Ntombikayise has not opened her father’s letter yet. It came enclosed with the letter from her brother, telling her to come home immediately. Well, actually, the letter didn’t say that at all. All it said was that their father was on his deathbed. Never a man to believe in Western medicine, he had opted to go the traditional route and hold a ceremony to appease the ancestors, asking them to rid him of the illness threatening his life. Cows had been slaughtered and the homestead had been fenced with tree branches from the special trees that were only ever cut down for occasions such as these. In the abandoned hut, the regal chief took off his traditional headdress, the sign of his chieftaincy, and approached the ancestors like a humble, mortal man. He reached for the beer the family had been brewing for a week and he spilled the whole calabash onto the ground, pleading with the ancestors to give him the sight to see when he would recover, and bargaining with them to speed up the date. He then threw a bag of animal bones onto the goat skin on the floor, to hear what his forefathers had to say and they told him all he needed to know: They were calling him home.

Ntombikayise read the letter by candlelight. She had not paid the electrical bill in three months now and her eyes had adapted to the dim light the white wax candle provided. Her breath caught at the last line. She folded the letter and put it back in the envelope and pulled out the second letter, which bore her father’s scrawl on it. She would have known it was his either way. Ntombikayise means, “Her father’s daughter”. Chief Khanyisa found it redundant to use that name for her so he called her “my daughter” instead and that is who the letter was addressed to- Ntombiyami. The name was a heavy burden she shed the day she ran away to the city. When the taxi driver asked her for her name, she told him it was Ntombi and with that, she became her own woman and severed all connections from her father. And now here he was, reclaiming her by resurrecting her forgotten identity.

Chief Khanyisa has always been a stubborn man, even when faced with his own impending immortality. The man absolutely refused to breathe his last, always taking one more wheezy breath after the last. His headstrong nature might have forced his daughter out of his home but it’s the only thing keeping him alive before she gets here. If she gets here, that is. The old man’s illness took him by surprise but he is grateful for the slow-moving pace at which the disease is consuming him. It has allowed him time to reflect on his life’s journey and no greater mistakes haunt him than those he made when raising his only daughter. The slight possible of being able to make amends is the only thing keeping him alive but he knows that it might not be enough to ward off death’s imminent arrival.

The letter greets her in the morning when she wakes up. It slips out from under her pillow and lands on the floor at her feet. She slides it under her bed with her foot but it confronts her that night when she’s looking for her left shoe. So, she takes it and stuffs it in the kitchen cabinet but every time she enters the kitchen, she is painfully aware of its presence and it torments her. She reaches out to open the cabinet and snatches her hand away when she reconsiders a minute later. She fears the power of the letter. Once she reads it, it will set in motion a chain of events that she will have no control over. She will be forced to return home, head hung in shame in typical prodigal daughter fashion, and face her father’s scorn one last time before he dies. Wordlessly, she takes the letter and holds it over the candle, only letting go when the flames start to lick her fingers. She tosses and turns the whole night on the squeaky second-hand mattress that she spent her last bit of money on. There’s a draught coming into the room from the broken window but she wakes up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. She has never been the superstitious type but she knows what this means. She pulls out her old battered suitcase underneath her bed and stuffs with the clothes that lay folded in the corner of her tiny room. She wraps her hair in the modest headscarf that she wore the day she left home and puts on her longest and most modest dress, coupled with sensible tennis shoes that will withstand the rocky terrain she will have to walk on when she gets off the bus stop. Her father is already haunting her from death’s door and she will be damned if she allows him an opportunity to do it from beyond the grave without speaking her truth. Suitcase in hand, she walks out the door and makes her way to the bus stop.

The bus rumbles along the gravel, swerving and curving to avoid the potholes and Ntombikayise grips the seat in front of her to steady herself. A sharp left turn catches her by surprise and she finds herself leaning into the older woman sleeping next to her. The woman does not stir from her slumber and Ntombikayise breathes a sigh of relief. She finds herself looking closer at the woman, unable to tear her eyes away. The woman looks to be in her late fifties, or her early sixties at most, around the same age Ntombikayise’s mother would have been. She tries to find other points of similarity but comes up empty. It was a futile endeavor anyway. Ntombikayise’s mother left when she was just four years old. She couldn’t remember what she looked like even if she tried. Regardless of the painful memories it brought to the surface, she found the exercise of studying the people in the bus to be a helpful distraction so she started to look around and make up scenarios in her mind about these people. She figures that the bus driver probably wanted to be a pilot but because an opportunity to fly in the skies never presented itself, he was content to navigate the roads instead. The impeccably dressed man sitting in the front seat fiddles with the wedding band on his left hand. He is probably wearing it for the first time in months and trying to erase the memories of the parade of women he let into his bed in the city before he goes home to visit the family he left in the village under the context of providing a better life for them. On and on Ntombikayise goes, allowing her imagination to write a narrative of the lives of the strangers while she searches for the bandwidth to confront the reality she is living through.

