Beni’s story continued…
By Wesonga Robert
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
It is a good path, that which allows the walker to walk it in peace. A walker looking for peace of mind would fancy walking on a path like that; perhaps trying to piece together the broken pieces of his life into one significant piece. Such a path permits its walker to get harmony in the glorious appreciation of nature. In fact, a path like that enables the walker to become one with nature.
You unite with the little acacia shrubs as you walk along the path. You commune with the no less hardworking bees of the semi-arid ecosystem as they go about their business among the rare flowers of succulent cactus plants. As you walk trying to avoid the dusty tracts left behind by herds of goats, sheep and cattle, you get constantly reminded of the presence of life. You walk on carefully here; slowly and musingly. You might even freely choose to allow your heart to join the hearts and spirits of other beings in this celebration of life.
Beni badly needed the loneliness of the path as he did his usual walk home from work. It is with silence and a calm sense of awareness that he enjoyed witnessing the sublime innocence of the environment in Samburu. This day had been long. His job, which had been steadily becoming a burden to both his body and mind, had gone a notch higher in attempting to destabilize his self-esteem. He was having more arguments at work than he considered safe. Each morning he left for work promising himself never to participate in the controversial discussions at work. He would leave his house intent on keeping his ideas to himself. So far, this efforts had followed by no success.
Many times he had been accused of being abstract and theoretical. Not a few of his colleagues and friends now believed that his ideas were impractical and could only find functionality in the non-existent utopian world. Beni felt that if his accusers were right, then he was not to blame. If he ever thought that these accusers were right, then his experiences were to blame. It was in the lecture halls that he began having his mind. At first, it appeared to be a mere working of his mind towards the satisfaction of his academic curiosities. But, like all good things, this thinking held him hostage. It held him a slave in the somewhat futile thinking that the theoretical world of the academy could find its full realisation in the practical world. Even now, he wondered why courses like Critical Thinking were being taught when thinking critically was never really readily acceptable anywhere he had been.
She was beginning to slacken her pace. Beni noticed that her strides were growing shorter with each successive stride. When he had got out of the gate, she was about two hundred metres ahead. She had glanced back and seen Beni moving towards the main road. At this point he began imagining that she would reduce her pace. And now she was doing it. She was a new addition to their workforce. Rael was one of those ageing ones who refused to accept the reality that age was finally catching up with them.
The top of her head was a maze of the natural and the synthetic. Where the natural Samburu hair would have held sway, overused artificial hair dominated. And this artificial hair made her cut the image that had induced a friend of Beni to remark that head looked like the mane of an ageing lioness. Misled thus that she looked younger with her head, she had the habit of swaying her head periodically when she talked. I think by this she meant to place her hair behind the ear. She did it not with the finesse in Hollywood movies; hers must have been a practiced move copied from a Nigerian movie of the lowest calibre. And Beni fell short of telling her that if she did it out there, she would be made to feel out of place in five seconds.
Rael was the reason why Beni decided to start dressing badly. She had one morning smiled, exposing two browning metallic teeth at the corners of her upper teeth, and told Beni that he was very smart. At that time, Beni almost thought her mouth was a masterpiece of dental genius imposed upon her by a film director. That was until he realized that she was not the creature he had seen in the movie, Nightmare on Elm Street. Beni decided to punish Rael by showing her the greatest contempt expressed in his poor dressing.
There was something better to look at. This thing was happening fifteen kilometres north-east of Kisima. It was above the forest on Kirisia Hills overlooking Baawa. The semi-darkened cloud was so selective; it was severally selective, sometimes for weeks or even months. It was doing this again. What reached Kisima and the surrounding areas when this happened was only the exceptional scent of soil held in the resultant cold breeze that wafted from the hills. The scent reminded Beni of the months of January and February in his childhood.
Back then, this smell would come after weeks of hard sunshine. At first the smell was not there, but it soon came after the spattering fall of the rain on the ground. When the singular drops turned into streamlets and began flowing collectively, the smell disappeared and left the people and the land bathing in the healing aspect of the rain. The misty picture above the hills was further illuminated by the six o’clock sunshine. Beni decided to catch the image using his camera phone.
The image was a little hazy but with some editing could suffice to be a screensaver on his desktop. He turned round and captured the sun. The image of the sun was clear but harsh to the eyes. He regarded it for some time and decided that he did not need it. He deleted it. A good photographer is one who captures rare and romantic images with freshness of style, he thought. The sunshine in Samburu was not something one could write home about. It was what everybody expected to hear.
By the time he resumed walking, he noticed that Rael had given up. She was hurrying ahead of him. She cut the corner at the Kisima Catholic church without as much as glancing at the approaching lorry. It was the same lorry Beni had seen selling timber and posts in Kisima. The dark smoke emanating at the back as it laboured on spoke more than a thousand words. He wanted to think about it but dismissed the idea. He had to stop his ung’ombe ideology from resurfacing again.
………………………….. TO BE CONTINUED.
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