fearful of rebuttal. In the end, it was easy, though perhaps left too late. She was glad to give me her email address. Scribbled it on the bottom corner of an A4 paperand ripped it off for me quickly, just before I was swept away by the indomitable tide of disembarking passengers, flowing down the aisle. Her slight frame twisted and her neck strained to bid me farewell, and then she was gone.

Off the train, I was on platform 5, looking for 7. For all my adventure, fines and flirting, I was back to the same position I was an hour earlier: on a train platform, uncertain, bewildered by public signs in a strange language (this time German as opposed to French) and alone. I looked back and up, to have one more look at Kaja (“It is spelt with a ‘J’ “), only I could not make out which window she was at, and no face could be seen.

My new passenger train was of more conventional design and less crowded. This time I was sure to board the coach labelled ‘2′. I sank into a nondescript seat by a large window, across the aisle from a plain woman waving good bye to another plain woman beyond my own window. I turned to the penultimate chapter of Basil Davidson’s Black Mans Burden and read about the fall of Yugoslavia and the creation of, among other states, Slovenia.

Benches of Love

On the bench, their bodies face each other. Eyes closed and mouths full. Their writhing is slow and with a rhythm. They are eating each other.

The wind is blowing, enough to make the water slap boisterously against the rocks of the wharf. There is a violence in the air. The seagulls squawk and the ducks are in a hurry. Leaves are carried by the wind and the sailboats rock slowly, their masts swaying. The couple on the bench, however are at peace and almost still in each others arms.

She is over him, breathing him in with her mouth. Her face is pretty and her blond hair falls behind her, over her shoulders. Her cheeks are sucked in. Gently, she strokes his face, as if to coax the fluid out of his mouth. She is drinking.

He is surprisingly supple, bent under her with his legs spread. A well built man, not 25. He is dressed in white cotton long shorts, blue t-shirt and low cut white sport shoes.

A large white sailboat pulls up and docks with the adjoining pier, its foghorn blowing loud. The boat is a relic of lake boats of a century past. It serves only the tourists, who now line the deck of the boat, cameras in hand and sunglasses on face, despite the grey clouds overhead. The tourists admire the city, the park, the wharf and the couple. No one embarks or disembarks. The boat departs. The couple take no notice and kiss on.

Across the lake, baroque edifices rise above the streets and trees. Above them is the grey-blue outline of mountains that are the French Alps. Overhead, the clouds continue to invade above as the wind steps up its raids. As the clouds block out the sun, shadows frame brilliant yellow beams of sunlight that shower the city. Maybe angels are channelled through these aerial streams, gradually lifting in to heaven.

The wind intensifies and all loose detritus is blown. There is a tension in the air as the many sailboats flags and ropes flap fiercely. The swimmers and sun bathers are dressing up. An exodus is eminent. However, the couple are not disturbed.

I too am on a bench, books and beer at my side. I share the bench with a second couple. By contrast, they are older and of contrasting race. They do not mount each other, but instead hold hands, shoulder to shoulder. Although their love may be sincere, it is not as brazenly displayed, as it is on the first bench. These are serene.

Even with the pending storm, a young man thrusts his weight between the serene couple and I. Scrambling to collect my gear, I spill the beer. In my quick little desperate rescue, froth erupts out of the can and is all over my pants and shoes.

“Désolé, désolé” he pleads, “I am sorry”.

“No, no” I reply, “it’s no problem”. “It’s fine,” I say with a shy smile. I do not know why I am so eager to show him that I am not upset. Our apologies ricochet off each other, across the linguistic divide, for a couple of cycles before we are each convinced of peace.

The young man has a narrow frame, blue shirt and a pair of jeans. His spectacles are thick and black. He looks clever, with his short cropped black hair. Something about him impresses me. Perhaps I recognise my youth in him.

He is up to something, coming out here just before a storm.

He pulls out a note book and starts to scribble. I stop my scribbling in my notebook to steal glances at his. It could be that he too is trying to recreate the world in story? Or perhaps he means only to record the world truly, not just how it appears to him.

He makes not words, but sketches. His pencil erratically dances all about his page, etching multiple little marks. He scribbles with haste. Soon, the city across the water begins to appear on his notepad in an impressive lead style.

I thought that I was alone in the universe. But alas, here, on a bench, as I muse at my surroundings, in the company of lovers, my doppelganger magically appears at my shoulder. I dare not look him in the eye.

We scribble on, against the burgeoning wind, with storms racing towards the city from all around. The world has turned grey and the light is draining out. Water droplets bomb my page. My doppelganger bails finally, and makes leave.

Now I am alone on the bench. Next to me, the second bench is empty too. Even the lovers are gone.

My beer is not quite empty. I pack my belongings and flee the wharf as well.

