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Khutso

Khutso – he is a mixed-up kid. He has two opposing characters: one Khutso is violent and the other Khutso is sweet. There is nothing I can tell him during the day. That’s when he is the violent, powerful Khutso. He does not take commands from anyone. He is too sensitive and that makes him rebellious.

The sweet Khutso is the most beautiful boy I know. His voice is a perfect baritone, very hard and rough when he is talking to a male and very soft and respecting when he is talking to a female. He doesn’t change it intentionally, it just happens as he is talking and I don’t think that he hears the difference. He can sing too – lead a song with his heavy baritone – but unfortunately he does not like to sing often, only when the mood takes him. At church they wanted him to be part of the choir but he just shook his head and told them that he cannot sing.

Sweet Khutso makes me very angry by being playful. I will hit him hard but he will still be very playful. I will shout and hit him again but he will keep irritating me until I am tired and so angry that I want to cry. Then he will give me a hug and sing a freestyle “My Love Is Your Love”:

’Cos your love is my love

And my love is your love

It would take an eternity to break us

And the chains of Amistad couldn’t hold us

Mokgethi, my love is your love

My life is your life

Khutso will forever and ever be your love

Because even eternity can’t break us

My love is your love

And your love is my love

Everything is all right as it will forever be

Everything is all right ’cos my love is your love

Then I will still be looking at him, unwilling to laugh, fighting the urge to hug him and he will say:

“Mokgethi, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“You are lying. Since when?”

Then he will walk out of the door.

He is my brother, why would I not love him?

Sometimes Khutso will call me to come and sit with him on the sofa. This is only when he wants to share it with me, though, because if I call him to come and sit with me he never wants to.

“Come sit with me?”

“No, I am not your boyfriend.”

But if I don’t call him, he will just come.

If there is one thing that he likes more than anything it is to share my plate. He will pretend that he does not want to eat, but when I start eating he will come and eat with me. When we have finished my food he will go and get his plate and we will share his food too. But if I don’t want to share my plate, I just have to call him. He will not come then and that is the trick.

I fear that Khutso is going to lose his way. Not because he is hanging out with a bad crowd, smoking dagga, like my uncle says he is. Khutso does not hang around with potheads; this is just my uncle’s way of not facing the problem. No, I fear that Khutso is going to lose his way just because of the way he is. They push Mokgethi around all the time but they cannot push Khutso an inch before he pushes back very hard. He will speak his mind aloud and curse my grandmother. He curses my aunt too and I have seen him fight with my uncle. All of them have come to fear him.

They bought him some new clothes that he didn’t like at all. He tried to bargain with my grandmother and they agreed that on the coming Saturday they would take the clothes back and he would choose what he wanted. But when that day came, they didn’t go. My grandmother had changed her mind.

“Gran, I cannot wear those clothes. You will have to take them back to wherever they came from.”

He took the clothes from his room and put them in our grandmother’s room.

“Khutso, you must wear those clothes. Where will I take them?”

“Gran, I do not want them and unless you want me to give them away, and I can do that, you must take them back.”

A few days later my aunt put herself in the middle of things. She came to the house early one morning and we were all happy that she was visiting until she started to talk about the clothes that she had bought Khutso.

“Khutso, I hear that you do not like the clothes that I bought for you.”

“They are not my style.”

“I buy you clothes and you tell me that they are not your style. You are going to wear those clothes whether they are your style or not.”

“Those, I do not want,” he said, smiling. “Will you please take them back because I cannot wear them!”

“We are trying to do everything for you and this is all we get in return?”

He tried to be humble. “No, it’s just that I cannot wear those clothes.”

“You are stressing my mother each and every day as if you were her own children.”

With that, Khutso raised himself from the seat and went to his room, locking the door behind him.

“I am talking to you!” Aunt Shirley shouted after Khutso, struggling to her feet. “This is what you are doing to my mother each and every day: she cannot get old in peace!”

Aunt Shirley started knocking at Khutso’s door, saying that we were the children of the snake that killed her sister, that she knew that we were little snakes and that we were here to stress her out, that she did not have money to raise the snakes that we were. Suddenly, very violently, Khutso flung the door open and looked her straight in the eye.

“Say that again. Say that again.” Tears were dropping out of his eyes but he was looking at her calmly. “I do not think that I heard you clearly. Say that to my face. Say it to my eyes.”

My grandmother tried to distract him, saying something that I missed.

“Gran, do not interfere in this matter.”

My aunt slapped Khutso with a hot kafferklap, but he didn’t flinch, just stood there looking at her.

“Hit me again if you want to see if I am a snake. Hit me again.”

I didn’t know what to do or what to think.

“I am the child of a snake? Why do you bother yourself with the children of a snake? Why do you buy the children of a snake clothes? For what good reason?”

He was more than calm.

“Gran, you don’t love us. We are only here because we are your grandchildren and you cannot just cast us away! Can you?”

“Khutso, my grandson, why would I not want you?”

“Stop lying to me. You don’t want us here.”

They didn’t have anything to say to that, they couldn’t lie or pretend any more. Eternity passed, then Khutso went back into his bedroom and took out half of his clothes and nearly all of his shoes, put them on the table in the sitting room and said, in tears:

“Thank you very much, but I don’t need these any more. And don’t ever buy me anything again.”

Then he went back to his room.

Before she left, Aunt Shirley and my grandmother had a whispering meeting, but neither of them touched the unwanted clothes.

When my uncle came back, the clothes were still in the sitting room. He asked whose they were and what they were doing there. Then he woke Khutso up and asked him to remove the clothes from the sitting room. Maybe he thought that Khutso would have calmed down by then and have realised that he needed the clothes, which was what I thought. But Khutso took them all to the back garden and set them alight. When he came back into the house my uncle asked him where he had taken the clothes, but Khutso didn’t answer, just shook his head and went back to his room.

My uncle’s curiosity got the better of him and he checked outside and found the clothes going up in smoke. Though he didn’t know everything that had happened between Khutso and my aunt and my grandmother, the burning of the clothes pissed him off. He went to Khutso’s room.

“Khutso, why are you burning your clothes?” my uncle asked in a tone that told everyone he was not really interested in an answer.

“Told her I didn’t want them any more.”

“You think you can just burn clothes because you don’t want them?”

My uncle’s intention was to punish Khutso. He took off his belt and hit him once but Khutso hit back with fists and then they were fighting. Unfortunately my uncle was a little drunk and by the time my grandmother got there he was lying on the floor and his blood was all over the place. Khutso and his uncle had fought and Khutso had won the fight.

It made me proud, very proud of Khutso, that he could stand up for himself and defend his ground. At the same time I felt sorry for my uncle, that it had come to this, but, truth be told, he’d had it coming. He had long ago forgotten that he was our uncle; he disrespected Khutso and me all the time, treating us like things I don’t have a description for. As the saying goes, “what goes around comes around”, and this was how it came around.

My grandmother didn’t know what to say – she was speechless, as was my aunt – but they had learned to respect and fear Khutso.