- The narrator's mother has a nervous breakdown when he's just five years old, so he is shipped away from his lovely Zulu nanny and sent to boarding school.
- His first night at school, the eleven- and twelve-year-old boys take him to the showers and pee on him, to punish him for being a rooinek, or a South African of English descent (they are Afrikaners, whose ancestors were beaten in an ugly war with the English—check out the "Allusions" page for more information). In the process they discover that he is circumcised, and he feels terrible for having a "hatless snake." Talk about a rough first day.
- The headmistress, known as Mevrou (Afrikaans for Mrs.), then beats him for having supposedly wet his bed (really he is just covered with the pee from the other boys). Peekay just can't get a break, can he?
- The other children give him the name "Pisskop" (Afrikaans for pisshead), and he gets a daily caning from Mevrou because he actually does start wetting the bed. Okay, this is just depressing at this point.
- The main bully at school is known as the Judge, and he makes the narrator's life a living hell.
- Finally the end of the school term comes and the narrator gets to go back to his grandpa's farm, where he finds his beloved nanny. His mother, however, is still being treated somewhere for her nervous breakdown.
- Nanny decides to call in the famous medicine man Inkosi-Inkosikazi to deal with the bedwetting, or "night water" problem.
- Inkosi-Inkosikazi shows the narrator how to do a special trick to make chickens magically lie still inside a circle drawn on the ground (we're totally going to use that trick at the next party we go to) and also visits the narrator in his dreams, taking him on a mystic journey over three waterfalls and ten stepping stones to cure him of his night water.
- On his way off to see Modjadji, the rain queen, Inkosi-Inkosikazi gives one of the chickens to the narrator to practice the sleeping trick.
- The narrator names the chicken Granpa Chook, and they become BFFs.