Excerpt: A Bitter Harvest

I cough. It is massive coughing. My own colossal coughing has woken me up early this Tuesday morning. The day is humid and it is quite frosty out there. The skies are draped in scudding dark clouds. Actually, it has been like this for the past three days or so – muggy, nippy and cloudy. But today it appears the weather is resolute to launch a grim mission. A horribly humid day it is. A dreadfully cloudy day it is. And a terribly chilly Tuesday, this one is.

I cough again. It is massive coughing.

There is always a flurry of sharp stabs piercing the inside of my chest each time I cough. That is why today, on this freezing Tuesday, I must pull together whatever little is remaining out of my once bubbly body and push it all the way to that giant structure of a hospital located in the other part of this cosmic city. Hostile weather conditions or not, I must step out of this shack of a house that squats amid several of its type in this vast slum township plagued by teenage prostitutes, fatherless rascals, hard-core bandits and countless other social misfits.

“I am dying.” I silently disclose this scary reality to myself.

You see, in the heart of my hearts I earnestly acknowledge that for quite some time now my life has been a tattered portrait of sorts. I am pining away at a rapid rate and if you inquire from those who have honestly known me for a long time, they will firmly testify that I was once tall and tout. Of course, I have not lost my height but I am now pretty emaciated. More bones, little flesh. A forlorn face with depleted cheekbones. Gaunt shoulders that hunch forward. Jutting ribs that can be counted, nay, that can be strummed like the strings of a guitar. And you would mistake me for an octogenarian from some famine-ravaged region yet I am still way behind hitting 40. So, there is no disputing that I am dying, bit by bit. I might be dead already. A dead man trotting. A breathing corpse.

I cough. It is massive coughing. The lady planted next to me in this rickety minibus shoots a callous look at me. I cough again. It is massive coughing. The entire ramshackle minibus shoots one huge brutal look at me. I feel mortified. I feel like an outcast of sorts. A pitiable Lazarus with his wound-riddled body in that biblical story of The Rich Man and Lazarus.

I cough again. Again it is massive coughing. But this time around my raucous coughing attracts reproachful looks from this entire ragged assemblage of metals on four wheels with its metallic vibrations endlessly raising reverberations of anguish. I silently and willingly plead guilty inside this mobile courtroom. I readily admit that I am an outlaw of sorts. I understand the heartless looks from my fellow passengers. Coughs are among myriad fatal infectious ailments in this part of the world. Coughs belong to the treacherous gang of air-borne diseases. My fellow passengers have every right to be distressed and unforgiving, courtesy of my hazardous coughing.

“Queen’s Bus Stage!” Shrieks the minibus conductor – a stout, husky-voiced fellow whose hair appears to have long ago signed a pact with the comb that the two parties must not rub shoulders. I am one of those expected to drop here. I feel, somehow, relieved. I feel, in some way, unchained. Liberated.

The bus stage draws its name from that of Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, the country’s giant public referral hospital which, in turn, derives its name from that of the great Queen Elizabeth of the Great Britain, my country’s former colonial master. It is one of the key bus stops along the Kamuzu Banda Highway, the busiest road in the city named after the very first black president to lord over our country after it was gallantly wrenched from the tenacious jaws of colonialism.

As I disembark from the minibus I cough. It is massive coughing. I can feel the ferocious looks from the minibus stabbing my back as I feebly walk away towards Queen’s – for that is what the central hospital is fondly and diminutively called. I cough again. It is massive coughing. My disgraceful coughing attracts contemptuous looks from vendors who relentlessly lie in ambush along the pavement to the hospital where they operate their tiny-scale businesses.

“Coughs like a tractor!” Thus cynically remarks one of the vendors, triggering derisive laughter among his colleagues.

I keep on walking. I walk on. I walk on. Feebly. Desolately.

The Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, built way back at the height of colonialism in Africa, is the last bastion of hope for the sick in the whole country. It is quite celestial a health facility sprawled over some spacious piece of land in the city of Blantyre – another name that is an undiluted relic of imperialism as the city was christened after the home town of David Livingstone, that legendary fellow from Scotland who long ago set foot on our land to initiate the then fashionable three Cs: Christianity, Commerce, Civilisation.

I cough. It is massive coughing.

OUT-PATIENTS DEPARTMENT – that is what is emblazoned in black letters against a white-painted background of the concrete signpost for one of Queen’s numerous sections where I have been directed to by a hospital security guard. There is a horde of equally gravely-ravaged souls here sitting in the queue on this rambling cement slab, each waiting for their turn to go and confess their ‘sins’ to the doctor hiding inside the Consultation Room. It is quite snaky a slab we are perched on, crammed from head to tail. And it is quite a sorry throng of sorts here: Pale men and women, ailing boys and girls, howling babies and then the massively coughing ones like me. An empire of the wretched of the souls in dire need of earthly salvation.

I cough. It is massive coughing.

A darting wave of chill sweeps across the place. The skies are still wrapped in a dense blanket of scudding clouds. There is repulsive stench swamping the atmosphere here. I am told the awful stink springs from the overloaded wards hosting patients who, because of the critical diseases assaulting them, are admitted to the hospital for round-the-clock attention. I silently but fervently pray that I should not become part of their ill-fated community. This place stinks – stinks like that grimy mammoth rubbish dump located somewhere in the outskirts of Blantyre where all of the city’s refuse is deposited.

I cough. It is massive coughing. Of course, I cough intermittently. And it is always massive coughing. But here – unlike in the minibus and along that pavement – my tractor-like coughing does not attract spiteful looks. It is a kinship of sorts here. We are one of a kind here as each of us has their own brutal trials and tribulations to mind.

A man pushing a stretcher hauling a patient covered in white sheets from head to toe passes by. And instantly the queue detonates into a frightening wave of murmurs. It is not a patient but a corpse being ferried to the mortuary, so the murmurs allege. Covered from head to toe, so the murmurs try to authenticate the allegation. And the white sheets, it is no longer an allegation. Fright crawls up my spine. It is no secret that I am scared. It is also no secret that I am not the only one who feels edgy here. Bloodcurdling murmurs, these!

I cough. It is massive coughing.

In the queue I keep on shifting, inch by inch. I also cough, coughing massively. So, it is dreary shifting punctuated by enormous coughing. Shifting, coughing, shifting, coughing, shifting, coughing …

Bio: Temwani Mgunda (PEN Malawi) is one of Malawi’s contemporary writers with numerous works published. His The Slums of Mbayani won the 2022 African Writers Award in the poetry category. Mgunda works as Regional Editor at the London-based China Dialogue. He will finish his short stories anthology, A Bitter Harvest: A Collection of Short Stories, during his stay at Paulet House.