KHOLEKA KUMALO

They may have moved house often, but her parents' family rituals make KHOLEKA KUMALO think of home.

So, where is home for you?” fills me with as much cause to pause as “… and, your mother tongue is?” The answers aren’t neat. “I’m from Durban,” I’ll say, hoping that quickly covers both. I mostly only consider Durban the city in which I was born and raised, though to me, home is something else. And it keeps changing.

Growing up, we moved often. Until I was about 14 years old, we’d changed address six times as a nuclear family. My father is from Kimberley, my mother from East London. Visiting relatives meant at least a nine-hour road trip, four little girls squished in the backseat, trying not to nap on each other.

During those visits to the Northern and Eastern Cape, watching my parents in their hometowns felt like seeing them exactly where they belonged – “home” home. So I used to think that home was wherever your roots were; wherever you felt most like yourself. My dad would chat and laugh so freely with the streams of family and friends welcoming him back to his childhood home that he seemed to burst with a fierce love and generations of familiarity.

And watching my mom be a daughter to her parents – my grandparents – seemed to make her fuller and more at peace. After a few days, we’d leave to head home, me crying. I too wanted a home brimming with busybody aunts, uncles and cousins popping in just because, celebrating milestones or holding serious family meetings in the same house, decade after decade. Perhaps the frequent moves and faraway family made me cling to a sense of doing or being part of small, regular, everyday things instead. I remember waiting to hear the garage door open, signalling my dad’s return from work; shortly followed by the thud of his heavy briefcase. Eating supper at 6.30pm every evening – rice gravy, meat and a minimum of two vegetables.

Watching every version of the news on the hour, hoping it wouldn’t clash with something more entertaining (it always did). My parents asking for coffee or tea a little later, after my mom had her evening bath. Washing the dishes. Doing homework and always struggling with maths. Joining another reality in books. Confiding in my diary. Writing dramatically long letters to friends. All six of us in the same space, each in our own little worlds, my sisters far less accessible to laatlammetjie me.

And then there were Sundays. My mother pruning the garden, my dad tending to the pool. An afternoon neighbourhood drive, looking at the houses for sale from the outside and daydreaming, or sometimes going in. Sundays filled with the things I still hold dear – reading, music and food. My dad poring over every Sunday paper that existed.

My mom playing a tape of Randy Crawford, Anita Baker or Aretha Franklin that would warm up the house, four stove plates and the oven on the go with something delicious roasting. The rituals stayed more or less the same, even though we moved around a lot.

Now I’ve settled on the idea that maybe that’s what I consider home. It’s wherever all the little unspoken things you keep sharing with people you have an unbreakable love for comfortably happen. So it’s not quite yet Cape Town. But, it’s been just over a year living here and I’m about to move into my third home. I can’t for the life of me imagine doing that with four tiny children in tow.