Raisin Against the Rain

By Boago Benedict Samakabadi

Raisin Mafora Chabatsotlhe was worried.

When the first discernible lightning cracked a while ago, something activated in his brain, automatically and subconsciously. Thunder, in muzzled tones, grumbled out of rhythm with the crack of the lightning, yet still in oneness with it.

The teacher was unmoved by this commonplace sequence of nature, and so she carried on reading from the Setswana story book she had threatened to test them on. The story she was currently reading was not part of her envisaged quiz, she had told them.

So why are you reading it to us now? Raisin wondered.

Another bolt of barely perceptible lightning flashed beyond the horizon, and as if by legerdemain, laden clouds appeared in the sky. He was seated at a window seat at the back of the classroom, and like a chameleon, one eye switched between the book on the table in front of him and tracking the teacher’s every movement, while the other was expertly fixated on the developing weather outside.

“A mo re pha! ka mpama, mme Malebogo a simolola go bona dinaledi motshegareng oo—” the teacher was reciting, slowly pacing in front of the black chalkboard.

Which book is this, again? Raisin searched his brain quickly. Oh, they were not reading a book per se, but a former student’s amateurish handwritten manuscript.  He noticed that the teacher was sashaying down the aisle which would lead her directly to his table. She liked to stay at the back of the classroom beside him, to consistently badger him and fault his every move with extreme prejudice. He quickly replaced the textbook in front of him with a notebook, in which they were expected to be taking notes as they saw fit. With much shuffling and rustling, he scrambled to get to an empty page only to realise too late that he was holding an Agriculture notebook.

“Mafora!” the teacher blurted, resolutely marching towards the boy’s table, her sky-high stilettoes click-clacking on the concrete floor. “What are you doing? Ah, we are on the Science lesson, I see—”

His classmates erupted into laughter. In his haste, he had grabbed the wrong book again.

“It’s like you are not even here with us! If it was up to you, you’d only attend science and maths lessons, akere?” She addressed the class at large, giving the pupils a much-needed reprieve from the mind-numbing story by a Sunny Potongwane, who was supposedly in their age bracket when she wove this yarn about the thankless and ungrateful Malebogo: “Bagaetsho, it’d do you well to take Setswana seriously.” She brandished her weapon of mass distraction, saying in purple Setswana, “Sunny Potongwane was the same age as you when she wrote this marvel of the Setswana language. Hear ye, she will be studied and honoured for all years to come, and not just from the novelty of her erudition at such a young age, but also her ability to absolutely express herself in writing and also speaking! When you get home, search for her videos of when she was your age! I can name five Setswana authors.” She turned to Raisin. “Can you name two mathematicians or scientists—”

“Yes!” Raisin interpolated emphatically.

“From Botswana!” She rolled her eyes, and, arms akimbo, stood staring at him with a cocktail of emotions mangling her pretty face.

In the same spell, another flash of lightning cracked, this time brighter and more visible, and the ensuing thunder was also louder and more powerful, sending slight shockwaves throughout the classroom. In unison, Raisin’s and the teacher’s heads turned sharply to the window in response to the lightning and quaking thunder. In a heartbeat, the teacher had had her fill, so she went back to her reciting, leaving Raisin to his devices when she started to strut back to the front of the classroom.

The consternation of the boy only multiplied at the development of the weather outside. His mother’s car was at some garage in some other village and he had spent the money he had been given for a taxi home, with a mind that he would be walking with some of his schoolmates. His home was on the outskirts of the village, but there were many schoolchildren who stayed in the general direction of his home, just nearer civilisation than he was. He well-nigh stayed in the farming greenbelt of the village, in an actual agronomy paradise.

