Sanyati

Peering through the pudgy finger-frame of his pseudo hand-binoculars, his fore nail nearly digging into the flesh of his thumb, Kurayi pretends to adjust his fingers for a better view.

“Okay, I have a decent view. Hand me the sling,” he whispers to the pile of boys crouched under his seat.

Immediately the air beneath him awakes, mingled with frantic movement and breathy murmurs. Kurayi sticks his hand below his seat and wiggles it around expectantly, concomitantly whacking someone in the face.

Poorly supressed laughter ripples through the boys beneath him.

“Sorry, sorry. Just pass the thing already! Who has it?” he murmurs, trying to keep his eyes on the target.

A stinging pain astonishes his palm as someone slaps the sling into his hand.

“What the hell!” he spits out, once the pain has faded into a ghost of itself.

“I’ll do it on your face next time if you don’t shut up and shoot,” one of the boys shoots back, probably whoever took a whack to the face.

He inserts a plastic marble into the slingshot and barely aims it at the back of his target’s bald head.

Truthfully, and unbeknownst to the gaggle of boys fidgeting impatiently beneath him, Kurayi has never shot a thing in his life, let alone worked a slingshot. But like most Zimbabwean youth—devoted to the demands of a testosterone-driven teenage life—he couldn’t back down from doing his part.

They had been planning this all week long and it was finally go time.

Squinting, he pulls the sling back, and aims for anything and nothing.

1..

2…

The bus jolts and the marble flicks out of Kurayi’s insecure grip, tumbling into the aisle.

A protestant groan ruffles through the bus, and Kurayi hurriedly stuffs the slingshot into his pocket and plunks himself squarely back into his seat, just as Mrs. B instinctively turns around to check that no children have been unceremoniously flung out of the window.

Her eyes dart from one pubescent face to the next, briefly taking each child in. She blinks once and restarts her visual investigation, this time starting from the back and silently counting each child. A warm, steady panic itches her scalp and brings her to her feet, her lips folded over themselves in a tight mouth-seal. The numbers aren’t adding up.

She uses her finger this time, pointing at each child’s head as she counts. Four are missing. How can four whole children be missing?

Kurayi, who has been impatiently waiting for Mrs. B to return to her knitting so he can dive for his fugitive marble, witnesses her growing panic and latches onto it, realizing what’s amiss.

He kicks at the space beneath his seat and tries to whisper, through static lips, “You guys need to get out of there, Mrs. B is doing a head count.”

Mrs. B is moving down the aisle now, holding onto the faith that lots of children nap on bus rides all the time.

“C’mon! Get out of there!” Kurayi tries not to scream.

The four boys, disoriented with panic, nearly mangle each other as they all try to contort their way out of the little space.

“Shit.”

“Kurayi, where are the boys that were sitting in the back seats?”

Kurayi rubs his palms onto his shorts and smiles.

“We’re playing a game Mrs B, hide and seek.”

“Hide and seek? On a bus? Where on earth would anyone hide?”

“If I knew I would have found them by now.”

“Well, tell them to come out right now, I’m doing a head count. I need to make sure everyone’s on the bus,” a relieved Mrs B demands.

Kurayi nods, “You heard her guys, come out.”

Tino emerges, feet first, followed by Tafadzwa’s head, Emmanuel’s elbows and Godfree’s arms. The boys untangle themselves and squeeze awkwardly into the seat next to Kurayi.

“What? What is the meaning of this? Do I look like I was born yesterday? What kind of stupid hide and seek is this where everyone hides in the same place?” Mrs B retorts.

“But it’s like you said Ma’am, it’s not like there are a lot of places to hide in a bus,” Kurayi tries to explain.

“You’re talking back to me? Your elder?  You think I’m stupid handiti. You think I’m the same age as you.”

Five heads shake themselves back and forth in dizzying protest.

“I’m separating you five mischievous boys. Next thing I know, one of you has lost an ear trying to play maflawu or pada in this bus. What will I tell your mothers? Tino, go and change seats with Albert, Godfree exchange with Chipo, Tafadzwa with Ernest, Kurayi with Susan, and Emmanuel you come and sit with me. Move! Move! Fambai!” Mrs B uses her entire, flouncing body to yell.

Masking his relief with his best imitation of irritation, a foul faced Kurayi settles in beside his new bus mate, thankful he didn’t have to shoot his dignity off along with that marble after all. 

“The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny,” the person beside him says, their eyes watching the world outside the window unfold. 

Kurayi glances at them and almost laughs at the sheer irony of this moment. The target his eyes struggled to make just a few minutes ago was now sitting right next to him. 

“Yes, that was directed at you,” a now grinning Sanyati adds, this time turning to face her new neighbour. “Wole Soyinka coined it. Don’t swallow the tyranny of that old hag, I’d tell her I have a mind to play all the damn games I like because my parents paid for me to be here.”

Kurayi offers her another short glance of acknowledgement and shakes his head, “Didn’t hear you. I mean, I thought you uh… were talking to yourself?”

