The cockroaches came out at night like they owned the house.
The moment the lights went off, they invaded everything. They crawled across plates, inside the sugar tin, under the blankets. Some even flew. I hated the flying ones. You could hit one with a slipper and still watch it stagger away like a drunken boxer refusing to die.
“These things will finish us,” Mai VaMaidei complained as she shook out a dress she wanted to sell at the market the next morning.
A cockroach dropped from the sleeve and disappeared beneath the sofa.
This was no longer normal.
Near the door was a woven basket full of vegetables ready for the market. A few cockroaches crawled between the tomatoes and covo leaves. In anger, I kicked the basket with my foot. It toppled over and the cockroaches scattered across the floor.
“Do you see what I mean?” I said. “They are everywhere now.”
“The strange thing is we never see them during the day,” Mai VaMaidei replied quietly.
- Rats, roaches and rage
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She picked up the vegetables and placed them in a dish filled with water.
I already knew where the problem was coming from.
Next door.
Baba VaSvinurai’s yard looked like a dumpsite. Old mealie-meal bags, rotten vegetables, broken buckets, empty beer cartons and black plastic bags overflowing with garbage were piled beside his kitchen hut. The smell alone was enough to make someone sick.
People had complained before.
Baba VaSvinurai did not care.
He had changed lately. His wife had not been seen for weeks and nobody knew why.
“Mind your own business!” he would shout. “This is my yard!”
Then the rats joined the war.
Big grey rats.
At night you could hear them scratching in the ceiling like thieves planning a robbery. One even ran across my foot while I was sleeping a few nights earlier.
The final straw came when Mai VaMaidei opened one of her bales of second-hand clothes and screamed.
The rats had destroyed nearly half the stock.
Tiny holes were everywhere. Dresses shredded. Baby clothes torn apart. Even the jeans had bite marks.
“Why me?” she cried, close to tears. “How am I supposed to sell these now?”
I felt anger boiling inside me.
For weeks we had tolerated Baba VaSvinurai’s filth. The cockroaches. The rats. The smell. The noise. We had fumigated the house several times, but after every fumigation the pests seemed to multiply.
Enough was enough.
As the cockroaches began appearing on the walls again, I picked up my jacket and headed for Baba VaSvinurai’s house.
Only a broken fence separated our yards. Some of the holes were big enough for a man to squeeze through.
I was ready for a confrontation.
But when I got there, I stopped.
Baba VaSvinurai was not alone.
There was another woman with him.
It was not his wife.
The woman was short, heavy-set and covered in thick make-up. The way they both looked at me made my skin crawl.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked.
Baba VaSvinurai hesitated.
“Can’t you see you’ve come at the wrong time?” he replied coldly.
He turned and started walking away. The woman followed him without saying a word.
My anger rose instantly.
Something was not right in that house.
I decided I would come back tomorrow.
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