A CLUSTER of children formed a ragged column behind two women chanting like soccer fanatics and the words rhymed with a popular chant at football matches. However, this word was a local euphemism for any female caught with pants down!

The childish glee and naughty repertoire evidently drew attention of the neighbourhood as one of the women told the other, “Why should you leave home and abandon your child to spend a night with that hoodlum?

“You must be ashamed of yourself!” concluded the one lambasting the other amid a growing miscellany of the well-known social phrase considered unpleasant!

Lazzo had invited the woman as a well-known cassanova in that part of the locality but word had gone round that a woman was indoors. Her relative had traced Lazzo’s girlfriend after a tip-off.

This was in keeping with tradition in the precincts. Everyone knew what everyone else did and there was no escaping this surveillance.

The incident reminded Lazzo of a mobile phone company billboard he had seen in the city centre somewhere which read “Free Calling All Night, all for ‘mahala’.”

While there was a catch to this advertising gimmick, it raised a controversial element of ‘mahala’. The latter was a word knocked off the Afrikaans diction spoken on the mines before and during the

post-independence era which meant ‘free’. White miners used Afrikaans as a language and was widely known as “Kabanga”.

The Copperbelt then harboured several expatriate miners who hailed from the then white-ruled South Africa.

But in Lazzo’s thinking, life was not for ‘mahala’ because there was no such thing as free lunch, hence the notion so prevalent among the opposite gender that anyone of them should not go out with another of the opposite kind for ‘mahala!’ It seems prudent, therefore, to assume that any extramarital orgy was not possible for nothing.

In fact, Lazzo had been asked several times by members of the opposite sex how much he was prepared to pay them if they gave in to his demands!

It appears payment in cash is prerequisite to a carefree conjugal trip. He recalled an episode in Solwezi when two gorgeous dames he had met in the flicker of lights at a popular night club were successfully lured to his guesthouse room.

Apparently Lazzo was on a business trip and had to lodge there.  As a philanthropist, Lazzo had befriended a government clerk who had travelled all the way from Mwinilunga to collect his cheque. In the process of socialisation, the pair booked a doubled room to which they invited the outgoing ‘amusers’.

Midway into the night, Lazzo’s companion began to have problems with his missus because she wanted to leave the guesthouse room. “It is not my style to stay overnight. I have to go back to where you found me,” she bluntly told her man.

The man felt his heart sink because this was the time he was beginning to appreciate female company but a deadlock appeared imminent because the man was reluctant to let her go. In the midst of this impasse, Lazzo stepped in trying to salvage the situation but to no avail.

Lazzo had no recourse but to part away with K50 on behalf of his new-found acquaintance who had not yet been paid but spoke a local language that made life easier for Lazzo.

When she was reminded that she might be picked up by law-enforcement agents for loitering, the woman who did not mince her words, declared that she was a free woman of the locality and nothing of the sort would happen to her!

The chanting children soon went round the bend in a wish-washy style and as they disappeared round the bend, a woman in the crowd was heard to say: “But if the child can walk and eat on his own, why not let the mother have a good time?”

“The issue is not the age of the child but the calibre of the person that she has spent the night with. Even I would not dare go out with such a man who insults people on the streets!,” interjected another woman clutching a 10-litre plastic container and headed for the neighbourhood communal tap.

For Lazzo, it was not the first time that his love affair had been bungled.

He has had several scandalous outings but the only difference with this one is that it was peaceful. There were no women throwing fists at one another amid foul language.

He was at peace because he had struck a relationship with a spinster who had had a child outside wedlock and whose father Lazzo had heard was now married to another woman.

Lazzo thought that the locality produced various forms of families if one had to think of the nuclear family first!

Then there would be the extended family system but the kind of families Lazzo was beginning to see were a ‘mixed grill’ type of families each one glued to either party. For instance, Lazzo had once become ‘dad’ to a widow’s children.

The other time, he became father to children of a divorcee and the list was getting longer everyday.

Someone invited Lazzo to a watering hole. He thought that without this lifestyle, he nearly became so pious to a point of becoming more inclined to religion.

But what went wrong? At some seminary, he met a rector in the corridor who told him that he did not think that he would make a good clergyman. One day, Lazzo related this story to his friend who sympathised.

But the overriding consideration of the whole transient life is that Lazzo was still a prudent character and had not sunk into the abyss of lawlessness and was not even unscrupulous like a myriad misfits he was rubbing shoulders with.

He had only become too social to the concern of moralists who were not in his world and he was not in their world. They were indeed two worlds apart! It was barely 10 minutes at the watering hole when Maria appeared rekindling memories of a cherished past!