Having forgotten that you need money to survive in the world, Lord Balah arrived in South Africa with not a penny, nickel or dime to his name. After announcing his intended change of name to the Chisselton’s, they had wasted no time in quickly disinheriting him from the family fortune and removing all photo’s of him from the Mans (which was short for Mansion, dear humble reader). Lord Balah was not much bothered by this, however, knowing instead in his heart that all he really needed was his dream, and for everything else the universe would provide.
It must be pointed out here, dear reader, that as a boy Lord Balah was home schooled, and thus had always lived a solitary, somewhat lonely life within the Chisselton Country Estate. From as early as he could remember, his only friends were the horses the family kept in the stables, where he would spend every afternoon feeding them carrots. It is for this reason that when Lord Balah entered the arrival gates of the large and imposing OR Thambo airport that his senses were soon overcome by the sights, sounds and general anarchy that is characteristic of daily South African life.
At first Lord Balah was overwhelmed by the noise and chaos which greeted him, but with the help of some cotton wool he happened to have remembered to pack in his toiletry bag which he proceeded to stuff into his ears he was soon fine. Unsure of where to go or how to get there, Lord Balah decided to sit in the waiting area for a while to gather his thoughts and decide on a plan of action.
Before he could even remove his backpack from his shoulders to sit down, Lord Balah found himself being violently accosted by an angry man who seemed to be accusing him of something which he could not quite make out, since he still had wads of cotton wool stuffed in his ears. Unsure of what to do or even what was happening, Lord Balah stood motionless pressed against the wall, staring down the barrel of a menacing fist whilst being yelled at by someone he had never met or even seen before in his life. Timid by nature and a pacifist by choice, the thought of retaliating or even attempting to defend himself never once crossed our hero’s mind.
After what seemed like a significant amount of time had passed and Lord Balah remained pinned to the wall by his anonymous accoster, Lord Balah noticed a woman standing a few meters behind the angry man. She seemed to be watching in quiet curiosity, although this emotion (Lord Balah could perceive) was being masked by a façade of tears and faked concern. Being the sensitive soul he was, it was a curious gift Lord Balah possessed that he was very easily able to discern people’s true motives and intentions- sometimes when even they themselves could not.
Within a few seconds of seeing the mystery woman, Lord Balah had realized the meaning of the scenario playing out before him: having been accused by her boyfriend of infidelity, the frightened woman had pointed to the closest man in sight in order to protect her clandestine lover’s true identity. To any rational person it would not make any sense at all that said clandestine lover would be at the airport with the unhappy couple at that exact moment, but unfortunately as Lord Balah knew when one is overcome with passion it is of necessity that all reason falls away. He knew this not because he himself had ever been in love or experienced passion in any way, but he had learnt about it from Shakespeare whilst studying for his A and O levels.
After realizing what was going on, Lord Balah- who had been a practicing Buddhist since his fourteenth birthday- decided to talk to the angry man and help to quieten his nerves. He quickly removed the cotton wool from his ears and spoke…
The pontsy English accent which emanated from Lord Balah’s mouth soon drew a sea of fascinated stares from passers-by who had never seen a black man talk in such a manner before. In fact, his angry accoster soon grew quite frightened by this startling anomaly before him and ran hastily out of the airport, whilst his girlfriend (or shall we now presume ex-girlfriend) stood staring at Lord Balah, frozen in shock.
Unsure of exactly what to do about this recent development, Lord Balah stood for a moment keeping an eye on the ex-girlfriend whose name he now discovered to be Trudie from a locket which bore that name hanging around her neck. Although they were standing a considerable distance from one another, it is well known within the Chisselton family that Lord Balah has excellent eyesight. Once, when Lord Chisselton was having an affair with one of the stable maids, it was Lord Balah who had spotted the evidence- a lone piece of hay- hidden discretely beneath his shirt collar. Of course, Lord Balah never told anybody of this forbidden liaison, but every member of the Chisselton family had been caught red-handed at one time or another-either in the act or soon thereafter- of performing some or other debaucherous deed by Lord Balah’s excellent eyesight and prodigious eye for detail.
Lord Balah decided immediately that the next course of action was to console this poor woman whose name he now knew was Trudie. Soon, Trudie had opened up to Lord Balah completely, and was 2 hours into telling him her life story when she remembered why she was at the airport in the first place: she and Johnny (Lord Balah’s angry accoster) had traveled all the way from their home in the East Rand that fateful day to fetch Trudie’s two young twin sisters who had just finished high school and were coming to visit their older sister on what was to be leg 1 of their 7 continent, 56 country world tour. After narrowly scraping through their end-of-year exams, the twins Fei-Ying and Fei-Yang had decided that life in communist China was not what they wanted for themselves, and so they had decided that even though they had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives that traveling around the world, one city at a time, would surely help them to figure it out. Having been born to a Chinese mother whilst their (and Trudie’s) father had been in the country on a business trip some 18 years before, the tech-savvy twins had found Trudie on Facebook some 3 months before and had organized to stay with their long-lost half sister in Boksburg for a few weeks.
As Trudie explained to Lord Balah the reason for her whereabouts at that time, he turned unexpectedly to see the twins standing suddenly at her side. Dressed in obscenely revealing tight pink matching skirts and tops, and draped in cheap fake gold jewellery, even Lord Balah could not mistake the resemblance between the half-siblings. Granted they didn’t have the same skin color, body types or facial features, but they certainly had the same lack of modesty and general inappropriateness when it came to their fashion sense.
And so there the four of them stood: Lord Balah watching as Trudie tried to introduce herself to the twins for the first time in person. As it turns out, the twins couldn’t speak a word of English, and had been using an interpreter during their Facebook conversations with Trudie. Also unbeknownst to their unsuspecting half-sister, the twins had escaped illegally from their communist country, where- as it turns out- traveling outside of its borders is illegal except for diplomats and foreign ambassadors. Unbeknownst to all four of our characters as well, the Chinese Secret Service had just discovered the twins’ escape and had deployed an undercover agent to find them and return them to within the country’s barbed-wired borders…
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