She stops when she reaches a man carrying a toddler on his lap. He makes funny faces, sticking his tongue out and twitching his nose up and down, and the little girl on his lap collapses into a fit of giggles. She reaches out stubby little fingers coated in yoghurt and grabs the man’s face, leaving strawberry flavored patches all over his chin, but he either does not notice or could not care less. The joy on that baby’s face is reflected in his and Ntombikayise has to look away because the moment feels too private to be observed by a random stranger. Or at least that is what she tells herself. She ignores the voice in the back of her head that reminds her that she and her father used to be the same way. Everyone in the village knew that everywhere Chief Khanyisa went, his youngest child and only daughter would never be too far behind. Save for the important tribal meetings, they were inseparable. At the communal gatherings, the Chief and the village heads would be seated at the front on low wooden stools, dressed in regal traditional clothes, the picture of ancient royalty. And right at the center of this, there would be a blob of pink clothes right next to the Chief’s stool, drawing stick figures in the ground and occasionally blurting out, “Look Daddy, that’s me and you!”. Even when she was too old to justify her sitting up front with him, the Chief would make sure she sat at the front and she basked in the attention. She was the center of her father’s universe and he was the sun, moon and stars of hers. Then came the wormhole that opened up and obliterated the dynamic between their relationship. Her stomach drops when she realizes that they have arrived in the village and the moment of truth has finally arrived. She is the last to exit the bus, trying in vain to draw out this part of her journey because she is not ready for the next part to begin. When she gets off the bus, she feels a moment of panic when she cannot recognize her surroundings. She hasn’t been here since she ran away from home at sixteen and that was over ten years ago. Asking for directions is definitely not an option.

The moment she tells them she’s looking for the way to Chief Khanyisa’s homestead, the villagers would put two and two together and realize that the prodigal daughter has returned and the whole village would know of her return by sundown. Of course, the story is bound to come out eventually but she would prefer to at least reach home before the news of her return does. She walks around aimlessly for an hour before she stumbles upon the graveyard where her mother is buried. She takes it as a sign and seeks out her mother’s grave. There are weeds all over the grave and the site screams years of neglect. She starts to pull them out with her hands but the roots run far too deep and she gives up the task, resigning herself to scrapping off the dust caked into the tombstone. She might as well be at a stranger’s grave. Her mother is nothing but a collection of random memories- gentle hands braiding her hair, a stern voice telling her to get away from the fire and the warmest embrace, the kind she needed now more than ever. She’s unsure where to start so she just starts talking.

She tells her mother’s tombstone of how her father remarried one of the young women from the village. Ntombikayise wanted her father to be happy, she really did, but she was unable to see past this betrayal of her mother’s memory. She begged him not to allow a new woman to come in and take her mother’s place but as much as he loved his daughter, he would not allow a teenager to dictate his love life. He told her nothing would change. This woman was not a replacement. No one could replace Ntombikayise’s mother, it wasn’t possible. And because he had never lied to her before, she believed him and took him at his word. The new lady of the house moved in and replaced all traces of her predecessor’s existence. The furniture was swapped out, the roses in the garden uprooted and replaced with daisies, and all the walls repainted. And her father let it all happen. He said nothing, even when he saw how distressed his daughter was. He dismissed her feelings and every conversation they had turned into a full blown out argument. Eventually, they stopped talking to each other altogether. There was nothing left for her here so Ntombikayise packed her bags and left her father to his new family.

There wasn’t a day she didn’t miss home. She often fantasied about coming back but the fear of her father rejecting her kept her in place. So, she lived in abject poverty doing odd jobs to make ends meet even though she knew that she came from the richest family in her entire village. She would have days when she wondered why she was allowing her life to be determined by a decision made by an irrational hot headed sixteen-year-old. Then again, why was it up to her to try and fix things with her father? He had made his choice time and time again to prioritize the feelings of his new wife over those of his only daughter. He was all she had left in the world and she could not help but feel abandoned by him, and therefore abandoned by the world. So, she had resolved to stay away. Until now.

Having poured her heart out at her mother’s grave, she is ready to say farewell to her one remaining parent. All the anger she had been carting around for years feels lighter. Remnants of it still linger but spending an hour talking to a carved rock put things into perspective. She still had a chance to talk to her father before he left this world. She didn’t want to spend whatever time they had left rehashing the same old arguments that had caused her to leave in the first place. Every minute counts so she quickly stands and walks briskly to where she needs to be. She now remembers the way home. The homestead is eerily quiet when she arrives and there is no movement outside. The whole place looks deserted and she wonders if perhaps the family moved after she left. She sees a young child playing outside her neighbor’s house and she calls him over. He begrudgingly obliges, annoyed at having his game interrupted by a random stranger. She asks him where the family who stays here is. He tells her that everyone is at the Chief’s funeral and that they should be back any minute now.

Ntombikayise feels the ground beneath her quiver and quack. Struggling to maintain her composure, she asks him when the Chief died and he says it happened late last night. She remains quiet for several seconds until the boy asks if he can leave now and she dismisses him. She waits until she can hear the commotion of an approaching crowd. She sneaks out of the back gate and heads to the gravesite, knowing that everyone else has left. When she arrives at her father’s grave, she wants to kneel at his grave but before she can bend her knees, her body gives out and she chokes out a sob on all fours. This is not how it was supposed to happen. She was supposed to get here on time and fix everything between them. With one apology from either of them, the great chasm between them would have been healed. He would have called her Ntombiyami one more time and just like that, all her broken pieces would have come back together. She would have held his hand until the very end and kissed his forehead after he breathed his last. And now she will never have that chance.

She thinks of the letter he wrote, the letter she burned and her sobs escalate into painful, heart-wrenching wails that barely sound human. She digs her fingers into the loose dirt, trying to claw her way into the grave because she deserves to be there in his place. She will never know what his last words to her were so from this moment on, she shall never know a moment of peace. If only she had torn it up or thrown it in the trash, there might have been a tiny, enduring sliver of hope, but not even that remains. The only inheritance she has is the regrets she will carry around with her. There is nothing left to do for what is done is done. The sun is setting and she cannot stay here. As she did a few hours later, she speaks to a carved rock in the ground that stands in the place of a parent and says, “I’m sorry, Baba” before turning to leave.

                                                                  
SIBONGUMUSA NCUBE was a transfer student from Zimbabwe.