The Mummy Returns

They called me a rovha, a vernacular bastardisation for loafer. They did not mean it literally, of course, but they were not particularly affectionate when using it either. It was a term labelled on anybody who was neither going to school nor formally enslaved (I mean employed, but what is the fucking difference) those days – even one who, like me, had just finished writing his O Levels and would be waiting for the results so he could decide what to do with his life after. I guess it was one of those colonial relics we could not shake off our body politic. 
Loafer. I was a bloody loafer.  

So, during those blissful three months between November and January when I was waiting for those results 15 years ago, I might as well have been a useless village hobo who was good for naught except being a nuisance at beer parties. Except I didn't drink. I didn‟t mind either; it was a perfect time for me to catch up with Shimmer and Tsodzo and Mungoshi and a whole lot of my Wordsworthian friends whom I had temporarily left for the love of a tidy O Level certificate.  

But there was only reason why I liked being a rovha; a school-leaver. 
Farming. 
Yes; farming. 

I don‟t mean the kind of farming that involved those humongous and amorphous things like the double-wheeled Holland tractor monster I once came across in Chiredzi; combine harvesters and some other such heavy earth moving stuff – I am talking about the simple peasant tilling we used to do at home when I was growing up. We had our small portion of land which was passed from generation to generation, and summer after summer my mother and I would yoke our donkeys at the first crow of the earliest cock and head for the fields. Some rainy seasons were pretty fruitful – I especially remember the farming seasons of 95/96 and 98/99 in which our harvests were so huge that we had to double the size of our granary.  

But come on, man; this is Chivi we are talking about, a place that many consider to be so cursed that it was saddled with the name Chivi to directly translate to Sin when the Queen‟s language is factored in. The soils got tired, and the rains have been winning the hide-and-seek game with my kinsmen for nearly a decade now. Maybe it is these sanctions. Or ZIFA.  

Or just the mere fact that Chivi is Chivi. Actually, there were, and still are for that matter, a lot of vile things people outside our boundaries associate my homeland with – famine, witchcraft, avarice, Satanism, incest; in fact, everything evil is found in my place of birth, according to people who consider themselves invaluably fortunate not to have been born in the godforsaken cauldron of literal and metaphorical trespass called Chivi. Think of any vice - murder, incest, sorcery, you think it - there is bound to be a true story from my homeland to match, or even better it. 

But Chivi is where my roots are. It is where my placenta was buried. I could tell you there is no better place on earth; but why bother – I might as well preach to the devil himself.  But it is true that I would not think twice about living there forever, even if it is only so that I could relive the icing sugar sweetness of her innocent young smile again.  

Oh yea. Her. Why else do you think a 17-year-old lanky boy saddled with a lot of school-leaving stigma and discrimination would enjoy waking up in the wee hours of every working day and engross himself with some serious tilling? There has to be some girl in the script obviously. There was in this one. There is. In fact, I only liked tilling one part of our fields – the part that was nearer to the road, because that way I would not miss her passing by on her way to school.  
Of course, she was just one of the numerous small girls I watched hurrying past the fields on their way to school as I ploughed my father's fields. I can't really say she was skinny because looked healthy enough for someone in Grade 6 or Grade 7; what I know is she was not fat. I have never seen a child who could be described as fat growing in our village. It was just like that as I grew up. We had them tall and skinny, short; plump or stout even. But fat? No; I don‟t think we had enough food in our area to afford the luxury called obesity. 

Or maybe she was not like the rest of the small girls that chirped and marched their way to our local primary school in their maroon uniforms. But not all of them had these purposeful maroon garments that gave them an air of some naïve importance. She didn‟t. I remember failing to get over the excitement as I waited for the minute to arrive when she would ample past in her yellow or white dress with a lot of laces on it, that was long enough to hide the bow-legged hint of her gait. But the skin on her face was fair and she had a strong jawline. I think she cast a spell on me the very first time she laid eyes on me. I would wait until she was directly under the Musumha tree, which we had christened Musumha Wezvivi, because it was barren and all the disputes that ended in fights were always settled under this tree. Then I would wave at her clandestinely and her grin as she waved back was like a morning kiss from Aphrodite as she revealed teeth that were as large as mine.  

I loved those farming days. After that brief morning encounter, my day was pretty much made, and I would spent the whole day at the pastures, drinking in the glory of that smile and would start day dreaming about all the things that I had no idea I would get arrested for had I dared try to make them real with a mere child of her age. Still the idea of feeling her mouth with mine refused to leave me. I would turn into a Shimmer Chinodya and create a myriad scenes in my head where we would bump into each other deep in the forest, and I would save her scared, shivering ass from marauding wild animals in the middle of a heavy downpour, which would turn into just light showers after the hero stuff had been completed. It was pretty obvious what followed after that. 

