It was a little after my eighteenth birthday when I discovered my father's secret hiding place. It wasn't a hiding place for him as such, but a hiding place where he could stash away his secrets. It was a treasure trove of sorts, mostly of personal artifacts. There were a few cheap jewellery items, whose value was more sentimental than real. There were a few pictures of old buddies and a few letters from old cohorts. He had some cut outs from newspapers of stories that only held some meanings for him. There were also a couple of handkerchiefs with monograms that I couldn't recognize and a few stubs of tickets to a movie, a play, or a game.
Then there were the more intriguing items. He had three letters from old flames. Two letters were from the same woman, who signed only her initials at the bottom—and they didn't seem like initials my mother would have used. Third letter was from a woman whose heart my father broke for some trivial matter and she was begging him to come back. I also found three pictures, or rather pictures of three women, all young and beautiful and all most likely his REAL secrets. One of them I recognized to be my aunt, my father's older brother's wife. I didn't know if her picture was from before her marriage to my uncle or after.
These items held only a passing fancy for me. I wasn't really concerned about my father's past or why my mother hadn't discovered these items and burnt them, now that he was also her past. The item that held my interest was an old book, a sort of cheap imitation of the Kamasutra.
It was a really cheap book, all pictures and positions were basically cartoon drawings and paper used was the same as – if not worst than – the newsprint. My young mind saw more than a cheap book though. I saw a book that held the wonders of the world for me.
In our village of 100 households, with mostly middle-aged and elderly people farming their lives away or tending to a meagre cattle post, here at the edge of South Africa, this book became my entertainment centre.
My mother spent her mornings at our farm while my sister tended to the small convenience store—a legacy of my father. In the afternoons, my mother took over the store while my sister came home to prepare the evening meal. My duties were to tend to the farm and the cattle in the afternoons, which sometimes went well into the evening, what with the animals being unpredictable in their wanderings and my having to chase them from all over.
Our evening routine was set in stone. I would come home all tired and dirty and bath in the cold water from the borehole. My sister would get me my dinner and then continue with her sewing. She actually made good money sewing and cleaning clothes for other families in the village, especially those whose young'uns had moved to the city ages ago. My mother would go next door to her one and only friend, Precious, and wither the night away in a carton of Chibuku, or some other drink she pilfered from the store. She had trouble waking up early the next day and that was one of the reasons why my sister tended to the store in the mornings. My mother spent early part of the day tending to the farm, but that was only an excuse. She used that time to nurse her hangover.
I spent my evening hours fingering through the book and fantasizing about experiencing some of those positions with someone at sometime in the future. There was no one in the village that would be a possibility. Mostly there were married women or old women and none very attractive. Precious WAS a possibility, but so was the hiding I would get from my mother if she found out that I held secret desires for her friend.
The only young and attractive woman in town was my sister and she was living in a world of her own. If you are wondering why we didn't move to the city like other young people, the answer lies in lack of relatives willing to put us up until we found something to do. My father and my mother had alienated their family members way before we were even born and by the time we thought of moving away from the stink hole known as our village, we really had nowhere to go.
My sister was four years my senior and lived in a world of her own, which was constructed out of characters she found in the magazines we sold in our store and in the gossip columns of the newspaper. Actually we used to buy only one or two magazines and only one newspaper. It was a weekly newspaper and, along with the magazines, it circulated from one hand to the other until everyone had read it from end to end. The magazines and newspaper always ended up back with us where my sister used them to copy the next outfit from or imitate a new hairdo, or even apply the makeup in one form or another. You see, my sister was also the local beautician and the dressmaker. She also made good money from the women who wanted to look like movie stars or dress like models. My sister saved her money in a secret place of her own. She was keeping it hidden from my mother until one day she had enough to fly the coop.
I was carefree. No school to attend and no one to answer to. My only duty was to make sure that the cattle were well-fed and the farm was cultivated when rains came. Other than that I was roaming through the savannah like a young lion, just marking my territory.
For some reason, I would always put that book back where I had found it. I knew it was my father's secret hiding place, but now it was also my hiding place. That book was now my secret and I kept it hidden in the same place. Every evening I would take it out and every morning I would put it back carefully in the same place. I not only guarded the secret, but the position of the book, with almost religious zeal.
That's why it wasn't difficult to discover that there was another reader of the book.
Someone else had also discovered the secret hiding place, and thus the secret. I felt violated.
I knew it wasn't my mother who discovered the place. It had to be my sister. Otherwise, things wouldn't have stayed in the same place. My mother would have destroyed them.
My sister was as careful with the book as I was. I knew that she probably looked through it in the afternoons when I was at the post. She would put it back by the time I came home. I didn't know, however, if she knew that I also read the book.
Now, the problem. Knowing that the secret was no longer just mine, knowing that the secret now belonged to both of us, and knowing that she probably looked at the very same pictures that I did and fantasized about the very same positions that I did, from the opposite point of view of course, I had found a partner to practice the positions with; albeit, only an imaginary one. The problem being that this partner was my sister.