Ukwangala kwachila ulupwa.
Friendship surpasses family.
Bemba proverb
My sister came to me a few months after I turned two, right in time for my memories to crystallise. Most things from that year are a blur, but I do remember the blaring pink of the shawl my mother brought my little sister home in. I remember her skin, as dark as the doll one of my aunties had brought for me on a trip to London. I remember pinching her and watching her cry, then being angry when my mother rushed into the room, asking what I had done.
Nothing, I said, shrugging.
A lie, but how would she know? The baby seemed to cry about everything.
My mother rushed to the baby and tried to diagnose this fresh wave of agitation, rising quick and sharp from her mouth.
Maybe her nappy is wet––as she swapped one white cloth under her bum for a fresh one and secured it with two pins above her hip.
Probably hungry––while pulling out her breast and turning her nipple into a silencer.
Are you sleepy baby––which came out hiccuped because she would say this while rocking her on her shoulder and breaking the sentence apart with Shh, shh, shh.
In my mind, that whole year is marked by the coming of my little sister––as though her birth, my reaction and adjustment to no longer being my mother’s baby, stretched itself out all of 1990 and not one cold Wednesday in May. I remember asking my mother to take her back to the shop, where she’d told me babies come from, and bawling when she said you couldn’t return a sister–– even if she snatched all your mother’s attention, even if you pinched her and she probably wanted to go back and would say so if they did more with their tiny pink mouth than cry.
I remember the fight my parents had––the first in my memory––one Sunday after church. I remember my black patent shoes, the dress still stiff from ironing scraping the skin around my knees. The window was open, ceiling-to-floor organza curtains in an intimate dance with the wind. I remember the quiet from outside, planting goose pimples all over my skin. I was wearing a sweater my grandma had knit, and socks pulled all the way to my knees. We lived on one of the top floors, and daytime Kabwata was a buzz of sounds that rose from below to sit in the living room with us, like my mother’s ivies, her stacks of books and framed family pictures on the walls. The din from cars, music at nearby bars, children’s games from the communal area, and Kabwata Market were as familiar as my mother’s humming whenever she was mopping the floors. Prior to that night, nighttime Kabwata found me sleeping. It felt then like a stranger in our house, like this fight, something to be afraid of.
I stood outside my parent’s bedroom, waiting for something that now, over thirty years later, blends itself into the rest of that year.
Mummy, I croaked, seized suddenly by the urge to pee. I had said it in a voice too small, as if the stranger had just stepped too close, cupped my mouth with a thick hand.
I could hear my mother shh, shh-ing on the other side of the door, my sister ignoring her pleas, wailing in her usual fashion, and my father’s pacing, which I’d memorised long before and would know even if my eyes were closed and the room was crowded with other footsteps.
Mummy, I tried again, the tears welling and falling, even though I was now a big girl, a big sister even.
My father’s voice was climbing above my mother’s shushing, and my sister’s crying. The crescendo triggered a gallop in my chest. He wanted my sister to shut up and my mother to do a better job at her shh, shhing. He mentioned the open window, the one lifting Kabwata’s quiet into the house, something about a drop down to the ground floor. My mother grew quiet, the threat hanging like a rope in the air. My father, too, stilled, his pacing dead. My sister was relentless.
A terror simmered in my core, afraid suddenly of losing the grating sound of my sister’s voice, so new in my recollections, to the flat stones that cradled our building’s foundation. I imagined her body anew––the wrinkles around her neck, eyes like mine, the tiny fists she made with her hands, the mouth like my mother’s, wispy clouds of hair, my father’s ears––splattered with the dirt and pebbles. My breath seized for a moment.
I had been a big sister for a few days by then, everyone asking my mother how I was taking it, her saying, Oh, very well, with the smile she used when she didn’t want to say much else. But that moment, when the world was silent but for the sound of her crying, was when I became a big sister for real. I accepted this duty to shield her skin from blemish, safe from monsters that came in the dark, even if they were couched in the familiar.
Between that thought and the next, I hurled myself to their door, shouting my mother’s name.
Before my next scream, my father opened the door, stalked past me and stormed out of the flat.
