A wife finds an earring in her bedroom. It does not belong to her so she confronts her husband about it.
Instead of owning up to his indiscretion of having invited a lover into their home, he decides to fib and tells his wife the earring is his. The lie becomes more elaborate over time as the husband, a school principal, is compelled to wear the earring in public in an absurd attempt to sustain the falsehood.
This is a scene from a story, Mpumi’s Assignment, that Dr Siphiwo Mahala published in 2001. A year later, while a creative writing student at Wits, it would lead him to re-visit a story he’d read a decade ago, Can Themba’s classic, The Suit, to which his classmates kept comparing Mpumi’s Assignment.