Yet in the real world, I rarely talked to her; for reasons quite obvious. Oh, there were opportunities to acquaint myself with her. Several times we crossed paths at the shopping centre or the borehole or the pastures or the cooperative garden, and she would say hi, with a high, lively pitch and chat me up some with her glowing face and that captivating mouth. But I always found myself held prisoner by her bewitching mouth and my words always came out a garbled jumble and I would end up looking for a crappy excuse to run away. I simply did not know what to say whenever the opportunity did materialise. Story of my life, really. I mean I did not have anything better to say beyond hi, and how are you. What nice legal things can a seventeen-year-old school leaver say to a child barely out of her twelfth year and still in elementary school?  
Maybe I could have asked her about school. Yea. How's school kiddo; how are the teachers handling the temptation of your budding constitution? Are they flogging your ass red like they used to do to our female classmates when we were in primary school? Yea; I could think of some chat lines like that. The only problem would be that my lines would be shitty and hollow, and while she might not have realised it because she was young and excitable and eager to talk about everything under the sky, I certainly would; the truth was I cared for her education no more than a lion would care for the life of its next meal. 

But that big toothy smile. It haunted me for years. Maybe I should not use the word haunted because I liked the way her smile haunted me. While at the pastures, I would lie under the stunted greenness of young Mupani trees and think about how a little girl could smile so beautifully at me and wave as she went to school. Maybe I was her good luck charm. I wondered whether she knew what her little smiles did to me. Wondered how her day would pan out after lighting my world with such a sunny smile. Wondered whether she knew I thought about her and her smiles every day. Wondered what she would do if she got to know about the effect of her smiles on my poor soul. I wondered so much I thought I was the word wonder itself. 

Fifteen years passed. Fifteen years is a very long time in life - even God's hair would turn a considerable whiter and a billion children can be born in fifteen years. The last time I had seen her was at the local borehole, which served a whole load of other important functions besides being the only source where we got the priceless liquid for a radius of a myriad kilometres (it remains the best rendezvous on earth for me; the best ever) – and there I had proceeded to chat to her sister. It was the calculated and safer option. The bigger girl had been my classmate all my life until we went separate ways after 'finishing school'. 
Of course there was nothing complete about that education, but that phrase was just another favourite village lingo because our secondary school could offer no more than ordinary level tuition those days. But; having what our more illustrious friends from more affluent environs called an upper top for a school was no hindrance for the further development of our callow minds. So big sister was now an A Level student and so was I; it was only natural that we had common ground for conversation. 
Still my eye could not be denied to feast upon the fine structure beside me that had haunted it for years. That word again. Haunted. It has to be the right word. She had grown of course, and there were things protruding from her body that had not been there before. I gasped – there was now a fairly developed bosom added to the glow of her big teeth. I swear I really did not know the definition of a full, toothy grin until I saw her smile that day. At me. With the same glow and lustre she had always radiated all the years I had known her. I wondered why she always lit up  like a Christmas tree on a bright blue Christmas morning every time she looked at me. 

At the same time, I was chiding myself for being so taken in by her disturbing presence – hell, she must have been fifteen or so years old at that time - it would be weird if there was nothing on her that had changed to prove her development over the years. Every limb, every salient feature and every of her graceful motions reminded me of every of the years I had spent with no opportunity to ogle at her while she made her way to school. I almost drooled. Really.  

But it was fifteen years now. Fifteen years during which I had engrossed myself with the life that Harare offered, and was so taken in by the lights and neon signs of the capital that I almost forgot about her. Harare has enough things to take your mind off any twelve year old crush. There is girls; real big pretty girls, with big pretty bosoms and big pretty asses. There is music, there is weed, there is… everything. But what captured my fancy was the beer, the football and the colleges. I bet no place is better at offering stronger, colder beer than Harare. And Dynamos is in Harare. And the Poly; these were enough to fill my years in the big city. I had dreamed of a life as a media writer ever since I knew the profession existed and so far everything was on course.  

I revelled in my ability to control outcomes in my life, and there was no point in it when I was scared because I fretted over things I had no control over. I worked hard at school, so I controlled the final results. Of course, there was that one time I had gotten drunk and had treaded the very edge of expulsion from the famous institution of Higher Learning when I spent the night in the wrong hall of residence. And spending that night in the wrong hole of residence. I mean it was the right hole, but… it was the wrong hole. The hole itself was clean and nice, and sweet, and smelled like nectar and nothing else I had ever known before – it was just not the hole I should have holed myself in. But come on, man; I was drunk – a man is allowed a few mistakes in life, isn‟t he? David fucked somebody's wife, but he is still in heaven. Or so the good book says. 