My mother was kneeling next to the bed, staring at my sister, squirming in the centre, surrounded by a pile of bedding.
I edged myself around my mother. I climbed into the bed and brought my face close to my sister’s. She smelt as sweet as I expected someone to smell after so much time tucked into my mother’s bosom.
Shh, I tried. The sound quaked through me but she started, following it with her head. Shh, I said again, letting her fingers fist my pinkie. I’m here, this time with a little more confidence.
My sister finally stilled, her small breath locking us in–– a unit. No picture exists of that moment, the cloak of dark, our small bodies huddled together. But in my mind, it sits as clear as day. In it, I see the hardness of her grip around my little finger, the fine hair around her temples, her loud wailing finally overpowered, and all the loud, messy brawling the moment foretold.
At this point, my memory grows quiet, as if on a page, somebody came in after and erased the words. There must have been packing of suitcases. There must have been walking down the narrow winding steps to the ground floor to stand on the pavers next to the highrise flats. My mind chooses, instead, to remember the thick smell of urine from one of the adjacent walls, holding my mother’s knee and shivering into her dress, the shaking of her own sobbing before we entered a car that took the three of us elsewhere.
*
Our next home, in Luanshya, my mother filled with more creeping plants and books. Those six rooms held the comfort of her humming in the morning, Radio Christian Voice streaming in the background. On weekends, she returned from kitchen parties with bottles of Fanta and fatty samosas in her handbag. Huddled on her bed, she shared treats and fairytales with my sister and I. My sister became my shadow, trailing me no matter how many times I said Leave me alone. She cried even more than I did on my first day of school and begged my mother to let her accompany me.
We lived next to a girl named Gertrude, whose mother ran a hair salon with one hair dryer and a plastic basket of fat rollers out of one of their bedrooms. Until I started school, Gertrude was just the girl who lived next door. But after we were instructed by our mothers to always walk to and from school together, those long walks between Kamirenda and our pre-school mutated us into something my sister soon grew to envy. On Saturday mornings, when Gertrude and I played, I made it a point to tell my sister that I was going to play, that the playing was a big girl game, and she was not invited. Of course, she told my mother, who then told me I couldn’t go unless I took my sister. So, my sister remained my reliable shadow at those games just as she was at home. There is a faded sepia photograph somewhere of me and Gertrude holding hands next to the clothesline. On my side of the photo, my sister is crouched to the ground with the Black doll that was once mine, beaming up at me. It is only now, in hindsight, that Gertrude wears the label of best friend, and even then, not until the year my sister turned three and went to live with my grandmother. Before then, my sister was the one I giggled with under the covers when we should have been sleeping. My sister rubbed my back when our mother spanked me. She waited for me to come home from school every day with a smile and a thousand questions. If there was a person to award this title of best at being my friend, it would be my sister, who had known me most of my life, all of hers.
The year my sister moved to live with my grandmother, we traveled to Lusaka together at the end of the school term, the way we did every three months. As always, my mother’s lap was our seat for the journey, and we spent much of it pushing each other for a bigger portion of Mother until she bought us biscuits at the bus stop in Kabwe. On the bus ride, we pointed out Banani International School, where we made our mother promise to take us one day. Our mother laughed, telling us she would, but only if she became a millionaire. In Lusaka, we greeted the water fountain that marked the entry into the city and shouted Lusaka, Lusaka, as if it was our first time. Then, at the end of the trip, when my sister stayed behind for a reason I did not yet understand, we waved at each other until we became stick figures in the distance. The unit, snapped.
My sister and I would see each other thrice a year in the next few years. In those vignettes, I would find she had become fluent in Tonga, which my grandmother spoke most, whereas I still mostly spoke Bemba, which was more widely used in Luanshya. We would bridge our conversations with English and Nyanja, edging around each other like strangers for a while before readjusting to each other’s presence. She had made friends with a little white boy from the farm neighbouring my grandmother’s. He screamed in terror when he saw me running to join them, with my back-length braids flicking around my face. She explained me to him instead of him to me, as the sister she had been telling him about, which didn’t assuage him. In the house, when I would slip into our mother’s lap, out of habit, my sister would watch from an opposite corner of the room until my mother invited her too. For my little sister’s fifth birthday, my grandmother threw her a birthday party which made me sick with jealousy when she told me during that August school holidays. Parties, in my mother’s mouth, fell in the same category as bicycles and an education at Banani, something she would do if she became a millionaire.
