KARAPI was hand-knitting a pink skirt for Kambakete. Grandma nicknamed her Kambakete because she kept the baby inside a pram-like box of washing powder. 

Granny sewed up the miniskirt from pink and white textile discards. A minute later, she strolled towards the yellow pee pot behind the purple curtain. The snooping baby, couldn’t hear the trickling water drumming in the pee pot. Seconds later, she squinted at the baby, and spotted the baby with a sewing thread hanging from her milk-glued lips. Immediately, Nana played a tug-of-war game with the stubborn baby by pulling the thread from her zipped lips. Unfortunately, she dug out two of her milk teeth. 

“She had swallowed my needle,” she cried. Tears misted her eyelashes, before raining down her cheeks. The freaked baby began to wail because Nana was crying. Karapi clutched the baby, and dashed to a witch-doctor. “The baby had swallowed a needle,” she sobbed. The giggling seer choked a bowl with breadcrumbs, and placed it in front of a naked-neck rooster. Beneath the breadcrumbs, the sangoma had hidden a rusty needle. The rooster pecked the breadcrumbs, but ignored the rusted needle. 

Karapi fastened the blubbing baby onto her back, and sprinted towards another seer. “She had swallowed a needle,” she sobbed, and planted a fork inside the baby’s mouth. This time, the chuckling fortune-teller placed a nylon needle in front of a black-and-white dog. The witty dog shook its head left and right, and whiffed the plastic needle. Afterwards, Karapi tiptoed down a thorn-infested footpath towards the sand bricks clinic. Along the way, she bumped into a strawberry-eyed baboon. “Can you see through the baby’s tummy?” she asked the breastfeeding baboon. 

The chimpanzee laughed at her motherly remarks. Soon, she sprinted into the clinic’s termite-eaten door, and knocked down a grey-haired man walking on crutches. The doctor placed the baby inside a pushchair, and ran X-rays on the baby. She lifted some X-ray pictures, but couldn’t find the needle inside the baby’s throat. The therapist wrote spidery words on a pink health passport, and gave the baby stick-mounted blue sweets. Later, a veteran nurse nudged Karapi with syringes on her buttocks. Immediately, Nana and the baby snoozed before a yellow flashing lamp van took them home. 

When Karapi woke up from the injection-induced sleep, she sat on the pee pot, and found a needle with the thread.