TLADI (Lightning)

It wasn’t that she didn’t love him anymore, No. The love had grown and intensified in a weird way. It had grown boundless. This meant that it crossed the bounds of reason... Her life was based on reason. Her love for him threatened her existence. It was a dangerous love. He knew it and she knew it. Though they gloried in the magnificence of its splendour, they knew it couldn’t last, wouldn’t last. They knew it had to die and the only way it could and would die, was if one of them died. For they knew that theirs was the kind of love that stretched across all boundaries of time and space. Until she saw the life drain out of his eyes, she would find no peace. Without peace, she would return to the dark days of her beginning...

Children born on nights of unusual terrifying storms were said to take on the nature of the storm. Her mother was killed that night, killed by the thunder and lightning of Tladi’s birth. Her dying words were said to her newborn, still-bloody child, whom she would let no one touch until death claimed her. The pale child had looked at her mother. The child had actually LOOKED at her mother, and understanding shone in that one dark, bottomless newborn eye. It was the most frightening thing the midwives had ever seen, yet they acknowledged that it was also the most beautiful. “It was like the storm” one old withered wise one said. “The greatest beauty on earth, yet also the most terrifying thing known to our kind.” This was true; their homes were made almost entirely of straw. The strongest straw, wild straw, but no kind of straw can withstand the burning power of lightning and thunder... These were The Mother of Tladi’s dying words:

“I named you Tladi, lightning

Because the day you were born, lightning struck within my soul

Rain and thunder raged across the plains of my inner consciousness

Many may have other names for you,

But you this spark of life

Igniting the African drum-beat of my heart, I named you Tladi, lightning

You came in a time of pitch-black

Darker than any pitch-black afro in the dark

You came and ignited the very darkness into raging fire with your fiery flood of flame, yes, thus

I named you Tladi, lightning

You came with a storm more violent than any that the horrific magic of the ancestral witch doctor, Tladi, could ever conjure

You wreaked the kind of havoc that the land of any mind can never recover from,

You split worlds of closed minds,

Shattered galaxies of negative perceptions, obliterated universes of pain, fear and emotional barriers

Violent Tladi, you cut gashed, stabbed, and scarred my soul clean with your lightning bolts

I now remain criss-crossed and zig-zagged with the wounds bleeding

Golden light so bright and blindingly beautiful; it can only be seen through the windows to one’s soul; causing people to think one beautiful.

You, my love, I named Tladi; are an electric soul transformer; violently, shockingly, brightly but beatifically and majestically magical; transcending even death. Thus

I named you Tladi; lightning”

Then The Mother of Tladi died. It is said that no one had ever seen her happy until that moment of death. It is said that happiness flowed into her eyes like the sunrise flowing onto the land and that this happiness illuminated her whole being. It is said she looked like a Goddess at that moment and that the midwives knelt down and worshipped her. Many things are said about that night... but the most terrifying thing is that... they were all completely true. The Mother of Tladi had never uttered a word in all the time that they had known her. Yet, at the time of her death, she proved herself one of the greatest poets that the village had ever known. That was really saying something. For this was an uncommon village. It was a village of poets and artists. It is not known what caused them to all congregate to this one place and decide that “This is home” but it had occurred.

The Mother of Tladi had been found nearly dying on the outskirts of the village on the desert side. She was one of those who had travelled across the desert, probably running from

something, as they all always were. The village had blossomed like a wild flower between the two rocks of desert and sea. All those who made it across the desert with a semblance of life became the village’s responsibility. Should such a stranger die, the whole village would experience great pangs of loss and go into mourning for a year. The reasoning behind this was that one who had the courage and determination to brave the greatest desert in all of Africa was already one of them.

“A tough soul, a tough soul... that’s the only true soul” is what one elder had said.

“It takes more than physical strength and resources to brave that desert” it was said,

“it takes a tough soul.” That desert had killed camels, evaporated water out of the most airtight

containers and caused all kinds of resources to malfunction, disappear or die. There was no water anywhere in that desert. It did not even have the mercy to delude you with a mirage of an oasis and it was a place in which strange unearthly things happened. Only the brave or the stupid attempted to cross that desert. Another exception was the suicidal. Strangely, they were the ones who always came back and when they did come back, they wanted to live. They could not tell you, they could not explain, what they had seen or what had happened to them, but they suddenly wanted, fiercely and desperately, to live.

The Mother of Tladi was not beautiful; especially not on the day, they found her, lying on the powdery, pale sand that was exactly the colour of her skin. No, there was nothing riveting about the facial features possessed by The Mother of Tladi especially in her constantly tormented sleep.

The entire village had come to visit this invalid, stubbornly hanging onto the last threads of her life. All had remarked on how unremarkable her appearance had been, though that itself was remarkable. The Mother of Tladi was not ugly; there was nothing at all extreme about her appearance, except for its unremarkable-ness.

Now how could that be explained? If something was plain, then no one would have anything to say about it. Yet here was a woman whose plainness received the same kind of attention that extreme beauty or ugliness would receive. They all thought that she was remarkably unremarkable until she opened her eyes ...