Besides, I had no control over the free-fall of the Dembare of my love, which was in the doldrums of its existence those years, but its downfall had been gradual and I cannot say we had not seen it coming. Actually, it was those misfortunes of Dynamos that had me running off to bury my frustrations in that right but wrong hole. Love. Well, I had dabbled in it once or twice. Even thought I had fallen in it at one time. Maybe I had because when she left me, my heart hurt and burned so much I thought it was dying. I don't mean her. I mean her; the other girl. The one who became the wife. My wife. It's like Chris Rock said in I Think I Love My Wife – I think I love my wife. And when she returned I thought I was the only man on this earth to fly so high nothing could bring me back to earth. And fifteen years, two children later, I was still flying. No other UFOs lurking in the shadows to bang against my flight. I was sailing in my own sea from whose bedrock no icebergs mutated to derail my perfectly immaculate Titanic.  

But then Mark Zuckerberg happened. 

Well. Maybe not Mark Zuckerberg as Mark Zuckerberg, but he is the guy who created this dangerously addictive drug called Facebook, right? I watched it in a movie about his creation once, and they said it was a near accurate account of events that surrounded the making of that prohibited steroid. So, in a way it is the young guy's fault. He is the iceberg that finally sank my moral Titanic. But I guess he was just trying to communicate with lost friends, and he succeeded in finding the most effective, most addictive and most vile way of doing so. 

I joined the bandwagon and enjoyed it no end, even going to the extent of finding her again. She was alive. And well too. It should have shocked me, but I think she only accepted my request because she is a nice person and that, from scanning my profile, she figured we had a lot in common. Our home and scholarly background for one. But she could not place a face to my name, which I had embellished simply because there was that privilege as offered by Zuckerberg.  I dabbled with the idea of reminding her about our clandestine shenanigans of old, but reason took over, I think. Besides, I wondered how - and why - somebody her age would remember waving secretly at a boy fifteen years ago. For all I knew she was married and her husband was the Great King Khali who had speech problems and ate little people who stalked his wife for fun. 

Or I simply figured that if she could not recognise me after so many years, then the simple equation was that she had finally grown up and I was apparently no longer that important to her. As if I had ever been; what with all the secret crush and silent signals I had last send a millennium ago. She would have to be really, really, really miserable to even remotely remember me. 
But one day I found a message in my inbox.  
“Hi. Joke is on me. Lolz. Been looking for you all these years, but now I see I was looking for the wrong name. Is it really you?” 
Now. You could have knocked me dead with a dove's feather! It was from her. Even in cyberworld, her words in my eyes felt like those days fifteen years ago when she would smile at me from under the Tree of Sins. Like a kiss from a baby's wet lips. Babies, especially when they are still toothless, have the sweetest lips on earth. When they are all drolly and howling and you put their lips in contact with the confluence of your neck and shoulder as you try to comfort them, there is bound to be a chemical – nay, electrical – reaction. It's as if a bolt of lightning has coursed through every vein and artery in your body, and directed the flow of the liquid traffic to one destination. The one destination that you would not want supercharged in a room full of people. 

But that is what happened to me. And what was worse, it did nothing to prepare me for what was to come next. My chance cyber-meeting with her was like reliving my idealistic adolescence years again, the days when she was just an inaccessible dream in my stream of consciousness, and I was OK with it because a man has to live for something; otherwise he will die for anything. I liked living for something, even when it was a useless crush that I knew got me exactly nothing and nowhere. 

But now the times had changed. I was a grown family man who was having a peek into his past. I was in control. So we arranged a meet; right in the middle of the expanding barrenness that I and she calls home. We all thought it would be innocuous. We should have gone to school about these kind of things. Up to now I still wonder whether it was the worst or best of decisions I have ever made in my life, but what I know is it this; it did leave a mark. So it was a landmark decision. 

We locked eyes from across the road, and it was precisely at that moment that I knew none of us was going to return home that night. God, that illuminating glow from fifteen years ago! She still had it, intact and innocent. I could stand there and drink in the spectacular grandeur of her glow until my eyes puffed and dried out. Nobody said anything; at that moment it would have been treasonous to say anything.  I knew I was losing control of the situation and I was powerless to do anything about it. Yet it felt so right. It was like that plan from God about which people have no control whatsoever, except to say, it's God's will, and all we can do is ask for the serenity to accept it. 

