Read Online Untitled by Kgebetli Moele - Free Book Online Page B

dispute it; it has become a known fact. Even Shatale knows it. He said to me a few weeks after my fight with Lebo:
    â€œDid you hear what they are saying about you?”
    â€œI don’t care what they say about me.”
    â€œWe could just do it and maybe then they will shut up and mind their own business.”
    Looked at him – this is a man who once dated my Aunt Sarah. I ran out of words.
    â€œBecause this is what they want for us, they want me and you to be.”
    â€œA yi nna thaka yago.” I am not of your generation , I told him as I walked away.
    His mind has completely decayed; he could not see anything wrong with what he was doing. Then I realised that to him what the community was saying did not matter at all. Here I was, feeling ashamed and guilty, having fingers pointed at me all the time because of something I didn’t even do, and he did not care at all.
    My pastor’s wife said while she was preaching that “young girls should stop breaking up families and start building their own families with their own men because you cannot build a family with someone else’s husband.” It did not occur to me that she was referring to Mokgethi, but over time I realised that she was making an example of me. It made me feel sick and very much unholy.
    A few weeks later, one of the women I attend church with called me:
    â€œMokgethi.”
    She said my name as if she had given up on something that she had been hopeful about, that she was hoping for with all her heart. She said it again, this time shaking her head slowly:
    â€œMokgethi.”
    I got scared and asked her to stop calling my name because by now she was right in front of me.
    â€œMokgethi. Not you too, my dear. This is something very much not you. You must just stop it. Stop it, my dear. I didn’t expect it to be something that you, you Mokgethi, would do. Please, stop now. When I heard it, I didn’t believe it, not even a bit, but if it is true, just stop it. It does not suit you. It is not the you that I know.”
    She turned around, continuing with her business as I tried to figure out what she meant. Then I remembered what the pastor’s wife had said and all of a sudden it came together. They believed that I was sleeping with Shatale ...
    What could I say to that?
    Nothing.
    If I defended myself and told them that nothing like that was happening, well, they would be expecting me to say that. In fact, the only thing they would not be expecting was for me to say, “Yes, I am sleeping with him, so what?”
    Mamafa tried to comfort me by telling me to ignore the rumours. He said that I wouldn’t be able to alter what was in people’s minds so I might as well get on with my life. Still, I wished I could do something to change things, but I didn’t know what, so when I saw her the next morning, as I was passing her house, I greeted her the same way as I always did.
    â€œTamaaa!”
    She acknowledged me with a wave of her hand, as if she were shooing away flies. Usually she would want to chat with me about this and that, but that morning she was not interested in talking to me.
    I continued walking for a little way, then I turned around and approached her.
    â€œPeople are saying that I am sleeping with Shatale. If you believe that I am sleeping with him, let me tell you the truth: I am not sleeping with him and I never will. Lebo is the one sleeping with him. She was my friend, then we had a fight and now people think we were fighting over Shatale.”
    Tears started to come out of my eyes because she was looking at me as if she did not believe a word I was saying.
    â€œI am not sleeping with Shatale! He is the one who wants to sleep with me. It is just that I was a friend of Lebo’s and then she started dating him. I didn’t want to be her friend any more, so she got mad and started saying things about me that made me angry. Then we fought and now people think that we were