Homecoming of the gods Page 6

  Surprised and embarrassed by how a little favour had thrown a drunkard into a fit of ecstasy and the two other customers sneering at him with hatred and disgust in their eyes, Zach sat down at his meal. But almost immediately, he was interrupted by some beating coming from behind the counter. There were thumpings and kicking all amplified by curses from the antagonist of the fight. There were low groanings and Maureen calling out: ‘I wouldn’t kill him! Please it’s enough already.’

  Zach stopped at his food and listened hard trying to make out the accusation for which the boy whom he could hear his low painful throaty moaning and coughing was being beaten. Forgetting that he was a stranger, he walked up to Maureen and asked: ‘What’s the matter?’

  Maureen observed him with a strong insinuating sneer that thickened under the light which hung low over them. Without saying a word, she turned and headed out of the counter. Zach stood embarrassed. But now, he was close enough to pick out the words.

  ‘You bag of filth. You owe me your life. You understand that? What nonsense? Coming here to demand for something to eat. You are not my responsibility and I am terrible with charity so next time, if you want food, don’t miss your rounds.’ A loud cracker followed as did more cursing. ‘And if I catch you stealing my food again, any bit of it, I’m going to drown you in Nānti. Idiot. Your mother cursed you at birth. You have no shame. Will you get out of here, you bastard, you scum.’

  # # #

  It happened in a flash. Zach did not know how he’d made the transition, but in a swift moment he was standing before another man, a fifty-something year old coarse man with a whip and a seventeen-year old boy whimpering on the ground. He had taken another door, the one that opened into the kitchen house and had followed the voice as it continued to rage in the distance.

  Not knowing which of the two to give his attention, he turned to the boy first and helped him up. But the boy was too weak to sit up. He would shrivel like a bundle of cloth each time Zach tired lifting him.

  He dropped the boy and turned to the other man who was looking at the two in angry surprise and said: ‘Sir, if he has stolen anything, I would pay.’

  The man cursed under his breath, muttering ‘I don’t need your money and left’ as he walked away.

  It had happened that the boy, a dark-skinned and big-headed boy, whose name Pûjó meant ‘vegetable’ in the local tongue served as a dish-washer in the eating house in exchange for his meals. He did menial jobs in the town for his survival—farm, launder, cut grass, wash car, fetch water…. But for being sick for a few days and unable to do his job, he had stolen into the eating house to steal a meal. His boss had caught him and had beaten him up. And looking at the boy, Zach saw that he was very close to death as he lay down with a broken lip from which dark-red blood oozed.

  It had happened as quickly as the first. Everything abandoned, Zach heaved the boy onto his shoulders and started out of the tavern. He flagged down a commercial motorbike that took him and the boy to the hospital.

  # # #

  The Nānti Health Centre was a rusty building that reflected the smallness of the town in many ways. Its yellow painting had begun to peel to the many rains that had beaten it. It did not look very much like a ‘hospital’. It could have been a flat converted into a hospital. It looked like that though it had its own otherness from a ‘flat’. Those that had called it a ‘health centre’ had gotten it right. A wide gutter separated it from the main road. The steps that led up to its reception was very steep that Zach felt his trousers would tear from under his thighs as he climbed them.

  He walked in with the boy on his shoulder and was met by a fat and stout nurse at the lobby that served as reception. She was chewing gum and humming a song incoherently in between the grinding of her jaws. She looked distasteful.

  Zach almost startled when she turned and asked him as he helped the boy into the hall: ‘We are done for today. Please go.’

  He was left embarrassed even the more when he helped the boy onto a low stool in the small lobby that was lit by an incandescent bulb overhanging the hall. That gesture had the lady sputter in the same tone as the first: ‘What do you think this place is? This is not a madhouse. We don’t treat vegetables.’

  Zach did not seem to bother. He laid the boy down and waited for what would come next.

  It was to his relief when another nurse, a plump one that looked mid-thirtyish walked out from the inside hospital to meet him. She had a smile on her face as she walked up to Zach with a greeting.

  Zach took note of her. She was well-natured and there was not an iota of pretension in her generosity. She was a natural.

  The eight-room hospital was almost deserted except for the female ward where there were women in post-natal care and the nurses who kept chattering and gossiping on top of their voices. The boy was admitted into the men’s wardroom that had two iron beds, and Zach paid for his treatment.