Except I did not think God had anything to do with this plan. And I didn't think Satan had anything to do with it neither; I don't think he is smart enough for that. Besides, Satan is there for destruction, but between me and her was this vibe that had its foundations built deep in our childhoods. I could see that clearly now. And I simply refuse to believe Satan had anything to do with my growing up. 
“I'm married.”  
Those were the first words I managed to utter when I finally found my voice. 
“I know,” she also managed to reply, before our vocal chords were stolen again. 
We got into a steakhouse and ordered food of some kind. I say that because, frankly, I don't remember what we ordered. She ordered something. I ordered something; all the while wondering why I just could not order a nice plate of her and eat her whole while everybody in the steakhouse gaped. We giggled like kids and toyed our way through our food while I told her how shockingly beautiful she had grown and how it was so unlike me to be so recklessly spontaneous. 

Apparently, we had both been spontaneous because nobody home knew she was there with me. She had planned to get back by dusk, but it was apparent there was no going back anywhere today.  Events had taken over. She kept asking me whether I was really there and to tell her that she was really not having one of those frustrating dreams from which one emerges feeling shortchanged and hot all over. Clearly she had been keeping reliable tabs on me; she knew where I had been and what had become of me. 
Why, I asked? 
She looked at me as if I was crazy to ask such a stupid question. But it was the National Stupidity Day, so I could say and do all the stupid things I wanted and still manage to keep a straight face. All she had to do was let me enjoy the holiday and humour me. Because I crushed on you since I was kid, she replied quietly, never leaving my face. 

Wow. On a day of discoveries, this was certainly one that bowled me over. I mean here I was, thinking, I have dreamt about this girl for so long. So long. Yet all the while all she wanted was for me to just say the word. This was so not happening. 
It was getting dark outside. 
“Let's get you home, baby,” I said after what seemed an eternity of us locking our eyes again. 
We had not eaten anything; I guess we were all content just from our eyes devouring each other. 
“Let's get you home before we do something we will both regret tomorrow,” I said as my hands involuntarily cupped her face, whose oval features had now fully developed. 
“We are practically on our first date ever, and I don‟t want to ruin anything.” 
We packed our food and left. But the car we picked for the journey home couldn‟t have been the worst for people who were trying hard to keep hands off each other. And failing dismally; we were barely out of that steakhouse when I grabbed her by her ass and started feasting on her mouth like a lion that has just spend 21 days in fasting captivity. God, it was hot and heavenly, and I had dreamt of doing that to her since her fifteenth summer. She was twenty-five now, but she still tasted like manna. Like my childhood dreams. Maybe I should not have touched her soft lips with mine and took us tumbling through the depths of time to that rendezvous under the Tree of Sins. (There could never be a better place to commit this kind of long-planned sin, except under that tree of trees). It was a spasmodic move that set a very dangerous precedent for the rest or our journey home; for we were alone in the back of that Isuzu.  

I should buy myself an Isuzu KB300 someday. It is a very, very lovely car. Back there, we felt like we were in a lounge, sitting on a cushion by the fireplace. Cosy. Touching. Kissing. Kneading. Licking. Sucking. Moaning. She purred as I breathed over her thick, dark teats that were wet from my suckling. I could feel her shudder as my clumsy hands travelled the length and breadth of her silky perfect body. But I did not think I was clumsy then. At that time, in that car, we were soap stars; the best lovers in the world. Yet, at that time the world did not exist to us. It was just the knowledge that I was there, she was there, and in the safe cocoon of an Isuzu truck that did not belong to us, we had all the freedom to be as clumsy as we wanted. 

We swam in that clumsiness and could not get enough of it. She was getting hot. I was getting hot. Maybe it had something to do with that Isuzu. Or maybe it had something to do with us and our clumsiness. This girl was going to burn me alive. She lay on her back and started pulling me onto her, just as my ears discerned something wrong with the sound of our transport. There was something wrong. Or right. It was the driver changing the gears and pulling his vehicle to a stop because we had arrived. Fuck; we were here already! I remembered myself telling her earlier that somebody just had to take control and be sensible between us. 

But she replied that  she had burned for me since her fifteenth summer, and she all she wanted right now was to take all the sense and sensibility and throw it out of the moving vehicle. And that is what she exactly did. Couldn't I see all the pent up passion blazing off her in several fire balls and going straight for my heart? No baby. Sense and sensibility can come back tomorrow. Today I want to be reckless for the first time in my life. I want to be reckless with you. 

Thinking back now; maybe we should have just kept all the sense and sensibility tucked safely away in one corner of that cocoon, helplessly watching as we ripped each other apart. That way the driver would not have been wise on our behalf; he would certainly have driven aimlessly up and down the road until he was sure that we had had enough of each other to last another fifteen years; instead of remembering that we were supposed to get off at some place sometime. We both cursed. Loudly. 

But I couldn't tell whether I was saved or cursed. Still, I would reflect on all that tomorrow. Because today was National Stupidity Day. All I wanted today was to be stupid and spontaneous and reckless.  

With her.