Why I Called Phibi By Her Full Name

When my mother sent me to school, her only child, before the age of 7 years like other children in South Africa, it was if in a hurry to re-collect herself as a childless woman. She said I was smart boy and ahead of my age, and in her words, ‘You’re wasting time at crèche,’ which meant money. But I was frail and little. And I walked like I was wet. In a genuine sense of this expression: my school uniform wore me.

Other children laboured the toil of education with love. And I couldn’t even endure grade one. It felt like prison in movies. And my teacher, Mrs. Medupe, was unforgiving as a prison guard while my classmates bore the belligerent nature of inmates. But because in some idle introspection of violence—that occurred in our childhood—something is funny as if the lasting effects, if there are, have as little consequences as never having to live twice. And so the memory has always been amusing.

On the second day of school: I didn’t have an eraser to reverse the inevitable mistake I made in mathematics. And I couldn’t borrow it from anyone even if my life depended on it. I was frail and little—needless to say, than all of them, and afraid, if some strong boy volunteered to stomp on the little pest then everyone lauded him for it. But with the presence of mind, the ingenuity of a genius, I wetted my index finger and rubbed the error away from the page. It didn’t end well. It left a gaping hole on the page. And I couldn’t hide it from my teacher, Mrs. Medupe, who hurled my book across the classroom and shouted my name from her desk. I was scared to a stupor, from her piercing eyes that prowled for me above the frame of her glasses, as she shouted my name once more and I kept quiet—stealthily still and almost invisible, hoping she couldn’t see me, smell me, or sense me in any way. Importantly, that she didn’t know me. School had just started. But she knew me, and upon seeing me, she beckoned me over to her desk and implored me to bunch the tip of my fingers like a beak. She stroked my fingers with blackboard duster until they were numb and boiling in pain mostly for keeping quiet like a little skelm when she shouted my name.

When she tasked Modise, a classmate, a strong boy, to monitor us in her absence, it became clear that more school days would accrue only with some order of terror and tyranny. But to a fault of our own, me and my classmates, we made noise and became a nuisance to Modise before we learnt of his militant ideas on discipline. In his foul mood, he’d wet a towel and implore us to close our eyes and sink our heads on our desks and pretend to pray, as he walked amid us and flogged whoever moved a muscle. The pain shot straight to the heart. And for his mouth was harsh as his hand that he likened to the blessing hand of God, I never prayed the same God; I found my own.

I felt stranded between school and home. I couldn’t tell my parents everything other than I hated school. My father’s face assumed a scowl, which I suspected, it’d become a permanent detail of his face if he knew I was leaving school. I didn’t tell. But I left school. My modus operandi was simple: left in the mornings with Phibi, a tall and beautiful girl, my classmate and the other child in my village section who attended the same school as me. Then I spread the fields. And ensured that nobody, besides Phibi, saw me, as I sunk below the roots of grass that grew taller than me—and eddied cautiously with any movement, until Phibi arrived from school in the afternoon, then it was time to go home. It went on until Phibi betrayed me.

Phibi. Short for Iphebeng. Odd name for a child. But besides her beauty, she was also neat and elegant with the amount of Vaseline she applied on her tall legs, unlike other children whose legs were magnets to dust. I didn’t know how my mother felt about her. But I knew how my mother felt about her name. It was in that ineffable name that’d easily suit old men that she said, ‘Only a witch can burden their beautiful daughter with a heavy name.’ And what on my mother’s tongue could prick where a thorn couldn’t, I inherited it as hatred and a true taunt for beautiful girls. They befriended a boy based on more than I could conceive was charming. Only in their presence, could a boy feel the shame of poverty like to see his own father naked—and not so much the nakedness than the sight of desperation. So, rightly or wrongly, I hated them. Not Phibi. And this, of course, was before she betrayed me. And for her discretion was beforehand in rapport with my plans, I couldn’t hate her. Only one year older than me, but the insignificance of age gap between a man and a woman—just a number, can easily round up to infinity between a 6-year short boy and a 7-year tall girl. But I wished to kiss her. Always. And I never called her by her ugly full name as a favour that formed its own pattern—maybe in my heart than my mind or my mouth, until, of course, the afternoon she betrayed my love.

The sun aligned into the usual hour of her arrival, but she didn’t arrive. I went home and as I entered the gate, to my surprise, there she was! Leaving my home! I looked past her into my mother’s unconcealable pang of disappointment. She was reading the letter Phibi brought; clearly about my transgressions. My worry dissolved into fear that paired uncontrollably with anger.

‘Iphebeng, what do you want here?’ I asked fretfully.

She walked past me. Ignored me. I reproached her with a hateful glare and asked again:

‘What have you said, you ugly child of a witch?’

She ran away from me—and homeward, the beautiful child of a witch, as I tried to chase her.

‘LEAVE HER ALONE AND COME BEFORE ME!’ yelled my father, emerging with few switches that qualified as bone-breaking sticks if one were to assess the possible impact on the frail and small, school-hating truant.

I stood at the gate with no intention of getting closer. He waited.

The end

By Tshepo S. Molebatsi

From: South Africa

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