Four O’Clock Tea
By Uchizi Carien Nthenda
Sandra sits several cars back from the Chichiri roundabout, engine idling, supporters streaming past in red, white, and blue, like the city has tilted and everything loose has slid this way. Kamuzu Stadium is just up the road, and on a derby day, most of Blantyre reorganises itself around that fact. Sandra has one job: buy bread and Buttercup margarine from Shoprite.
Four o’clock tea has been followed religiously at her house for as long as she can remember, as it is in most houses. It is not a snack, nor an accident. It is a scheduled event with its own logic and consequences.
The tray kept specifically for this late-afternoon ritual comes out. What is on it depends on whose house you are in. Chombe or Satemwa. Others swear by Rooibos or Five Roses. Some, inexplicably, Ricoffee. Honey, brown sugar, or both. White sugar has disappeared from shelves in recent years, for reasons that remain unclear to most people and accepted by all. The water comes from a large plastic or metal flask, boiling hot the way it should be. Some people, like Sandra, cannot handle the heat and drop in an ice block or two, which others find deeply unreasonable. She has never seen the point in suffering through a cup of tea. If you can afford milk every day, the tray might also include Nido or another powdered milk, though some households keep a separate flask just for fresh milk. Sometimes, you will find lemons, halved or cut into thin rounds, on a saucer. And, of course, something to eat alongside: freshly fried mandasi, cooked cassava or sweet potato, zitumbuwa, cake, chigumu, or roasted groundnuts with a white powdery coat of salt.
And the consequences of getting the time wrong are real. Eat too close to five, or stretch it to half past, and you will arrive at dinner with your appetite already dulled, pushing your nsima around the plate while your mother watches you with an expression that requires no words. Timing is everything. Four o’clock means four o’clock, which means the bread and margarine need to be on the table by five to four at the absolute latest, which means Sandra should have left the house an hour ago, which means she miscalculated everything.
That was forty minutes ago.
She turns down the radio. There is noise coming from the car ahead, from a phone someone is holding out of a minibus window, from a man in a replica jersey narrating a summary of the match to nobody in particular as he walks. She does not know the score and makes no effort to be made aware.
A boy knocks on the passenger window. Groundnuts for sale in a small, sealed plastic bag. She shakes her head, and he moves on quickly, already looking at the next car. The traffic is not moving. She turns off the engine.
She did not know that there was a game today. Meanwhile, her father is fixated on the PSG vs Arsenal match, no doubt. As always, his mood will shift significantly based on the game’s result. When he held out the car keys, she took them without argument. Partly because she obliges him in most things, but mostly because she had not left the house in days and needed air.
Her father is particular about Buttercup in the way some people are particular about things that seem small, until you understand that the smallness is the point. Blueband is never considered. When he runs his own errands, he walks past it in every shop, every time, which tells you everything about the kind of man he is. She has never understood the appeal of margarine. Peanut butter, yes. Jam, certainly. But margarine occupies a strange middle ground she cannot place. She tolerates it on toast, spread thin, where the warmth of the bread does something useful to it. Beyond that, she has no use for it. And yet here she is, in Blantyre traffic, on a mission for the specific yellow tub her father has requested by name.
“Stork wa Buttercup.”
Malawians have a way of collectively referring to a household item by the brand name of one product. And the names tend to stick. All margarine, therefore, goes by “Stork”, the same way all toothpaste is “Colgate”. All washing powder is called “Surf”, whether it is Surf or not, just as every scouring powder is “Vim”, and every bleach product is referred to as “Jik”, regardless of what the packaging says. You grow up understanding that these are not brand names so much as the words themselves, the only words, and anyone who says otherwise is being unnecessarily complicated.
She looks at the clock on the dashboard. Quarter past four. Her father is waiting for her the same way she once waited for him. She was eight years old. All the other kids had been picked up that afternoon except Sandra and a younger boy whose name she cannot recall.
