By Aobakwe Laone

He closed the oven door slowly, careful not to bang it, just as grandma had taught him. “All that hard work kneading air into them will fly right out if you bang the door!” she often exclaimed. No matter how many times they baked together in that kitchen, this had been MaMpho’s most consistent warning. He peeked through the glass, reached for the dishcloth slung over his shoulder and wiped his brow as he straightened up. Dark spots on his shirt marked where the sweat had fallen as it made an endless stream from somewhere in that thick mass of hair and down his sideburns, meeting on his chin before leaping onto his chest. He fished out a lighter from his faded jeans and lit a cigarette from the pack of Dunhill menthols sitting on the counter. Blowing out a cloud of white smoke, he leaned against the counter and set the timer for 20 minutes.

He remembered picking it out in a curio shop somewhere in Kuala Lumpur some years back. It had never been used, and the box it came in still had its seal when he found it, and thus it was a fairly new timer. It was the model of a lime green frog with black spots all over that lay sprawled over a dome. Grandma had said it looked as if it were hanging on for dear life, Thuso thought it looked spent, as if it had just swum in am Olympic challenge. Thuso had known his grandmother was terrified of frogs and had gotten it as a cruel joke, part of a game they often indulged one another in.

For as long as he could remember, MaMpho had been the one person he could always rely on. Though technically, she had been his grandmother, MaMpho was the only mother Thuso had ever known. MaMpho had married at twenty-three and had two sons by twenty-seven. She had planned to raise her children through her thirties and see them off to college in her forties. A grand plan – until Thulaganyo was born, the last child, born seventeen years after her son Khumo. She named the child Thulaganyo, a name that loosely translates to “order” or “program,” but only seemed to draw attention to her awkward position in the family. Thulaganyo, the obvious mistake. Her name only seemed to point this out, a cruel joke of ironies and innuendos.

Thulaganyo’s skin was much lighter than her siblings’, more like her grandmother’s. She also inherited the same light brown, almost yellow, hair, so that she had looked, at least from a distance, like a child in dire need of vitamin supplements. Thulaganyo had been an early bloomer, blossoming into a very attractive teenager. By fourteen she had hips that filled out her dresses and a bosom that made older women blush. She also had a baby on the way. Seven months into the pregnancy, one windy afternoon in May, she went into labor.One caesarian and thirteen hours later, little Thuso came into MaMpho’s life. Thulaganyo died within minutes of her son’s birth.

MaMpho, a mother again at fifty-seven, named the boy Kgomotso – comfort – but because she never wanted him to feel he had simply been the comforting end to an otherwise tragic story, an unplanned mistake like his mother, she also named him Thuso, after her late husband, a man the child would never know.

Thuso leaned against the counter and took a long drag from the cigarette as he watched the blueberry-lemon scones baking in the oven. It had been four years since MaMpho died. Four years since he had been home. There was a strange comfort in being home after so long. It obviously felt different from the times when MaMpho had been around, yet he found comfort in the familiarity of home. Everything was exactly where it had been, exactly where MaMpho had left it. After avoiding home for so long, even he had to admit there was a peace in being there that had eluded him for as long as he had been away.

Humming something with no obvious tune, he walked into the living room and pulled sheets off the furniture. Dust motes swirled around, blond in the setting sun, dancing around the room before settling once more on the grand furniture. Three dark mahogany sofas with overstuffed cushions sat in state around the room, proudly showing off the hand carved detail on their arm rests to one another. Rosewood side tables stood on two corners of the rug, between two of the sofas, like two elegant ladies at a gala, stark contrast against three burly men stuffed into ill-fitting suits. He crossed the room to open the windows but thought better of it as he saw a swarm of mosquitoes hovering over the bushes in the garden. Cursing under his breath for forgetting to buy repellent, he turned on the lights and watched as the rays of the high chandelier reached into the room, chasing out the long shadows that came in with the setting sun’s rays. There was a chill that came with sunset in Mokolodi at this time of the year. The hearth was bare. His grandma had never trusted the idea of burning a fire inside the house, preferring an electric heater instead.

Thuso walked back into the kitchen, letting the pleasant, familiar aroma of baking scones escape into the rest of the house as he opened the kitchen door. He stood in the doorway for a minute, basking in the familiarity of it all. As a child, he would imagine that if he stood in the kitchen long enough, he too would smell like a blueberry-lemon scone. Little particles of air, like dust motes but blue-black like blueberries – potent with the smell of lemons and vanilla – snuggling together between the threads of fabric. He snubbed the cigarette on his grandma’s old ashtray and walked over to the recipe book.

Thuso had always loved cooking, spending endless hours in the kitchen with MaMpho. They would pore through countless recipes together, cut-outs from Bona and Drum magazines. The two of them would make alterations as they went along, brewing their own recipes along the way. When he was nineteen, he had gathered up as many of the recipes as he could, typed them out neatly and sent them to Mr Harrison’s to have them bound into a book. It had taken a lot longer than he had hoped, and he had gotten the scolding of his life when MaMpho realized her recipes were missing. She soon forgave him and later confessed how foolish she felt when he gave her the leather-bound volume a couple of weeks after her seventy-sixth birthday.

It was no great feat, with fewer recipes than a conventional recipe book one could pick up at the store, but MaMpho had cherished it, as she had cherished Thuso and all that he had been to her. Thuso had written small notes on the pages preceding each of the recipes, explaining where the original recipe had come from, and often noting the number of trials it had taken to perfect each of their adjusted versions. On the page after every recipe was a photo. Some were of the food in the recipe book, but many were of Thuso and his uncles at various ages. In the middle of the book, he had placed a photo taken from MaMpho’s wedding, as she and her husband cut into the wedding cake she had baked herself.

Thuso had always been fascinated by food, and MaMpho had always encouraged his interest. Her pride in his cooking skills had driven him, and he had nurtured passion into a career.

He turned the page. “Karuvatu Kulambu/Dried fish curry,” it declared in bold letters across the top.

A small orange stain sat in the middle of the page, sprawling out from one line as if reaching out to the two lines above and below. Staring up at him and smudging the word “simmer” so it looked like “sommer.” The first two letters merged into one and looked like something he remembered from a history of art class in college, where the lecturer had insisted that some strange, deformed circle was an ancient alphabet of some sort. “Dried fish curry.” He read the words out loud as if to some other person in the room. A faint smile crossed his face as he shook his head, the memories flooding him, glazing his eyes.

On their third date, he had insisted on cooking. It had not been so much insisting as it had been a rise to the challenge. Gerard had teased that Thuso seemed very spoilt, that he probably couldn’t even boil an egg. Gerard had been more than just impressed with the dried fish curry, and as he scooped out one spoonful after the next, telling stories of visiting India with his parents as a young boy, Thuso wondered if it was the chili that watered his eyes, or the nostalgia that kept threatening to choke out his voice. That night, they slept together for the first time.