His scheme was dependent on whether or not the weather allowed. If it was going to rain like he feared it was, then he was thoroughly in trouble. He had been given a fifty Pula note in the morning and sternly advised to spend only half if he was in a splurging mood, with a mind that the remaining twenty-five Pula would be spent the next day. However, he had spent all of it, with all the loose change from that prodigal exercise almost definitely amounting to a grand total of three Pula! He was too scared to check for sure. But what he was sure about was that a taxi was eight Pula, and not a thebe less! He hated the rain, but he also hated darkness; above all of that, he hated lingering about in school after school hours. Today, the karma gods seemed intent on meting out his due comeuppance, wholesale and all at once.

“Malebogo,” the teacher was saying, as Raisin was trying to simultaneously engage a couple of gears in his brain, knowing full well that his options were limited—and not just limited, but he actually only had one option, if he was being frank with himself.

He had to hazard reproach from his mother at the greengrocer in the middle of the village. She usually didn’t want him anywhere near the foul-mouthed, uncouth customers at the family business if she could help it, so he would be doubly guilty if he went there. Notwithstanding, the greengrocer was in the opposite direction of his home and the school. His mother would not give him any money, so he’d have to wait for her to close shop at eight, that is, if he had survived the reproach, which would definitely come coupled with corporal punishment. That would happen in front of the customers and—most definitely—a couple of his schoolmates, so he’d be sorely marked for eternal ignominy and a permanent loss of credibility. He wouldn’t risk that, now would he?

I shall run like the wind, then, Raisin decided, punctuating the decision with a stern nod of the head, which didn’t go unnoticed by the teacher, who pirouetted on her stilettoes and flounced toward him with purpose. It was almost as if he had the stigma of the Devil, and she was a zealot during the venery. He tensed in anticipation of verbal battery.

“Mafora!”

“Mma?”

“Do you agree with Malebogo’s philosophy that all children should be allowed to vote for their own representation in government and society?” she asked in standard Setswana, the version too standard for Raisin to fully grasp what she was saying.

“Mma?” he said once again, leading a handful of pupils to start laughing. He recovered, and answered in his signature hybrid of English and Setswana (the much-dreaded “Tswanglish”): “Not really… Children are not responsible for themselves; that’s what the parents who brought them into this world are for…”

Another bout of laughter from the other students. He usually had that effect on them, especially during Setswana lessons because of his and the teacher’s cat-and-mouse shenanigans. It was true that he didn’t care for the subject at all, but the teacher seemed to care too much about it altogether, and it bothered her that even though he didn’t care for it, he was still one of the top students in class on the subject! So, she had concluded that his main mission on earth was to distract other students with his jocularity and disrupt the class just for the heck of it. She had communicated as much to his mother once during report collection, and Mma Mafora had almost given him a thrashing there and then!

“Malebogo says that every human being, regardless of age, has their God-granted agency; so, in her mind, everyone is responsible for themselves…” Again, her language sounded nearer to that of the time of the gods and Mafora didn’t care enough about it to bother to try to decipher it.

He was momentarily distracted by a sudden crack of lighting accompanied by an urgent peal of thunder, announcing the urgency and propinquity of the impeding rain. Damn! “God also granted custody of the children to their parents—” His fellow students laughed. “I can’t even cook for myself—”

“—Setswana!”

“Sorry, ma’am…”

And so the remaining twenty minutes of the lesson were thusly spent, with the teacher sparring opinions with Raisin and two other opinionated students, Kelebogile Roberta Sua and the radical Mompati Sabata.

Immediately after the Standard 7 class was dismissed, a few isolated raindrops marked their arrival in urgent bangs on the corrugated iron roof of the classrooms, and that was when Raisin started collecting his stationery in triple-time. It was just his luck that the day he had to take home all of his books was the day he didn’t have transport and had to negotiate with the disastrous elements to get home. If it started raining and he got soaked, he would be in danger of an even greater disaster when his mother discovered his treachery. “She must not find out,” he told himself firmly, buckling his bag on his body and making all the preparatory adjustments reminiscent of a marathoner about to launch their speedy trek. And indeed, it was going to be a marathon, a three-kilometre run, at the very least.

