Sunday Times Fiction Prize: Excerpt from Lost Colours of the Chameleon

July 13th, 2009 by Rene

Mandla Langa’s latest novel, The Lost Colours of the Chameleon, is shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. An excerpt from the book ran in this week’s paper:

The first indication of trouble was a tingling at the back of his throat, followed by a lively to-and-fro sensation inside his cranium, as if the brain tissue were struggling for direction. And then the pain started from somewhere inside his ear and detoured behind the eyes to hit him at the base of his skull. Engulfed by nausea, he jumped out of bed and had just emptied the contents of his stomach into the washbasin when his mother entered the little cubicle to do her toilet.
Madu took one look at him and placed her cool palm across his brow. She removed it as if it were red-hot.
“You’re running a fever,” she said, “and you’ll soon be raining sweat if we don’t do something quickly.”
“But I’m fine,” said Zebulon, cursing the weakness in his joints, “really.”
“Really was a Silly Billy,” Madu sang — something picked up in the schoolyards of her own childhood, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but its lilt made Zebulon realise how much he loved her. “Come here.”
She rummaged in the cupboards, upended suitcases and various tin boxes and came out with handfuls of dry herbs and phials containing dark violet liquid or magic crystals that came out entangled in twine and sewing bits and bobs. Lighting the wick and then pumping a Primus stove, she threw the mixture into a saucepan to boil, steam rising and filling the kitchen with a pungent smell.
Awash with shame, he let her strip him naked, then sit him down on a low stool and place a steaming vessel on the floor between his legs, with an injunction to watch it didn’t burn his pretty pink privates. Madu covered him from head to toe with a heavy blanket…
The steam swirled around his genitals before enveloping his face, stinging and causing his closed eyes to water, heating the back of his head, which had been, he felt, the starting point of the fever. And just when the heat inside the blanket was nearly unbearable and her son was almost suffocating, Madu whipped the cover off and handed him the saucepan. “Go,” she said, “and douse yourself with this stuff in the pot. Some of it will stick to you; don’t worry. Just go to bed and you’ll wash properly once you’ve recovered.”