His eyes turned red as he looked around the room wondering where Boledi was. She entered with a tray with tea kettle and corn scones. She was dressed in a makoti attire: a long dark skirt, swirling around her now graceful legs with a long sleeved flowered shirt. A headscarf wrapped around her braided hair completed the look.

She looked worn out and plainer than he remembered. There was no light in her eyes – only resignation. Her skin that was always so bright and healthy now looked tired like dry leaves. Noko felt his stomach getting tighter with anger remembering the girl he grew up with.

“What do you want to do when you grow up, Boledi?” he had asked when they were teenagers after they had managed to escape their chores. They hung around the fields eating sugar canes sitting under a big gum tree near the river closer to the cornfields.

“I don’t know I want to leave this village someday, maybe study further in the city if it is possible,” Boledi said with enthusiasm but the light in her eyes dimmed. “But I doubt my parents will allow it. More so my mother, she is very traditional as much as my father is religious; they don’t believe in a girl living alone in the city without a husband.”

“Don’t they realise you are different than your sister?” Noko said with appreciation.

“I am aware of that,” she answered with annoyance. “She is beautiful and she has a lovely voice and everyone loves her,” Noko had put his hand on hers to stop her from digging the wild grass in anger.

“I didn’t mean it like that, I meant you are much smarter than her and that is a good thing.”

Boledi stared at him trying to gauge the truth from his eyes, when they looked earnestly into hers. She smiled a little and removed his hand from hers, standing up awkwardly and said, “Thanks, I think. I have to go, see you later.”

Different, smarter huh? To what exactly? Noko now wondered, his mind skimping in and out of the past. He had gone to school with Boledi. She wasn’t as beautiful as Mabotse but she was pretty in her own way. And they became friends. He could now shamefully say that he became friends with Boledi to get closer to Mabotse.

Noko realised that he was as foolish as every man in the village, who had made an arse of themselves over Mobotse but he wasn’t given much of a chance. He soon realised that he was better off and was grateful that he didn’t become one of her victims. One of the men she liked had used and tossed her aside. But the misfortunes fell towards his brother, although he never really seemed bothered.

Noko felt like he walked in a different direction from most of the people in the village. Becoming one of the first to go to university in the city, something that he didn’t much boast about. He gained a different perception on things like, his brother pushed to marry his dead wife’s sister. Noko vehemently tried to fight against it but Nare didn’t have a backbone, he accepted whatever the family pushed upon him.

What shocked him even more was how readily Boledi agreed to marry his brother. He had thought she was smarter than any of the girls from their village who weren’t even interested in education but living the life of the past. They waited for men from the city to come rescue them from their boredom, marry them, giving them a dozen children. While, they slaved themselves in their mother-in-laws’ ‘houses’ – which was what Boledi was doing now.

Soon enough their parents saw that Nare was wasting time and they decided to marry him off after their father heard that he wanted to leave the village to work in the city. Both brothers and their last born sister were good-looking children, one of the village gossips would often say, “When God gives, He gives all.” And the Mahubes were given more than just land. Although that couldn’t make up for the problems they all had.

Tell us: How would you feel if you were told to marry someone?