The Wharf

The wharf ventures off the promenade into the lake. It is paved and lined with street lights and steel public trash bins. At its terminus, fortified by a low circular stone wall, are four low hanging tress. The trees hang low with leaves and brood over four empty benches. The hot sun rays have swallowed the benches and the populous take refuge in the shade. The scene is framed by the lake, the city across it and the dim mountains beyond them.

Loud ragga muffin music is blasting out of a portable stereo, resting on the grey stone bulwark, its poor quality speakers struggling against the volume setting. Flanking the stereo on both sides are lanky young men, most wearing tall narrow black turbans. The pink and pale among them don short sleeved brightly coloured flower shirts, buttons open, revealing their flat chests and little navels. The brown and dark wear t-shirts, jeans and sneakers. These men stand here, in the shade, as they do most days, only moderately amused by the surroundings. The conversation between them selves is barely audible over the stereos cacophony, but they seldom speak loudly. Youth in groups of three or four cycle or roller skate/blade up to this cabal frequently and make surreptitious exchanges.

My back is up against the trunk at the base of on of the four trees, my buttocks on the hard and compact ground, the worn grass giving little cushion. Beyond the trunk, is an animate group of 4 men, languidly lying about their patch of grass. Their cheerful Arabic is bouncing back and forth between them, with the intermittent chuckle. Their shirts are open too. All have sunglasses raised to their forehead and some have short stubble on their head, instead of hair. I have two books and a can of beer for company.

All around is a scattering of bicycles, up against the opposing trees, against the vacant benches or supported, in the sun, by the encircling stone wall. Jutting off into the distance ahead of me, is a narrow wharf, enclosing an impressive collection of sailboats, sprouting a forest of masts and ropes. The sailboats are innumerable and outnumber the ripples on the water in which they berth. The narrow wharf is blustered by piles of rocks, in random order, facing outward and dropping into the lake. The rocks are populated by an equally random collection of pink and orange bodies, embracing the rocks and soaking up the sun and the heat, like lizards. The sun is gleaming off the lake like a floating hot liquid. Some of the lizards are splashing into and out of the moderately choppy water.

A short pier juts out of this stone corral, into the warm sun and the lake. From here, wet bodies climb in and out of the water in a random routine. A slender brown creature emerges, climbing up the stainless steal ladder. The amphibian’s smooth film of water, which is like a scrambled mirror, is quickly shedding. Its dreads are kinky and brown, with a copper tint, and come down to the shoulders. Its small breasts are concealed in a bikini top, but its sex eludes me nevertheless. She joins three similarly dreaded and slim creatures, all of them wearing beach shorts. Although the others are bare chested men, they look so indistinguishable it is as if they are all about to conflate and mould into one larger dreaded creature. One of them, with gold yellow dreads halfway down his back, breaks rank with the rest, carrying three sticks. One in each hand and the third, the bamboo stick, is balancing precariously between the two. He flips and tosses the bamboo, left and right, back and forth. He is crouching, as if the sticks only balance when they are a foot off the ground. Then he spins the bamboo sticks through a vertical axis, back and forth, like a wheel. The bamboo is tossed high and falls behind his back, kicked tactfully with the back of his heel, up, over his head again and back to the precarious balance of his two sticks in hand, left and right, back and forth. The dance goes on and on and I am dazzled. He catches me smiling, but returns no expression.

This shady enclave at the end of the main wharf is visited continuously by wondering tourists, on foot or bicycle. A pair of girls, quite possibly from Taiwan, slowly waddle in on bicycles, in sandals, shorts and sunglasses. Their skin, shockingly pale. They stop on the short pier in the sun and look out, over the lake, at the north stretch of Geneva and the buildings the encompass the UN, the WHO and the ILO. Quickly, they lose interest and waddle off.

I am reading Kafka’s The Castle. In the story, the castle is high on the hill towering over a village. The lead character tries, by meeting all the people in the village, to be allowed into the Castle. He struggles to use his little influence to gain acquaintance with people from the castle. His efforts are in vain and he might not ever reach the castle.

With the beer, the pages turn easy.

I too might never make it to the UN, the bureaucratic fortress across the water. I too might forever be lost in the village, Geneva

A Second Encoutner

I cannot see the bottom and this scares me. It is however a ridiculous fear, for this is surely one of the cleanest lakes in an urban setting in all of Europe.

It is a simple challenge I have put before myself: to take a 30 min jog up and down the lakeside quay, and then on return, run down the paved wharf, scramble along the rocky pier and dive into the water. Of course I must dive, it would be far too cowardly to simply lunge in legs first. Besides, everyone else on this rocky stretch throws themselves in head first. Still, I cannot hardly bring my self to go in head first, let alone tread the tepid waters at all.

