“Msotho, the work that is following you is huge,” my grandmother says after hearing of my day with Oom Tami. “I am scared.”

My grandmother had lived with BaSotho in our motherland. She had been taught by a Sotho headmistress. In her time all Sotho men shaved their heads. And so, the women may as well give birth to hairless children. When I was born I had no hair on my head. That was when she suspected that her daughter may have not spoken the truth. The father could be Msotho. In her words, “My child, Wendy may have not said the truth. But, whatever it is, you are my Msotho.”

My name, Andile, was a statement of her dignity, the expansion of her household, adding to the three boys her second husband gave her before running away. All of them who would be men one day to pull her out of the poverty hole and return her to her father's world of abundance, and since people are always on the roads and would have to walk into our home, abundant provisions for travellers too.

I learnt so much from the conversations with my grandmother. During her active life there was little opportunity to commune with her children. She ran a tight schedule that was not of her dictating. Working class lives are not in the hands of the members of their class. It was at her retirement, with no benefits, her forced grounding since her bones were succumbing, that we found time to sit and talk. I would pose questions that would cause her to fall into long silence.

She would talk about the memories of meeting my grandfather, about their marriage and the look of her father, about conceiving her first child, her only daughter, about her walks with the child down Mendi Street, about a small business they owned, and about never thinking she could fall one day into a deep dark hole of poverty after their separation. She would talk about many efforts to escape the hole, about us, her children, and unfulfilled expectations. And, even if life had turned out differently, she would still embrace her grandchildren.