“Ray,” his classroom best friend, Messenger Thuno, was saying above the sporadic bangs of raindrops on the roof. “Why don’t you come to my house to get the console? You’ll catch a taxi from there…”

Messenger’s home was an arm’s breadth from school, and knowing him, they would spend a good twenty minutes loitering before they arrived because he’d feel it vested upon his person to greet everyone in school and give them a pep talk as needed before going home. He was like the messiah of Mamotswa Primary School, and he played the part very well.

“I should meet Uncle in the village because I don’t have taxi money.”

Raisin looked at the tenebrous sky with what he hoped was not too much trepidation, for fear of Messenger deciding on him as his day’s mission… for counselling and sermonising to, that is. Once his friend started with his seemingly spiritually-charged psychoanalysis, there was no stopping him. Messenger, too, looked at the sky and nodded in agreement. The Uncle Raisin spoke of was, by and large, mythical, but he did have uncles all over the district.

“I have to go before the rain catches me.”

And he was off, keeping to the corridor as much as he could with the horde of pupils also taking shelter there. He had an umbrella—what with it being the season of rain and all—but he knew that if he had to run like he was planning to, then the umbrella was going to be impedimenta he’d have to jettison anyway. Unless it started pouring down, in which case he would have to use it while strolling.

Messenger observed his friend from where he had been left standing, a hint of a smile on his face. Raisin’s phobia of rain was somewhat of a legend in the village. Maybe something had happened to him when he was younger that made him fear the rain, Messenger was thinking, not investing much hermeneutics behind the thought. The fact was, he knew that Raisin didn’t have taxi money, and he was terrified to go to the greengrocer to wait for his mother; and also, he was too proud and independent to ask any of his classmates for money he would have to reimburse the very next day…with interest.

But, what’s up with him and the rain, anyway? Messenger was wondering, opening his aegis of an umbrella and stepping into the rain, intent on avoiding the student crowd by any means necessary, even if it meant trudging in the mud with his best Grasshoppers. And Mamotswa Primary School was proverbially built on a bog!

­­­Raisin had decided on the beeline across the village, forgoing a self-deleterious ambition to use the tarred road skirting the village, with misplaced faith that some well-meaning motorist might take pity on him and give him a lift. The possibilities of the particular motorist being someone socially adjacent to his mother—say, a customer or relative—were high. If word reached Mma Mafora that he was seen running in the rain, the woman would definitely spare no thought in inventing a new punishment apparatus in his honour! That woman was placed on this earth to love and cherish him, but she was also meant to be his finisher, he was convinced. If he didn’t die from her smothering motherly love, he would perish from her psychotically creative punishments.

It was still barely raining, with isolated raindrops of unbelievable size splattering here and there, but his barometric skin was transmitting a drop in pressure. His walk was almost a trot, and he hoped that he didn’t look like a dork doing so. A classmate had this thing of saying that whatever you did, at least don’t look like a dork while doing it. He saw the wisdom in that now, especially since doing something as daring as walking in the rain ought to be one of the coolest ventures anyone could undertake.

The urgency in the lightning and thunder was slowly sending him into a panic attack, and when he mentally calculated the distance already travelled, and an estimate of ground to cover… At least a few hundred metres; three kilometres to go! Damn! Of course, he didn’t have any perception of distance to speak of—he usually grossly overstated or dismally understated—but he was sure that everyone would agree that he stayed “very far” and that currently, he had already travelled “not very far”.

“Yoo-hoo! Mafora!”

Damn! He had been so engrossed in getting home as dry as the camel’s skin in the Kalahari that he forgot he had “tracks to avoid” for myriad reasons. The annoying girl, Maitemogo Samakokore, was staying in the neighbourhood dissected by the beeline track he was currently taking, and knowing her, she was going to make sure that she told—in lyrical abandon, voyeuristic exaggeration and an embarras de choix of vocabulary—Mmalesedi Loseka about the extent of dorkiness Mafora had displayed while walking in the raging rain.

