As Baba Mdletshe began to speak I had a strong feeling that Mkhulu was gone. He had slipped away so quietly that I was the only one who noticed. Everyone else was watching the sangoma and listening to what he had to say. As the sangoma spoke, I laid my head on my grandfather’s broad chest. I used to do it when he was alive and then his hands always came up and rubbed my back, but now they lay lifeless in the dirt.

“This good man, head of the Ngcobo clan, was given a love potion by a woman called Beauty in Johannesburg three weeks before he came back home. She did not mean to kill him, but to have him forever because she truly loved him,” Baba Mdletshe emphasised.

Everyone but me was shocked. Mkhulu had told me about Beauty and how she had given him a home in Johannesburg and made life comfortable for him when he worked running his taxi business. The way he had talked about her, I had liked her and I didn’t think she sounded like someone who would have given anyone a love potion.

She was a city lady, Mkhulu had told me, and owned a big shebeen and a big car. She wasn’t so desperate that she needed to give an old man from a rural village in KwaZulu-Natal a love potion. Besides, Mkhulu had told me he loved her and that he was thinking of marrying again and making her his city wife. No, the way I saw it, she did not need a love potion.

***

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