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Beware the green-eyed monster, it will cost you

It's one of the costliest emotions on earth. And equally destructive.

It has seen people plunging themselves to their deaths from the top floors of tall buildings. It has seen others reduce themselves into burning torches. Others have killed their loved ones - sometimes entire families in one fell swoop.

It's jealousy.

Thousands of books have been written about it and it has been analysed by academia over many generations. It can manifest itself in baffling ways. Sometimes it can make people do things that are ridiculously insane.

When I was young, a friend who caught his girlfriend with another young man stabbed the miscreant - then rushed home to hang himself.

Sadly, our hero chose a weak piece of string to hang himself with.

It snapped. Just as he was coming to terms with the fact that he was still alive, members of the family of the young man he had stabbed arrived. They beat our hero to a pulp. Then told him the young man he had stabbed was still alive.

The following day, members of his own family beat him up again. He had brought the family name into disrepute by trying to kill himself. One of the uncles kept saying, "You're such a failure: you lose a girl. Then you try to kill somebody, but even there, you fail. You only scratch him with a knife.

"Then you come home, you fail to even hang yourself.

"You're bringing bad luck to this family."

To this day - just over 30 years later - our hero is still the butt of jokes among those who remember his shenanigans. Needless to say his story has been embellished and titivated with all kinda spices.

In one version, our hero tries to shoot himself - but the gun jams, then members of his family beat him up. In another version, he consumes poison - which does not kill him, but only paralyses his left leg. Oh, I forgot to mention that he was born with a slightly deformed left leg.

Even when we tell the revisionists that the man was born like that, they laugh it off: don't allow facts to stand in the way of a good story.

 

This story of jealousy was brought home this week by a report I read in the papers.

This fellow from the KZN coastal town of Ballito - estranged from his wife - succumbed to a fit of jealousy after spotting her with a new person in her life. He went berserk: first he went into the bedroom and started shredding her linen.

Then when he spotted her car at the entrance to the complex where she lives, he drove his own car at high speed, smashing it into hers. He drives (or drove) a sports car, a red Toyota 86, and she a Mini Cooper. So you can imagine the damage. And, oh, I almost forgot: in the excitement of driving his car into hers, he also smashed down the boom gate at the plush coastal complex at which she stays.

At the time of writing, our 34-year-old hero was in police custody and was due to appear at the Umhlali Magistrate's Court facing charges of malicious damage to property.

Now they are counting the costs. Having seen pictures of the damaged property - which have gone viral on social media - I think both cars will be written off. I suspect the insurance company will refuse to pay. This was, by all accounts, not an accident. But of course I am no legal eagle, so I shall leave the judgment to the courts and the insurance assessors.

And then there's the small matter of the boom gate. The company that owns the estate - or the body corporate - will demand damages, one would assume.

I can also imagine that after this incident the wife will seek a protection order against him. From whichever angle you want to look at it, this is going to be costly to the couple. Both financially and emotionally.

A commentator on one of the social media platforms jokingly said the man had watched too many of Tyler Perry's movies featuring his madcap character Madea, who does not hesitate to use a crane to remove from the parking lot the car of a person who had "stolen" her parking space.

Well, where I come from, even in times of death, we laugh.

That's why I laughed at this comment. But the comment hides a deep and serious truth: we live in stressful times. Sometimes, yes, we seek resort in "solutions" that we glean from the movies, or newspaper articles.

We forget that we have brains. That there are counsellors who can help us cope with emotional challenges. We do not know what the underlying circumstances really are in this case, but the fellow could have handled things differently had he sought help in time.

Thankfully, no one was killed in the making of this movie.

Send comments to fredkhumalo@post.harvard.edu

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