BLACK MAMBAS AND PAPERBACK WESTERNS

MISTAKEN identity is not a reason to be left alive. More especially if you happen to be a snake passing through my beloved Bangladesh market district in Chatsworth.

Every member of that family is a black mamba. Before the humble tree snake can even pull out his green identity document, he is clobbered by all manner of murderous weapons.

Sticks, stones and even broom handles are wielded like machine guns by normally peaceful people.

“He finished with the politicians, now he chooning for the snakes,” came a soliloquy from across the tomato stall, as the speaker eavesdropped on my conversation with Daisy, the dreamy dressmaker.

Drips is an old friend from my primary school days at Cavendish. He shot me a dazzling smile with enough gold in his teeth to pay my bond.

His name is thanks to the coconut oil lathered into his scalp on a Sunday afternoon. Sitting low on the front stoep, he would have his head nestled in his granny’s lap. She would work through each strand with a fine comb to remove any signs of wildlife.

Whatever she found was summarily squashed between thumbnails.

Today we pay top dollar for the same oil treatment in a fancy salon.

Drips’s problem came on a hot Monday morning, when the restless coconut oil would dribble down his sideburns and tumble like Victoria Falls off his fringe.

No amount of bunched toilet paper could save him embarrassment. But when we graduated to high school he was renamed in matric. He became Part-time. That was on account of having a girlfriend who was shared among several other boys. Stevie Wonder’s Part-time Lover was the rage in 1985.

“Got some lukker books, ekse?” he asked me now.

No amount of reading will fix his grammar, but it is gratifying that he is a reader. He once told me he could read a Louis L’amour western in a day.

Crouched on the rough seating in the back of the bakkie on the way to his shoe factory workplace, he would pull out a paperback while his workmates played thunee. Drips reminded me of L’amour’s Down the Long Hills, where the children Hardy and Betty Sue were left stranded on the prairie with only a horse and a knife.

The story line goes on about fighting wild animals and snakes. Drips has a talent for picking up a stompie and making his own storyline.

“You know, ekse, black mamba is only snake which will attack you for nothing.”

He is right on that score. But it is still no excuse for my folks to kill every snake in sight.