to cure you. Go! Get your cure from somewhere-elsewhere!’ Mrs Zulu seemed to believe that only incurable sadness would yield the miracle of Matha’s infinite tears.
When Mrs Zulu next made her short pilgrimage from No. 78 to No. 74 Kalingalinga, she was armed with nine weeping women in a deferential queue behind her, ordered by height. Wielding her thick Bible in one hand, a raspberry shoot in the other, Mrs Zulu stood at the head of the line and rallied them to weep and hoot and holler. Then ‘March!’ she shouted, and off they went, Mrs Zulu sending her whip whizzing behind her like an equestrian whenever the keening slackened.
Soon everyone in Kalingalinga knew what it meant to see those thin horizontal tattoos gleaming white or pink on a mother’s or a sister’s outer thigh. The nine Weepers each had their own reason for crying. A philandering husband. A stillborn baby. An abusive brother. But Mrs Zulu did not care to hear why the women were sad and they did not dare share. As if they were at a neverending funeral, they just gathered together to sit in the yard outside Matha’s home and cry all day long, their sobs beating through the air.
Neighbours rolled their eyes. Grace scowled. Dogs set to wailing in competition. But after a while, Matha herself grew reconciled to them. Indeed, she became downright gracious, welcoming them in for hot tea in tin cups and bread and butter sandwiches. Over the years, Matha’s constant tears had aged her and isolated her. Now she found herself enjoying The Weepers’ girlish banter, and the laughter that broke through their tears like a breeze on a humid day. She savoured the company of other young women whom she could chastise by wiping their tears with her shrinkled fingers or soothe simply by doing what she always did.
* * *
Maybe that’s why Matha got distracted. Because, two months after Mrs Zulu gathered The Weepers and brought them to her like a wilting bouquet, little Sylvia went missing. Matha woke up with her usual salty sneeze. But when she rolled over to pat her daughter’s head, the sleeping mat was empty. Matha sat up. Grace had already left for work. Matha fumbled around the shack, its dented, chipped objects tumbling here and there in the cyclone of her hunt. Her daughter was not inside. And she was not outside, crouching as was her wont over a small piece of the world, rapt in contemplation. Matha hurried to the toilets, desperately rubbing salt from her eyes. But Sylvia was not there either.
Matha cursed her tears for dimming her vision and choking her throat, which only clicked when she tried to call Sylvia’s name. She knew that her daughter was too timid to go too far without her. Could Grace have taken her to work? Grace, with her scar of a frown, Grace who had ignored her niece except for exactly once, a close call with a lit mbaula when Sylvia was two? There was no kind of sense to be made of it but Matha had no sense left in her now anyway. Her mind was in the grip of panic.
She made her way to the neighbourhood where Grace worked. Going anywhere took a long time – Matha was banned by reputation from the buses because her crying infected everyone’s mood – and she knew only that it was near the university. Matha spent the morning drifting around Handsworth Park, waiting at the gates of a dozen houses. Maids and gardeners shooed her off, thinking her a beggar or a lunatic. By the time she found the right address, the sun hung high in the sky, a bright blob.
‘Ah-ah. So you are Grace’s famous cousin who is crying all the time?’
Matha nodded at the skinny black blur topped with a squat white blur – a hat, she assumed.
‘Your relative is always complaining about you,’ he laughed. ‘I am Mr Sakala, the cook.’
Where was Grace? Where was Sylvia? But Mr Sakala was still talking.
‘It cannot be so bad, my dear. Have you had some tea?’
Was he trying to cheer her up? No, no, no – there was no time for such sentiments!
‘It is very important to keep the body nice-and-warm. There is a special root I use for Dona Agnes. She is from abroad’ – here he paused to measure job security against the relish of gossip – ‘and she is blind. This root, it is good for the eyes. She is