  There was not much that was said about the boy’s condition by the smiley nurse, except that she thought it was pneumonia. There was no doctor for the night—there hardly ever was—and she would have to treat him for that, as it was prevalent among the people especially during rainy seasons. She was sure it would not have been anything else.

  Thankfully too, it turned out to be a lodging for the night as well. He could have had a hard time with that as well.

  # # #

  What Zach did not know was that Nānti was a small town where the news speed was close to that of light, and that the story of a man who was calling drunkards ‘gentlemen’ and checking mad boys into hospitals would spread like wild fire.

  He bought some snack and water from down the road and curled into the second leather-covered hospital bed for the night, while the vegetable boy slept fast the first.

  His body, weakened by the long journey, was taken away into a deep and dreamless sleep. And for once, he forgot himself and everything fled from his mind.

  None of all that had happened felt unusual.

  Chapter Eight: The Boy Who Lived

  The next morning, Zach was woken by the sound of anxious muttering in the distance in what sounded like an argument between and man and a woman. He had a hard time waking to the sound for indeed he was well worn by his journey. He slipped back into his sleep.

  When he was finally woken by some violent nudging, the sunny dawn had finally broken into full day. A nurse was at his side. It took Zach a while, in between which he stretched, yawned, and tried to familiarize himself with the new environment, to make out what exactly she was saying.

  There was a new patient and he would have to leave the one-room-sized ward.

  Just outside the door of the ward stood a heavy-set man who was wearing a bowler hat that covered almost half of his face. He was speaking in low tones with the other nurse who had admitted the boy. Something clicked in Zach at the sight of the man as he walked outside trying his shoes on. As the man’s face came into partial view, Zach was almost certain that he had seen him before.

  As he tied his shoes and tried not to stare, he heard: ‘I can’t keep him in my house either. B., I really don’t know what else to do. Let him stay here for the mean time. I will pay though if that’s your concern.’

  The nurse nodded in hesitant resignation and led the way out. After them, two young men carrying another, made their way into the way and dumped their load onto the other bed in the ward.

  Pûjó still lay still when Zach observed him. He seemed to be unconscious.

  He looked at the new boy. It was unlike anything he had ever seen in a human being before. His body had shrunken into what looked like a mass of dried banana leaves. The boy’s flesh, the much he could see in the face and in the palms uncovered by the coat, into which he had been placed, looked as if it were putrefying already. The sight made Zach shudder. There were deep black pockmarks on the boy’s face.

  But one thing was certain, the figure was still breathing. He still looked very much alive. He was not putrefying nor was there any fe
tid smell.

  It became obvious to him that someone was disposing of what was a living corpse. It could have been worse if it had come with the smell of death and putrefying bodies but there was none of that yet.

  But why in a hospital?

  Zach felt a surge of compassion for the boy mixed with irritation and disgust at the hair-raising, spine-chilling and goose bumps-giving sight. A surge of pain raced through his body as he now prepared to find breakfast for himself and his new friend. That was a sight to forget.

  Zach left the health centre and strode back into town.

  # # #

  Nānti was a small town sandwiched between two smaller towns but separated from the larger ones by the great river that gave it its name: River Nānti. It was intimately organic, hedged in by thick woods and a large body of water that had abundance of mystery to it. The houses were well separated, and finding one’s way about the town involved walking through thick words, lonely streets, low brushes and farms. The major roads were not tarred but were clean—except when they disappeared under the heavy rains forming into small pools. The sights of cars on them were rare. There were motorbikes and buses that routed the town with the other towns from which it was seemingly isolated by fairly thick woods. There was much green about the town. The trees were tall and there were farms almost at each turn.

  The town had, among the sparse grand buildings, a Catholic cathedral whose spire could be seen from a good distance on the east. There was also an Anglican parish. They both had their own schools among the public school in town. The most conspicuous buildings in the town however was found in and around the town centre. The town house had a shopping mall facing the boulevard, offices inside and a primary school behind it. There was a wide football field on the far east of the town centre. There were wooden goal posts at the two ends. There were other features that suggested that the field was used for wedding ceremonies and other festivities as well as for football matches. The town centre held a police post, a post office, a number of halls, a fuel station as well as a registration centre. Around the town centre had gathered a market that was pushing its way onto the boulevard. Under the trees that lined the boulevard were clusters of market women and their wares of purple onions and potatoes, red tomatoes, green vegetables, yellow peppers and an abundance of fruits that gave the area a rainbow-like look on a good and bright day.