By the time we started living together again when my sister was almost six, we had forgotten how to be without thinking. She was no longer the colicky baby, me no longer the half-protective, half-annoyed toddler. We had missed chunks of our upbringing and had to build this friendship from scratch. Under the covers, with stories and giggles, for eleven of the longest, shortest, best months of my life, we became friends, sisters again. The backdrop was our parents’ shaky reconciliation, this one marred by arguments that led to blows, but my sister and I, together, made the family feel less like a patchwork to me, more like a whole.
Then, one Tuesday in November became the entire 1996 for me. Twelve months compressed into the moment my mother told me that my little sister had died, the only casualty of a freak mass food poisoning case in Lusaka, which had weakened her immune system enough to let measles in. The instant knowing was that I had failed my sister. I am the one who had cooked the tainted vegetables. It didn’t matter that neither my parents nor I knew about pesticides at the time. An eight-year-old mind can turn that sautéeing of greens into the falling of a body, down several flights, plummeting to a death she could have prevented, if only––. I didn’t know about immunodeficiencies that could journey from mother to child. What I knew was that it had been my first, only job, and I had failed. The one who was supposed to stay with me for my lifetime left at the fringe of my inchoate years.
In the decades following, I hung between telling people I had a sister, to watch their expressions cloud over, worrying as they issued their apology for the cruelty of the universe, and simply telling them I am an only child to shield myself from their fumbling and having to sit in their pity for even a second. I did both, depending on who was asking. To some, I was an only child. To others, a––I had to Google the term for a person who loses a sibling––forgotten mourner.
In this gap of knowledge, left by the sister I had and my false identity as an only child, I collected friends in lieu of sisters, like trinkets, teaching myself how to colour myself into a hue of me that pleased them. Playing sister. In grade eight, I told a classmate that I, too, loved watches more than earrings. We were inseparable for years. In grade ten, I started walking to school with a girl who lived on my street. She loved Brandy as much as I did, and now, when too long has gone by without us talking, I send her my latest Spotify find. My college roommate loved impwa, which I’d always found a little too bitter. But the years we shared a room and clothes, I re-taught myself to cook and eat it. On the days I was home before her, I’d slice the miniature eggplants and brown them in oil just the way she liked. Afterwards, we’d eat this ‘favourite’ in silence.
When I was twenty-three, interning at a law firm in Lusaka, I would finally meet someone who would make me show myself. Maybe because I didn’t see it coming, the way I hadn’t anticipated my mother’s swelling stomach to morph into a girl who would become a haunting. My boss, whose voice boomed surprisingly loud for his stature, summoned me into the empty office next to mine. We have a new associate, he said, pointing at the desk. She will be in charge of you.
Okay, I said, smiling at her. Nice to meet you. Any supervisor would be better than his tumultuous temper.
Silent, she looked at him, her expression unyielding, hands folded on her lap.
Master shapeshifter, collector of sisters, I pressed my palms together and stared at her, hoping she would look.
She didn’t, and throughout the day, when I ventured into her office, asking her for tasks or relaying an instruction, she carried the same expression like the sister who refused to be quieted. It made me seek her out. Everyone liked me, and she didn’t seem to. We edged around each other like that until that Friday.
I was in her office, returning a file she had asked me to work on. Her office, which was between mine and our boss’, was often a site of interruption, the place he would stop to explain something he would forget later.
Our boss burst through the door with the phone to his ear. In that big voice of his, he went, Hello. It was a weird combination of nasally and consuming. When he breezed through to his office and shut the door, we turned to each other and burst into laughter. She has a shy, half dimple on her right cheek.
It’s not that she didn’t like me, at first, it was that she was slower to open, like a slow blooming flower. She is like this with everyone, cautious until sure.
