Tea and Biscuits

I had hoped to meet and make a friend on the bus as we were all headed to Harare to register as first year University students. I enrolled into university motherless and on the brink of womanhood. The boy seated next to me on the bus had smelled of dried cassava root mixed with fish and cheap alcohol. He had talked and talked pontificating about politics and the withering economy. There were no more free seats so I sat there and stared outside the window wishing that my mother could have been there.
The events of that day will be etched in my mind forever like a tattoo. The pastor’s yard had always smelled distinctly of freshly cut grass and pine, from the pine trees that flanked his wire fence. It was always a fresh satisfying smell that masked the fetid scent of neglect that had taken over the entire city. This scent was enshrined in the potholes, blocked drains and the cracked pavements that the city council no longer bothered to maintain. We were so excited to have tea and biscuits at the pastor’s house.
I often wish that they had not served us biscuits that day. After they broke the news to us something in me broke. The love of biscuits and tea broke with it and I have not eaten a biscuit since. I banished biscuits from my mouth and my stomach forever. The pastor’s expression was sullen and his wife’s countenance was betraying. A pervading look of finality and sadness had enveloped my mother and we could hear it in the sound of her voice as she recounted the worst news I had ever received. She spoke slowly with cracks in between words, cracks that I have today every time I remember that day.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), we had learnt this in school. Big words whose meaning were translated into death, stigma and fear all mixed up in one big bowl of shame. Each ensuing visit to the clinic became even more foreboding and we came to see her weekly appointments as an augury of her return to the ancestors. My mother became slight and her hair flowed like a new born baby’s hair. Her skin became dark and shiny and her eyes became so bright. Always bed ridden she began to lose her sight, her joy and her life. Her gait became stiff and I often had to lift her up to take her to the toilet and back to her bed. The whorls of despair that we had; became insurmountable. Flu became an arbiter of doom and the slightest chill in the atmosphere made everyone panic looking for blankets to heap on top of my mother.