A candle of amusement lights in her eyes. 

Sanyati laughs lowly and nods. “I know I had quite the reputation for conversing with myself all through primary school, but I’ve caught on to some social norms.” 

Her words could have echoed in the empty space between them.

“And if I really wanted to, I could just think up a conversation with myself in my head, instead of saying it out loud for you and the rest of your bully friends to hear.” 

“Bully friends?” Kurayi repeats and shifts even further from her, as if recoiling from the word itself. . 

“What? Would you rather I say oppressive? Tyrannical? Ruffian?” 

Kurayi tries to swallow but finds nothing but air in his mouth. 

“We’re not bullies.” 

“Oh, my bad then. I guess I’m yet to catch on to the social philosophy that normalizes taunting people for being bald and religious.” 

Eyes fastened on her taciturn interlocutor, she watches as he fingers the hem of his blazer, clearly intent on rubbing out an invisible stain he finds there. 

Kurayi finally unhands his blazer and looks straight ahead. “We’re not bullies.” 

Sanyati opens her mouth to say something, but decides against it and turns back to her moving show, leaving a relieved Kurayi to clean his spotless blazer in peace. 

Kurayi doesn’t know what this feeling is, or who put it inside him, but all he knows is his body can’t seem to contain it. He jerks and shifts beside Sanyati, fighting the urge to steal a glance at her head—hairless since the very first day he saw her in third grade.  He swipes his upper lip with his tongue and can almost taste the memory of the salty air that welcomed her that day, saturated with third grader tears and prejudicial disdain. There was something about her bald head and white robes, that dissolved the rest of the thick and kinky haired children to tears. She was the child of a Madzibaba, the head of a national religious sect, associated with ancestral worship and African traditional healers—The Mapostori. She never said or did anything particularly scary—none of them did, but for the more sheltered, private school children coming from families of a western religious affiliation, and raised to believe in the absoluteness of their beliefs, anything unknown to them was scary enough. 

Of course he never questioned it, he was young and only knew to fear it, to fear them, like everyone else. It had been years of creating elaborate jokes and pranks to unsettle the only heathen child in the classroom. The lost children that prayed to more than one God were not to be pitied or conversed with, lest you be contaminated. 

So why then, does he want more of her? To hear her list some more words he doesn’t know, to tell him more quotes about men who die of silence. Why does he want to see if he can make her laugh at something he says, to see if he has anything in his own head that he can give her to chew on and consider.

Curiosity. 

She put it in him, and he has to get it out.  

Tafadzwa’s booming voice rattles the little bus, which falls into receptive silence at the sound of his two words: “AHOY MACOMRADES!” 

If relief were unhealthy, Kurayi would have been choking on it by now. 

He jumps to his feet and joins the rest of his classmates in answering to Tafadzwa’s war cry: “AHOY!” 

Then the entire bus erupts into song—feet and hands banging on anything they can as they belt along. 

Sanyati rubs her eyes for the third time now, but is met with no change. Perhaps her mind is playing a sick joke on her. No, perhaps they are toying with her. 

It took years of hard work to control their access to her and keep her grip on her physical reality, especially when they were trying to call out to her. So how could they have gotten through to her today.  

Placing two protective hands over her ears, she shouts for Kurayi to let her into the aisle and moves through the musical ruckus in the bus. She places a shaky hand on Mrs. B’s shoulder once she gets to the front. 

“I need to ask you something, where are we going? You said it was a swimming trip?” she yells into the teacher’s ear. 

“Oh but we’re almost there dear!”

“No, I need to know! Where are we going?” 

“Well, it was meant to be a surprise, but we’re going to the most potent river in Zimbabwe, the river Sanyati!” Mrs. B screams back, then bursts into a heaving laugh, “Why, that’s an incredible coincidence! We’re taking Sanyati to the river Sanyati!”

Sanyati’s eyes pool into dread. She clutches Mrs. B’s lower arm, “We need to turn around. Now! We can’t go there, it’s dangerous!” she screams, the fear in her eyes spilling onto her cheeks now. 

Mrs. B bends and motions for Sanyati to repeat herself. 

“I said this is dangerous! We can’t swim in that river, please turn the bus around!”

Mrs. B shakes her head and yells back, “I can’t hear anything anymore, the bus is too loud! Ask me when we get there child!” before shaking Sanyati off and returning to her half-knit scarf. 

So they aren’t playing tricks on her, nobody is. 

They are actually here. 

They are in Mhondoro, headed for the Sanyati River. 

“PLEASE BE RESPECTFUL OF THE SANYATI AND ITS HISTORY, ENJOY YOUR VISIST” reads the wooden sign currently receiving all of Kurayi’s scorn. So much for leaving everything to do with her on the bus.

He whacks the sign lightly with the back of his hand and jogs forward to join the rest of his friends, who are diving into the river from its boulder strewn edges. 