To pass the time, they had wandered the school. Sandra tapped her field hockey stick against each step as they ascended some stairs. The large corridors that were ordinary in the daytime felt different and longer. They raced each other down one and then slowed down, walking in silence and breathing hard. When they heard a car turn into the entrance, they both rushed back to the parking lot. Sandra had secretly hoped it was for her, but felt bad at the thought of leaving the boy alone. It was the boy’s mother. He waved at Sandra through the passenger window as the vehicle pulled away. Sandra watched them go and waved back, her hockey stick hanging on her left shoulder.
As the sun went down, she paced at the school gate, her bag on her back, until her feet hurt almost as much as the thought that somewhere at home, the tray had come out. Four o’clock tea had happened without her, and nobody had noticed her empty cup.
When the night guard appeared for his shift, he stopped. He stood for a moment, taking in the empty parking lot, Sandra’s bag and hockey stick on her lap, the dark coming in. Sandra, recognising his uniform, quickly went up to him and explained the situation. Shortly after, he called the headmaster, Mr. Patel. He then stayed with her, abandoning his usual rounds. He swept the same patch of concrete near a kerb, as if keeping himself busy was a way of willing a parent to appear before he was done, not knowing what else to do with a child who would not cry. She remembered deciding quite clearly and deliberately not to cry. Every car she heard slowing outside made her sit up straighter. Every one that drove on made her slump over again.
Her father arrived in the dark, the car moving too fast and then stopping too suddenly. He was still in his work clothes, and his face when he stepped out, she could never forget that face. Not anger. Worse than anger. The specific look of a man who could not forgive himself.
He said her name like it was something he had dropped and was relieved to find unbroken. He apologised three times before they reached the car. Then again, when she buckled in. Then once more quietly, to himself, when he thought she was not listening.
They were living with relatives from both sides then, in Kanjedza, in a house so full it was easy to assume someone else had handled something. Easy to lose track of a child.
That is the thing nobody tells you about growing up in an extended family. From the outside, it looks like abundance with all that company, constantly in community. And in some ways, it was. There was always food, always laughter, always noise, always someone’s radio on or someone’s argument in the kitchen as some washed dishes and others watched on. Always enough hands.
But there were no birthday gifts or parties. Not the kind with balloons and a cake with your name on it and everyone gathered specifically, intentionally, for you. Birthdays passed like ordinary Saturdays because in a house that full, singling one child out felt like a statement nobody wanted to make. You learnt early that you were part of a group, not a person with a separate story.
You had no room of your own. You shared a bathroom, a bed, and a wardrobe with cousins who had not asked to share them with you either. You learnt to fold yourself smaller. To need less visibly. To keep your things in a bag inside a bag, so nobody could borrow them without asking, except they always did anyway. You learnt to share, but you also learnt to hide and to keep things to yourself. Things said and done to you in the dark, in the gaps between one person’s attention and another’s. You learnt that silence was its own kind of survival. That the best way to carry something heavy was to carry it alone.
Sandra wonders if her father remembers that evening. Somewhere along the road home, they had stopped at a PTC shop in town. He promised not to be long, locked the car doors, and returned with a Cadbury and a Twix. He set both chocolate bars on her lap without a word, as if the chocolate could say the thing his mouth kept failing to.
She has never asked whether, in the years since, he has brought the incident back to his mind. She doubts she ever will. He carried that weight once, and she sees no reason, over twenty years later, to make him bear it again.
When she walks through the door, her father looks up from his chair, grins, and punches a fist in the air. Arsenal has won. Sandra smiles back at him, Shoprite bag in hand.
Uchizi Carien Nthenda is a Blantyre-based Malawian freelance editor and proofreader. A BA in Humanities (English and French) and an LLB (Honours) gave her a deep grounding and fostered a growing passion for language, literature, and critical thinking. She usually works behind the scenes, polishing and refining other people's writing, but she's finding her own creative voice. She loves a good story and a tasty cookie, especially when enjoyed together.
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