My uncle, the patriarch of the family, turned 80. We call him Uncle Soss. I know many people who are much younger and look older than him.
He’s a gentleman, a snake oil salesman, and a clotheshorse. When he wears a hat, you know that that can’t get on another man’s head because he wears the hell out of it. He was the first man to buy my mother a jeans skirt in the early 70s which, I hear, was a big deal.
[My mother always talked about it until her death.] He was always committed to my mother when she was terminally ill for six years, right up to the time she passed on. I love him like one would love a father.
He had on a hat at his birthday party at Kuche Kuche. It was my first time in Kuche Kuche. I have always avoided it because Kuche Kuche is his living room and my generation grew up not putting your feet up in the same room as your father.
I was surprised at how big the place was, and how many staff they had. We sat outside on the terrace, taking up half the space with my kith and kin. A brilliant live band played rhumba songs.
They played a song that took me to childhood called Attention Na Sida by Franco. I was 10 years old when the song came out. It reminded me of my father when he had a big beard and played football in the evenings.
And that’s the thing with Kuche Kuche: it's an arena of memories, the theatre of nostalgia. We shared drinks, cousins, aunts, uncles, villagers, who are connected by blood and marriage, and tribe but also set asunder by the ugly demands of city life.
As the drinks set in the blood and the band loosened emotions and memories that came in waves, I found myself wondering how eras come and go, how we age and time sweeps us away. But also how the present is so precious especially when you are surrounded by those who were there in the past.