“Come on Kurayi, you’re up,” says Emmanuel, hitting his back and pushing him towards an empty boulder. “It’s a little slippery so just move slow. And don’t dive dive, it’s not a pool, just do like a belly flop dive,” he cautions.

Kurayi does a mini salute and steps onto the boulder, takes two shallow breaths, then dives in and hits the water—belly flat. The boys applaud and cheer as he emerges from the water and Kurayi joins them, his stomach stinging with teenage recklessness, but finally feeling like his most empowered self for the first time today. His victory moment is, however, short-lived, as everyone diverts their attention to Emmanuel who’s now yelling the rules of a new water game. 

Kurayi begins to wade his way closer to the gang. He scans the edges of the river as he moves and hooks onto a sight that steals any knowledge he previously had of movement. Feet sinking into the muddy river floor and arms floating limp at his sides, he watches as Sanyati sits under a leaning Muhacha tree and pinches the corner of a page in her novel, her eyes hurriedly darting back and forth across the page, as if trying to read as fast as possible so she can finally turn the page. Her impatient fingers eventually release the corner and turn the page, but turn it back again as she re-reads the last line, which she probably read too fast and forgot to stitch to the rest of the pieces of her story. 

He watches as her eyes move a little slower now, and thinks perhaps this part of the book isn’t as interesting, perhaps it’s sad and gut-wrenching to read. He wonders what she’s thinking, who her favourite character is and if they’re still alive that late in the novel. Or maybe it’s the kind of novel where the best characters don’t die, the kind of novel that cares how the readers feel. 

She would read a novel like that. 

Suddenly, her eyes lift off the page and stare right into his. He blinks twice but doesn’t look away, neither does she. But her eyes don’t acknowledge him at all. In-fact, they blink lazily and move to focus on something behind him. Then they widen—those dark, black eyes. 

Stretched with despair, her eyes dart between Kurayi and whatever has caught her attention behind him, before she leaps to her feet and begins to run toward the river. She yells something as she runs, but he can’t make out what.

Swivelling around, Kurayi is met with a sight he’s only ever seen in an old dystopian movie he watched a few years ago. Cyclone something. The water behind the gang of boys, who are currently tossing around a stick further down the river, seems to have risen and coiled around itself to form a looming, twisting, water cone. Kurayi doesn’t move. He opens his mouth to warn his friends, but can’t seem to grasp the words. Things like this don’t happen in Zimbabwe.

Eventually, moved by the recollection of how that dystopian movie ended for everyone except the main protagonist, he gathers his wits and begins frantically splashing at the water to get his friends’ attention, “Emmanuel! Tafadzwa! Guys get out of the water, something’s wro—” 

A half-naked Sanyati splashes ahead of him, as she moves toward the group of boys in giant, leaping wades, flinging herself into each one. 

“Wait no, Sanyati it’s dangerous! We should call Mrs. B!” Kurayi yells at her retreating form, but doesn’t move to follow her. 

Sanyati doesn’t hear him, or if she does, she pays him no mind. Once she is only a few metres from the boys, she stands and waves her hands frantically, managing to catch Tafadzwa’s attention. 

“Behind you!” she screams. 

By now, most of the boys are either just catching on, or already swimming to the edges of the river, away from the roiling water, but Godfree—who was furthest from the edge—is caught in the rising water. Kurayi watches in horror as his friend splashes about futilely, unable to outswim the tide. 

“Someone help! Help! We need help!” he yells, seized with helplessness. As if in response to his words, which he wishes he could take back now, Sanyati dives into the water and swims toward Godfree. She raises her arms and moves them in a circular pattern for three or four times, yells something inaudible, and then pinches her nose and sinks into the water. 

Immediately, the risen water falls back into itself and the river regains its calm. 

Godfree, tired and seized with shock, floats slowly to the edge of the river, where he is received by the rest of the boys and some girls from the first aid club. 

Kurayi stares at the now sedated water, saucer eyed with confusion, then swims frantically to the edge and runs for Mrs. B. 

                                                       * * *

Sanyati’s mother—an underwhelming and aged version of her dark eyed daughter—is clad in the standard Mapostori knee length gown, her hands clasped together, as she stands at the school gate and briefly searches for her daughter’s face on each child that passes her by. Kurayi’s feet, lead heavy, walk themselves down from the bus and up to her. And now, facing a woman he has never spoken to, in a place his feet brought him to without his consent, his mouth decides to follow suit: 

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I think your daughter is dead.” 

Sanyati’s mother doesn’t flinch. 

“Excuse me?” 

After an agonizing few minutes of recounting everything that occurred at that river, Kurayi doesn’t know how to respond to this now smiling and seemingly relieved woman before him.

“Well, it sounds like you all had quite the adventure, doesn’t it? In any case, I’m glad you had Sanyati. Without her, your trip would have been in for a dubious end,” she beams. 

Kurayi takes a step back, “W.. what?”

The woman places a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. 

“Sanyati will be back in school on Monday.” 

And with that, she turns and slowly walks away from the perplexed boy. 

But how can a dead girl… come to school?