My socks stuffed into my Adidas jogging shoes, a colorful pair of stripes, laces and cushioning, all covered with my sweat soaked t-shirt and a faded army green pair of shorts. I splash into the water, head first after all, and my vision turns to a cloudy green-black vista. I was sure to leap clear of the ominous green rocks near the surface. This latest venture is against my better judgment. However , I have recently learnt to turn away from my better judgment, for it only ever leads me up narrow alleys without much meaning. This latest exercise is but the latest rebellion against my better judgment.

In the water, my heart is in my mouth as a sense of panic starts to encroach upon me. I cannot not see the bottom of this lake! What is below my feet? How deep is this lake? It appears pitch black below me. What if there are crocodiles in this lake I think to my self. A completely ridiculous thought of course, but who is to say for sure when the lake seems to have no bottom! To think that as a child I did indeed swim in a lake with crocodiles and, worse still really, Hippo’s. And to think that my elder sisters would swim out to islands over half a kilometer out in such a lake.

This lake is cool on my skin, luke warm and soothing. Instantly it washed away the salt that was deposited on my skin from the 30 minutes of pedal torture that I inflicted on myself. Newly splashing in the water, I pull up my boxer shorts, that were half way down my buttocks from the impact with the surface. A reason to be weary of lunging into the lake head first. Then, I begin to swim away from the rocks and out into the lake. Every swim I have ever taken in my life seemed to risk a drowning, and this one is no different, in fact more even more so.

As a child once, before I learnt how to swim, I lost hold of the concrete embankment at the deep end of a swimming pool and sank like a rock to the bottom. Curiously, I did not panic that day, as I seem to be on the verge of doing this day. To live to see another day, I made leaps to the surface (for the pool was not deep at all) to cry for help. Soon enough, my cousin came along and rescued me.

Now in this bottomless lake, I do not have the same option of sinking to the bottom. Besides, who could come to my rescue, I have no benevolent cousins watching over me here. Worse still, there are but a dozen people all together on this rocky pier, over half a kilometer long, all of them too involved in their beverages, conversation and lakeside reading material.

Of course, there is no crisis really, just my acute ability to perceive one. My energy intensive and poorly executed frog stroke is enough, barely, to move me about the water, knowing not to go further than a point of no return, given my already fatigued body. On the other hand, the water is a little choppy and intermittently wonders up my nose, causing an interruption in my breathing and a loss of rhythm that leads to choking. At this point the rocky shore seems far away indeed, for my breath is now lost on the ensuing panic. I am also worried that I have over estimated my strength and so wont have the energy to make it back to shore.

Finally, I return to the rocky sanctuary from where I took my leap of faith. The rocks beneath the surface appear an aquatic green and are covered in a slippery and slimy algae. Struggling for support, as I mount the rocks out the water, it seems possible that I might lose balance and crack my head open. Alas, I triumph and I am on dry rock, on my feet. My boxer shorts curiously retaining air to give a bubble appearance to my genitals. Nevertheless , I have triumphed over fear and fatigue. The sun, as it sets, appears like a dash of ochre orange pastel on a canvas of threaded and beaded clouds. their detail revealed by the searching sun rays.

But once again, I am not alone in these rituals of solitude. Standing higher than me to my left, standing tall on the rocky pier is my doppelganger, appearing in silhouette. Once again he proves to be a more complete human being than me with his thick frame spectacles (so much more robust than my pair of spectacles). Soon he has stripped off his clothes, not to his boxers but, to complete nudity. In his body language there is no hint of the hesitation that accompanied my groggy stop-start denuding. As if in a hurry, he leaps off a rock, meters higher than the one I leaped off, head first with his penis gently bouncing on his ball sack. With a neat gentle splash, he takes to the water with clean strokes. He makes 3 confident laps, into the lake and back, without expressing any fear of drowning or crocodiles.

I am envious in my little corner of rocks. This doppelganger takes solitude in his stride, as if it is his servant and he the master, in difference to me where the case is definitely the opposite. In my little world of self doubt and constant regret, with the UN buildings looking over me from across the lake, I wonder how I can face my immediate challenges of unemployment and unaccomodation when simply jumping into one of the cleanest and safest lakes in the world can cause me such anxiety.

Already dressed and making his ’sortie’, the doppelganger towers above me as he walks past on the rock above.

‘Bon soir’ I call out, barely recognizing my own voice after hours of being kept to myself.

‘Bon soir’ he returns, in a voice whose pitch is a couple of notes higher than what I expected, like a boy almost. This seemed incongruous with my perception of him. I was hoping he would have recognized me from our previous encounter, before a storm on the wharf. In this brief exchange, I searched his face but found no trace of recognition. What a lovely world it is if your own doppelganger does not recognize you.