The laughter carried us into the lunch we agreed to share that afternoon and later, when we watched a Trevor Noah clip where he is mocking the Afrikaans accent using the Siri function of the iPhone. An inside joke formed instantly––an amalgamation of the nasally Hello and the Hi Siri from Trevor Noah’s skit.
The first time she called my phone out of work and said Hello, Siri, I was seized by the same uncontrollable fit of laughter from the office for a few minutes before I could talk.
For years, our calls started like that. Hello, Siri, became a bed of feathers, no matter what would come next. The friendship was young, but working together, spending so much time in each other’s company, we saw each other at our worst and again at our best. We never said it, the way my sister and I didn’t have to, but the label was there when I gauged her among other friendships. This was my best friend. When I was getting married in 2012, and my first tailor completely fucked up my dress, she recognised the ache in my voice when I tried it on and said I like it. After the fitting, she drove me to a different designer, where I bought a better, ready-made dress.
Hello Siri, you’ve passed––her to me, the day my bar exam results were released because I was too nervous to check for myself.
Hello Siri, I just had my baby––me, circa 2013 and again in 2015.
Hello Siri, I just had my baby––her, two days after I gave birth to my second.
Hello Siri, I am getting married––her in 2015.
Barely three years into that marriage, when I came to work with my eyes swollen again that week, she said Siri, you have to leave him.
Hello Siri, I think I am leaving him––me, the very next day, when both our babies are just six months old.
She helped me navigate the debris while I filed for divorce and held me up so that I wouldn’t crumble.
Even when I moved to Kabwe, three hours from Lusaka, we’d call each other daily and fill each other in on our secret escapades, the quiet insecurities of our love lives. In each other, we could confide about anything, even the things we’d never write down in diaries, the words which, without each other, we wouldn’t dare say out loud. Often, after these sessions she’d say Siri, we have to be friends forever, you know too much.
So, one afternoon, between trials at court, when my phone buzzed with her name, saved now as Siri, I smiled.
The message was long, unlike the broken-up chains we usually chatted in. I had to scroll up and down a few times to absorb it all. A friend had just told her something about herself. Something she had previously told me, only me. This thing she’d heard about herself belonged to my ears alone. One of those near-unspeakable secrets we shared. Nobody else knew, she said. She was hurt and couldn’t believe I would do that. Don’t refuse, she said. I already know it’s you.
Even through the phone, I could see that stiffness return to her face. Her pain was palpable. It carried over the miles, the way our former boss’ voice used to travel from office to office. My day was ruined. In that afternoon’s court session, every denied objection felt like a personal jab.
When I told her I didn’t remember betraying her trust, I believed myself. To be sure, though, I asked our two mutual friends: Did I tell you something personal about her? Both said no, but still, my heart was frantic. What if I had? What if I had commingled the sacred with the ordinary? She wouldn’t just point an accusing finger my way unless there was reason to. I insisted on a meeting, somewhere the accuser, the secret carrier, and I could face each other. I said I would drive to Lusaka that weekend to meet her first thing Saturday morning. But even then, I was afraid. Since I had moved, she’d accused me of a distance, replaced by newer friends since my divorce. We had laughed about it, the way we both were protective of the boundaries of our friendship, not wanting to share.
Before circling the roundabout and water fountain in Lusaka, I copped out of the meeting I had suggested, feeling cornered. It would be my word against hers. My best friend would simply have to pick a side. In my heart of hearts, I feared she had picked one already, so I pretended to be busy and didn’t go, deciding this would be like all other losses of before, something I would get over. In the mornings after, I woke up with a bile in my throat from this betrayal I couldn’t remember but was sure I was guilty of. Was I so loose-tongued that I couldn’t remember spreading my best friend’s secret like a dandelion in the wind?
Probably, I decided. I deserved this purgatory.
She texted me a few weeks later. Siri, she said, and my heart unlocked, a hope renewed. Let’s forget everything, she said, this can’t come between us. It came in a singular message. Even with the missing Hello in front of the salutation, I was so relieved, and that day’s trial seemed easier than most. Still, when I responded at the end of the day, I found my fingers shaking. The messages felt like a beginning, not a continuation, something that would be ripped from beneath me.