He paused, mainly to show her his mordant smirk of derision, which he knew as soon as he manifested it would not register on the girl as an insult, but something mortifying. He immediately wiped it off his face and said, “What is it, Matimone?” She had made the fatal mistake in their infancy of misspelling her name as “Matimone” and Mafora had never let that go.

The barb didn’t register, as she was pirouetting like a Disney princess, and in an airily singsong voice, she said, “Ah, y’know, I’m just now wondering where you are going in such a devilish hurry…”

“Home!” and it occurred to him that he had wasted a lifetime entertaining the girl, so he swirled on his heels and charged forth, not hearing what Maitemogo was saying to him in her melodic voice. She does have a nice singing voice…

The raindrops were starting to come with a frequency and insistence that didn’t bode well for him when he realised that he was at least halfway out of the village, which meant that he was still very far from home. He also realised that he was thirsty, and maybe a little peckish. What did I spend the fifty Pula on, again? Oh, the snow cone and chicken livers… He then remembered that he hadn’t spent the entire fifty Pula, but that he had lent at least twenty Pula to three boys who wanted to go to the game-room after school; the other ten Pula had been for the contribution for a school trip scheduled for next month.

It all came back to him now, as he wiped beads of sweat from his forehead with his microfiber handkerchief: He had given Mrs. Phoolo the fifty Pula note as soon as he got into class, and she had given him back two twenty Pula notes. He had asked her to give him two ten Pula’s instead, but she had refused, dismissing him by just pointing to his seat. When Mikael saw that he had money, he came to borrow five Pula for the game-room, and he had given him the twenty Pula. With the remaining twenty Pula, he had bought the livers, four fat cakes, a snow-cone popsicle and a juice box. He had an outstanding balance with the vendor he was buying from, so the juice had been bought with it. He now didn’t know where the rest of the loose change was and he was too busy to check all his pockets.

“Where is your mom?” someone was asking as he zoomed by.

“At the shop,” Raisin answered without missing a beat in his trek.

A memory burst into his consciousness, and he felt overwhelmed by a rush of numbing emotion which he knew was dread. He was younger, not yet five years old, but definitely older than three, and he remembered his mother suddenly bursting into his space to scoop him up and run like the hounds of hell were yapping at her feet to the house. Almost simultaneously, there was an eardrum-blasting booming sound and a blinding light-burst outside followed by a downpour of rain. He barely remembered what she was saying but he knew she was admonishing him about playing in the rain and telling him to never do that again. There were tears on her face and she was smothering him with kisses, arms still clamped around him with adoration and devotion. His mother was known to be affectionate to an embarrassing extent, he was to find out later in life.

This memory was like a second shadow in his life. He suspected that it came every time his worry fared too close to the fringe of psychosis (he knew that word meant “madness”). He didn’t know exactly what that memory evoked in him, but he always noticed when it came and when it left. It brought a heaviness to his limbs and a dullness to his senses. He was never sad or terrified during the episode, though it was always triggered by dread. Rainy or cloudy weather was the biggest direct stimulus he knew of, especially when it was accompanied by lightning and thunder.

He paused, partly to catch his breath and locate his bearings, partly to allow the bedevilment to subside. The episode usually lasted a couple of seconds, usually culminating in paralysing catatonia, followed by disorientation.

“Why are you sweating so much in this cool weather?” a passer-by wanted to know, but before Raisin could answer, the stranger had already passed.

He swabbed his face with the kerchief in one languidly fluid movement, and almost in the same breath, relaunched his marathon. His skin was beginning to turn clammy from the cold sweat, and so, it became extra sensitive to the atmospheric pressure. The pressure was still gradually dropping, though the raindrops had returned to their previous sporadic staccato. There was a quiescence to the environment and it had darkened from the cumulonimbus (he knew that word from another one of Sunny Potongwane’s stories, albeit in English. Mrs. Phoolo was on a mission to spread the Sunny evangel as long as she was alive and a teacher at Mamotswa Primary School. And for good reason, because, despite the faults she was possessed of to write such mind-warping stories, the girl knew how to write!). His thirst had increased, and, looking around, he found that he was somewhere familiar, and closer to home than he dared to venture, lest it was all a sick trick by the karma gods.

