Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

‘To get to Lalapanzi,’ Sisi Blandina said, ‘you take the train here in Salisbury and get off at Gwelo. You then take a bus from Gwelo and drive through Wha Wha before you get to Lalapanzi.’

I liked to work the rhythm of the names into my skipping games.

‘ Right foot Salisbury, left foot Gwelo .

Right foot Gwelo, left foot Wha Wha .

Right foot Wha Wha, left foot Lalapanzi .

Right foot Lalapanzi, left foot Lalapanzi .

Both feet Lalapanzi, both feet Lalapanzi .’

There had been many housemaids before Sisi Blandina. They lived with us, they were a part of our family and yet were not of it, sharing my bedroom, and getting up at five in the morning to sweep the floors, make the breakfast for my parents and for Munya and me, wash the dishes, walk Munya and me to school, wash the clothes and the windows, make lunch for Munya and me, fetch us from school, do the lunchtime dishes, make and serve the supper, wash more dishes, and through it all, watch that Munya and I behaved and didn’t kill each other, before collapsing to wake again at five the next morning.

The white children like my old best friend Jenny Russell and Laura Steele in Miss Blakistone’s class called the maids who worked at their houses by their first names, but we called them Sisi , sister, it being unthinkable that young children could address adults just by their first names. They came and went, dismissed for various flaws as my mother searched for the perfect housemaid, leaving behind the uniform dress and matching hat that they all wore which seemed to stretch and shrink to fit each one.

My mother dismissed Sisi Memory and Sisi Sekesai because they ate too much bread in the morning, spooning too much jam on their bread.

‘Housemaids should not eat too much,’ said my mother.

Sisi Loveness dimpled and glowed when she smiled, and every Saturday she undid her plaited hair, scratched out the dandruff with a red plastic comb, washed her hair and plaited it again in neat rows across her head. She used Ingram’s Camphor Cream and not normal Vaseline, and her clean smell lingered in every room that she left. My mother fired her because she said SisiLoveness cared too much for her appearance and not enough for the floors of the house. I see now that my mother fired Sisi Loveness because she was all too aware of the stories of maids who stole husbands away from their employers.

‘Housemaids should not be too pretty,’ all the women agreed.

Sisi Dudzai was fired because my mother came home unexpectedly and found her dancing to Bhutsu mutandarikwa , sweating and dancing, as my mother said, like one possessed, stomping on the living room floor, clapping herself on in encouragement, head thrown back in abandonment, whistling like she was out herding cows.

‘Housemaids should not enjoy themselves too much,’ my mother declared.

Those who were not fired quit, like Sisi Maggie who left to get married to Mukoma Joseph, the gardener who worked for Mr Shelby from number twenty-five. The union did not bring Mr Shelby closer to us, and he still watched with an unfriendly face as Munya and I walked past his house, and grunted his response when we chirped, ‘Good morning, Mr Shelby,’ while Munya looked at Mr Shelby’s dog Buster with longing.

Sisi Nomathemba quit because she could not make us obey her. Munya and I had an unerring eye for the weaknesses in the maids’ resolve. We found them in Sisi Nomathemba, and sometimes led her away from the normal route along the road, and got her lost among the greenways at the back of the houses and left her there. We tormented and laughed at her because she spoke Ndebele, we said ‘ hai ’ to everything she said because that was how she began her sentences, and we repeated what she said and mimicked her accent until, conquered, she wept and said lina abantwana liyahlupa sibili .

We went with Sisi Jenny to our mother’s friend’s niece’s wedding in Canaan between Jerusalem and Engineering in Highfields and she wore a yellow dress with white stars that was too small for my mother. When the master of ceremonies pointed to the lorry that would drive people to the rural home of the bride, SisiJenny hurtled off in that direction and the last we saw of her was a distant figure in a yellow dress clambering into the packed lorry, her red shoe almost falling from her right foot.

Sisi Jenny was succeeded by Sisi Lucia, who was not pretty, and did not eat too much, and did not enjoy herself at all. She did not smile once in the two months that she was with us; she watched me all the time, and made me feel guilty for no reason. My mother thought she had found the perfect housemaid until Sisi Lucia locked Munya and me up in my bedroom and vanished with my mother’s new electric kettle and toaster from Barbour’s, her favourite pair of shoes and three pairs of my father’s trousers.

My mother then tried out poor relations as maids. They came from the rural areas with the musty smell of old smoke on their clothes and the sweet smell of peanut oil on their skin. They delighted in the television and stood mesmerised before its images. Vatete Susan sat and watched as the Capwells in Santa Barbara failed to see that Dominic who whispered his words and appeared only in the shadows was really their supposedly dead mother Sophia, as evil Angela Channing tightened her grip on the Gioberti wine estate on Falcon Crest , and all the while my mother muttered under her breath and the fat congealed on the dishes piled up in the kitchen sink.

The Capwells did find out about Dominic/Sophia and Angela Channing lost to Chase Gioberti, but Vatete Susan was not there: she had been replaced by Mbuya Stella who liked to stretch out her legs on the floor as she talked through the smoke rings and regaled my bemused father with the latest stories of the antics of the black sheep of their family. Through the convoluted logic of Karanga relationships, at seventeen, she was his mother, and therefore my mother’s mother-in-law, to be treated with some respect.

Then my mother decided that it was youth and not the lack of a blood connection that was the problem; the girls were too young, too inexperienced. She found instead a woman much older than her whom we called Auntie in the English way because she was not our relative but was too old to be called by her first name even if it was prefaced by Sisi , and whom my grandmother being hard of hearing called Kauntie. Kauntie fell asleep in the middle of the day and forgot to fetch Munya from school and he went hunting for tadpoles in the Chisipite stream, fell and banged his mouth and that was the end of his upper incisor tooth and of Kauntie. And that is how we ended up with Sisi Blandina, who spoke Karanga as deep as my grandmother’s, and after two years it was almost like she had always been there.

When Sisi Blandina told us stories that her grandmother had told her, she began the tales in the traditional manner and said ngano ngano ngano , lilting the different syllables, and we replied ngano , and she repeated it twice to make sure we were really ready; we chanted back to her in anticipation because we knew that she would lead us to an enchanted realm where boys who turned into lions won the maidens of their hearts’ desire, the hare was more cunning than his uncle the baboon, the girl who scorned to squeeze an ugly old woman’s sores ended up living in enchantment beneath the water, and the king of a land far away set a trap to find which of his perfidious wives and children had cooked and eaten his royal tortoise.