I was cautious, veiled, talking to her from a distance with my arms folded, a demeanor I know she noticed and mirrored. Every few days we tried again, sputtering to a start but failing to recapture the old magic, further and further away from each other until one of us stopped responding.
*
I decided that this is how friendships had to be, fleeting like my sister, a luxury for only a split second in a lifetime.
So when I started talking to a friend I had made in a mom’s group on Facebook, I expected nothing more than talk of our mothering woes. She had recently emigrated to Australia from Zambia and instantly opened herself up, sharing all the new edges of motherhood she was slamming into as an immigrant. Usually, I was the talkative one, talking myself sick and then replaying conversations at the end of the day, wishing I had been quieter. This felt different. My brain said Careful, ka. But something about the six-hour time difference and this recent friendship loss made me careless. And thank heavens for that because, I was still spooling myself back together from my divorce and felt the weight of supporting my children, accepting finally that the person I had chosen to parent them with would never be a parent to them the way I had hoped.
I found myself leaning on her for comfort through this phase of my life. I avoided most of my friends, too drained to put on the usual show. Through the phone, I could be a little more myself, and there was less at stake because she lived so far away. There would be no follow-up meetings. We didn’t have any mutual friends whom I could forget having betrayed her to. At first, we talked a few evenings when I was back from work, conversations where I spoke about how dreadful dating was, and she told me how she was adjusting to a new country.
Between then and now, we started texting every day with frequent calls that lasted hours long. My favourite thing about these calls and messages was the lack of need for a preamble. If someone pissed her off, even if we had been talking about a funny song we heard the night before, she knew she could toss me right into the conversation and be fine. We became each other’s steady thing, and I didn’t see this one coming either. Not until years later, when Nexplanon drove me into a depression so deep I struggled to get out of bed most mornings.
On one of those mornings, I lay in the middle of my bed, buried under our plaid winter sheets. My children had left for school, and the house was still again, the quiet I always begged them for swallowing me now. The tears were coming, ebbed by the guilt that I had once again failed to get up to prepare them for school. I had moved from Zambia to Minnesota by then, stretching our time zone another seven hours. We spoke every morning and night, dropping each other into conversations about our shocking encounters with racism, arguments with our children, gorgeous dresses in a thrift store, a new book from the library, something funny the husband had said––whatever. She would already be sleeping; I’d have to wait until the next day to talk to her.
I am very careful with this friend, a fresh egg in my hands. I watch myself each time her name is in my mouth in her absence. I am prudent about how I convey her to others. There is fear, yes. I don’t want to lose what we have created, this knowing of each other, somehow, honestly, even this late into our existence. But there is gratitude too. I am grateful that this long after the parents who left too soon and the sister who disobeyed the order of nature, I can still form a sisterhood. I don’t want to break this one. The one I seek when I am hanging low in my emotions, the one whose nest of comfort holds me up.
My husband––whom I met on a date she had insisted I go on––came downstairs. He found me crying in the bed, kissed me on the forehead, and asked me if I wanted to WhatsApp call her. I had my children, yes, I had my husband, and their love was, is a sure thing. But swallowed up in the sheets, I felt my failing as mother and as wife and for that fractured feeling, a hatchling weeping, I wanted my friend, my sister.
Yes, I told my husband. I was already imagining the soft contours of her voice, how her stories would pull out my laughter. Years of practice had me following the tendrils of stories even before they slipped out of her mouth—about her active son, her slow days in the thrift stores, parties where she is the only one sober, her latest acceptance from the lit mag of her dreams.
The phone rang once. Bwanji, she said. This far from Zambia, Nyanja had become a delicacy of a language for us. The sound of her voice slowly releasing the ache my chest.
Bwino, I lied, hoping she would accept my Fine and not catch the crack in my tone.
A beep came just then, a request for me to swap from audio to video call.
Daily conversations are difficult with a thirteen hour time difference, and we can only share pictures of our separate lunches, park views, play dates. There is a way we are always knowing each other, starting anew, like my sister and I circa 1996. But when the screen lit up with her face, concern veiled by her smile, the ten thousand miles between us thawed into nothing.
*Edited by Non-Fiction Editor, Ravynn K. Stringfield, Ph.D.
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