With that realisation came an awareness that rain was gushing on the other side of the village. He paused to take stock of the situation from all the angles he could muster in that position in the universe. Yeah, there was a monsoon in all directions except where he was headed. And this monsoon was inching closer to him by the second!

He took a deep breath and launched into a sprint. He was hardly an athlete, but his athleticism was good enough to put some space between him and the coming rain for as long as his energy could carry him. He felt the vaporous breath of the incoming cloudburst on his exposed limbs and on the back of his neck. He also saw the cumulonimbus and nimbostratus rushing to close in on the sliver of uncovered sky which had illuminated his way thus far. When he focused his sight on where he was going, his house appeared as if by magic. It was still some distance ahead and now the mist from the rain was gaining on him. His chest was burning and his legs were aching. He could hear Sir Newton, his German Shepherd, barking excitedly in the distance; the dog had probably spotted him. He was nearer! Was this an illusion? Were the karma gods perhaps playing tricks on him? It seemed like it had been a few literal minutes since Mrs. Phoolo had dismissed the class: he had been with Messenger only a minute or two ago!

Sir Newton’s barking became more urgent in tune with the crescendo of the rain sounds. Raisin was now positively wet from the cold mist and sweat. A few stray raindrops were starting to ricochet on his skin when he was wrestling with the main gate which led into the farm. He still had a good six-hundred or so metres to negotiate to get to the house. Sir Newton’s barking persisted. He was locked in the enclosure of the farmhouse, that was why he couldn’t meet his owner at the farm gate. The farm workers had probably sought shelter in the confines of their chalets some sizable distance from the farmhouse.

“Move, Sir Newton!” he yelled at the dog, as it jumped on him when he opened the gate.

He was wrestling to close that particular gate while trying to keep the canine at bay, find his orientation and preserve his sanity. The latch of the gate usually needed a bit of romancing and goading, and today was no different. Suddenly there was a pause, a stillness, when the rain stopped. The boy stiffened. So did the dog, its ears pricked, tuning in with nature. Within the same second, Raisin was racing through the force, with Sir Newton leading him, and just as suddenly as it had stopped, it started raining once again.

The pouring rain merely washed his left foot which had been lagging behind when the rest of his body was in the veranda. He nearly crashed onto the front door as he skidded on the tiled floor, trying to regain coordination. His spiralling was stopped by a pile of tyres beside the door, and without missing a beat, he yanked the door open, allowing ingress for both himself and the dog.

When he closed the door, he was startled to see his mother raise her head above the couch in the living room. She seemed disoriented; she had been sleeping. She never slept when it was raining because, if Raisin’s phobia of rain induced in him only neurosis, it awakened psychosis in his mother!

She blinked groggily, realisation slowly dawning on her face, seeing her son standing as if in catatonic enthrallment, glistening from sweat and rain mist. She also registered the dog next to him. “Did Moremi bring you? I had asked him to pick you up at school, I thought he would forget…”

“Yes.”

Mma Mafora was satisfied with that, because she then went back to her uncharacteristic rainy day nap.

Raisin playfully ruffled Sir Newton’s ears, took his shoes off, slipped his cold-benumbed feet into fluffy slippers and marched to his room. He sighed behind his closed bedroom door. He rummaged through the chest of drawers on the side of the door, looking for noise-cancelling headphones which he then snapped over his ears, and almost collapsed on his bed. He was sticky and achy all over. Sigh!

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Boago Benedict Samakabadi is a 31-year-old man who enjoys storytelling. He began writing when he was 13 years old in 2006, but only started writing to completion in 2023 for some writing contests. This story is one of the five that he completed in 2023.