The morning of the first day of twenty-forty-four finds Malusi spread out over his PC like a fallen angel, snoring. The chirp-chirp of birds in the garden outside, the revving motorcycle on the street; he registers neither and neither does he register the soft cast of sunlight that reaches him on the mahogany dining room table on which his head has collapsed. He didn’t get much sleep last night, nor did anybody else in the house. In fact, the entire house is full of such fallen angels, most of which lie still in intoxication from the indulgence of the night before. Every inch of this luxurious urban home is scattered with bodies slopped in various positions.

All is silent except for the cry of a baby that nobody seems to hear, not a distressed cry but a please-find-me-if-you-can cry. A bronze ceiling fan swirls silently, imparting a sleepy aura in the air which smells bitter with alcohol. New Years’ Eve is not enough an explanation for this situation, it had also been a celebration of Malusi’s birthday, which falls exactly on the thirty-first of December.

Among his good fortunes, he has this big house and friends and family to fill it with. However, the idea of celebrating his birthdays unsettles his stomach. He could not deny that the best of his birthdays were behind him, when his mother sang his song on his favorite day. To be honest, the party was more about everybody together than him as an individual. It was worthwhile to reconnect with them all. Besides, his line of work didn’t allow him much time for socialising. He returns to healing the sick the following day.

The story goes that in the hour that Malusi was born, Malusi’s mother, MaMalusi, was told by an attending midwife not to push until after twelve a.m. so that the baby’s birthday can fall on the first of January twenty-eighteen rather than December twenty-seventeen. The motive, which sounded so disingenuous to MaMalusi, made her contractions much stronger and she pushed hard. Seconds from 12 a.m. the baby boy was born. When the nurses distributed baby hampers to only the mothers of babies of who were born on January first twenty-eighteen the next day, they passed MaMalusi over.

Mamalusi protested but there weren’t enough hampers to go around, the nurses said. This was not true. The nurses took a number of the sponsored hampers to share the contents amongst themselves. Sister Phindi, who had given birth three short months before, found and hid three hampers where the other Sisters wouldn’t find them. None of the others noticed and when they began sharing the rest of the hampers, Sister Phindi casually volunteered that those who were nursing mothers among them should be considered first. Another Sister retorted Phindi by saying that they were all equal before the law and the rest of the sisters seemed to agree with her and that was that.

It was in the era of a different kind of government, who could blame them? Times were harder then. Everybody was either fearful or angry. Today, the commonly used remark is: thank God the double-headed president is gone. The economy is booming and nurses today earn thrice what Phindi earned back in the day and new state-of-the-art-hospitals are popping up like mushrooms country wide.

Not being born on new-year’s day was still something Malusi was resentful about. When he was younger he would say, “I was this close,” indicating with a slit between the tip of his thumb and index finger. But he needn’t be resentful. Life had made up for that misfortune – if it can be called a misfortune at all – with the most remarkable of blessings, anybody would agree.

When he was younger, MaMalusi would buy him birthday presents and keep them for him to open on the morning of January the first. He grew to appreciate this ritual, even on January firsts where there were no presents, and the only gift was his mother’s beautiful voice singing him a happy birthday song. It was really this and not the car toys nor the wooden house, nor the bicycle that made him happy on those days. Because he had the song and its singer, he considered himself the luckiest boy, even though he was this close.

Happy birthday, to you, happy birthday, to you—

His ears awake to this song before his eyes open to take in the dining room where he slumbered. There’s the cream-colored carpet where the spilled contents of a wine bottle have created a cherry-red globe in the middle of which lies the guilty bottle. There’s the gold-encrusted wall clock with the small hand pointing at seven and the large hand at six. There is also the picture of his young family on the wall above the fireplace. He sees them but he doesn’t see them. It is the singing that he registers, acutely so. It is the voice of his mother. It must be her, it could not be anybody else.

He steps over the still-asleep bodies to follow the voice. It is coming from the kitchen so he walks there. No, from outside: the garden. Through the kitchen window he is able to see the singer, it is her. He turns the handle and for a moment he stands still outside the door.
“Is it really you, Mother?” he says out loud, but the voice keeps singing and the singer doesn’t turn around to meet his gaze.

—happy birthday dear Malusi, happy birthday, to you…

The air smells like it was infused with a million lilies, the dull sharpness under his bare feet almost make him chuckle but his attention remains on his mother’s voice. The huge garden is a sparkling green, with flowers from heaven, indeed. He picks up his pace as he gets closer and closer. Just about when he reaches her she turns around, he sees her, young and beautiful and smiling while singing. She has the most beautiful smile in the world. It is a smile of angels, he agrees. She reaches out both of her hands with a box covered with Christmas wrapping between them.

“Happy birthday, ngwanaka, o gole o gole,” she says with a smile that makes him smile in return, grow and be great, my son.

When he reaches for the box he becomes a boy, twelve-years old? He opens it; it is a bicycle. How did it fit in there? He discovers himself in the dream and awakens in his dining room to a crying baby that no one but he can hear. His attention is diverted to a newspaper on the table. He reads the front page article with a sensory hurriedness. It is titled “South Africa revolutionizes human reproduction.”

The article is about a pair of researchers from Kwa Zulu-Natal and their team who fertilised a human egg and sperm cell in vitro and subsequently allowed the fetus to come to full term by incubating it in a sophisticated machine that “fed it nutrients and oxygen while processing and removing wastes.” At the end, the article says that the baby is alive and healthy. It is first baby to grow to full term outside the human body.

“Whatever happened to ethical research?” Malusi murmurs disdainfully as he steps up from his chair.

He follows the sound of the crying to his daughter’s room. After he quietens her he carries her to the kitchen where he prepares a bottle of milk for her. He looks out the kitchen window and remembers his dream, his bicycle, the last gift his mother gave him before she went to heaven.

“Koko was here,” he says to his daughter softly, who is still in his arms. “She sang for daddy,” he continues, “she sang: happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”

It was the way in which his mother passed that motivated him to become what he had become. Not only a doctor but a junior department head in the ministry of health. In high school he skipped two grades. At university he excelled and graduated cum laude. He and others who worked in the medical field worked tirelessly to lobby for the passing of the National Health Insurance Bill, arranging facts and calculating figures. The Bill came to pass five years ago when he was still a student and since then there has been a drastic reduction in the nation’s overall mortality, maternal mortality in particular. Today, more and more women stand less a chance of dying the way his mother did, during child birth.

“Happy birthday, daddy, happy birthday, daddy,” his daughter murmurs the song sweetly and wipes a tear from his eye with a folded baby fist.

His best birthday in fifteen years, he’s sure. His mother sang for him, his daughter sang for him – on his real birthday, today.