Four spoons of sugar, please!

Though there have been some very exciting and rather distracting things I would love to have written about instead - including a trip with another 2 South Africans to an Indian takeaway hidden in the dark bowels of a ghostly industrial estate. But, I had promised to write more about our family's 'domestic worker'...

Eunice Thenjiwe Nozulu. (Though I think, in all likelihood, it's probably Thenjiwe Eunice Nozulu - the issue of carrying both a Xhosa name as well as an English name is a whole nother matter: it could be psychoanalysed and deconstructed and stripped 'moer-toe', but at the end of the day it is about two things: fitting in / belonging outside of their Xhosa culture and the general white laziness to pronounce the clicks and curls of Xhosa names.) I can hardly remember back to being three years old and Eunie's first day at work - but there are beautiful, richly coloured memories of Eunie arriving at our pre-primary school to take Melissa and I home, a short walk in the swelteringly perfect summer afternoon, babbling and giggling as if we were all three years old - Eunie telling us she'd made us strawberry jelly for after our lunch! I mean - what more could two little girls want? It was only as we got a little older that the roles reversed a little and we were the ones who made her hot, cheesy toasted sarmies for lunch - and, it would be hopeless to try count the cups of dark, scaldingly hot tea saturated with at least FOUR heaped spoons of sugar! It was round about this time too that Eunie began to scold us, albeit playfully, for our messy bedrooms or leaving crumbs on the kitchen counter.
She gave birth to identical twin girls - Ayanda and Siyanda - when I was about 5 or 6. I decided then and there that black babies were definitely the most gorgeous and adorable in the world! And oh, how deliciously they smelled: like hot, crumbling spice cookies just out the oven! We used to beg Eunie to bring the babies to work so we could tickle them, tease them and carry them tied tightly to our backs with their baby blankets! And as we got older, we watched the twins grow from plump dumplings to shy schoolgirls. (But you see, as I'm writing, I'm editing and heavily censoring myself to the point where there must be a thousand intertwined stories that deserve telling - and here I am giving it all to you in cutesy-pie, neatly wrapped up sentences. Whatever shall we do about this? Perhaps I should devote the rest of the week to telling Eunice's story in full? Actually, it is not so much a story, as stories: hey,it could be the basis for my first ever novel! So maybe I shouldn't spill the beans here in this blog - maybe I should keep it all under wraps till it is a published novel? Let's take a vote!! Let me know your vote in the COMMENTS option below!)