  It was a quiet town that erupted in the tail of ’96; a peaceful town that was rocked by its own past that had haunted it for years. There was nothing that suggested that her people were either ready or prepared for what was her inevitable fate. They went about their lives without any presentiment of any ground-breaking event that will forever change their lives and the lives of many others. They went about their business in a typical mind-your-business-as-I-mind-mine mode and spending what remained of their time in gossips and drinking and tending their farms.

  # # #

  The town was strange to Zach but he did not yet seem to be feeling its strangeness. It was nine o’clock when he made it back to the town centre where he had first seen the taverns.

  He would remember that he was in a strange land when, upon returning to the taverns, he found that no one would do as much as talk to him. They remarked at the sight of him in the native language, the sound of which was disparaging even if he could not make out what exactly they were saying. A fat woman spat out as he walked out of Truth Is Life. There were dumb moves and fingers pointing as he went from tavern to tavern apparently ignorant that he was the topic with which they had broken their morning fast.

  Nānti was too small and too close a town for impulsive strangers like Zach. They supposed he was seeking attention and they gave it to him cold—with their teeth gritted.

  He finally managed a bean cake wrapped in plantain leaves and thankfully so returning to the health centre with a silent vow to keep his impulses to himself—or risk more enemies.

  On his return to the ward where Pûjó the vegetable boy, still lay still with a drip overhanging him, he met another sight that seemed like a Déjà vu. A very young and rich lady of about twenty looking like she had been taken from a portrait stood just by the door. She had her eyes on the corpse. A handkerchief was dabbing at her face. It was obvious that she had been crying for a while. Zach said a greeting that was not returned. The lady, lifting her gown shot out of the ward as soon as she saw Zach.

  It did not take Zach any more than common sense to figure out that she was somehow related to the dying boy.

  Zach stayed inside the hospital until evening. He had very little to think about. Making sure home (and the town) stayed out of his mind, he concentrated his thoughts on finding the mayor and his daughter. He would then take it from there.

  Into the afternoon, the smiley nurse that had taken them in arrived for her round which lasted into the nights.

  It hadn’t occurred to Zach why she had obliged them unlike her partner the night before. He just saw it as part of the demands of her job which she generously fulfilled. The lady was in her early thirties, Zach noticed. She looked pale. She was chubby. Something suggested some hidden agony in her face. Zach’s sensibilities, which were growing took note of that.

  She changed the IV of the living boy and observed the dying/dead boy, then began at Zach. ‘There has been some stories about you floating around town. They say you fought all night at a tavern and helped a thief escape custody.’

  Zach laughed aloud. ‘Did I?’ That was a different kind of sensationalism.

  ‘I wouldn’t go about this town with my nose in the air. I would try my best to mind my business if I were you.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. They were beating the boy. They almost killed him.’

  ‘What is he to you?’

  ‘He is a human being and his life matters as much as mine. And I wouldn’t waste it for a plate of food when I can save it for that price.’

  ‘That sounds noble enough. But the people do not think so. They’d rather have him dead.’ She said and the proceeded to tell him the boy’s story which was popular among the people.

  He was a vegetable.

  There was a cultural myth to his type that was summarised by the term ‘vegetable’. The myth could have been anything. It could have been their way of washing their hands off him. It could have been an excuse that justified their expulsion of him to the frontiers of their society. It could have been their way of paraphrasing their ignorance over what his true condition was.

  He was fragile, retarded in his mental development and the general cultural sentiment about his condition was that he would die young—whoever gave them that idea!

  The myth had been thrown about him at first and for all that came to pass in the twentieth century, it had stuck.

  His type were known to die young to escape their fate and return in a cycle of rebirths that ended when they found a full life. A vegetable was not known, with some kind of empirical certainty, to outlive childhood and it was a mystery how he had lived that long. His mother had abandoned him on realization that he was underdeveloped mentally. Maybe that was the excuse she needed to dispose of him when she learnt of his condition and the burden which it placed on her. He grew fending for himself, doing mostly menial jobs. No one had ever heard him speak a word and so it was assumed that he was dumb as well.

  ‘There is so much pain and suffering in the world, sir and when I see people like him… like them,’ she said in reference to the two boys, ‘I fall to silence over my own sufferings.’

  Zach fell to thought over that as the nurse walked away. He wanted to ask her about her own suffering but he chose to leave it for another day.

  # # #

  On account of that word of exhortation, something in him smacked at him for his goodness. He now felt he should stay away from public sight as much as he could and as much as his sense of ‘caution’ and courtesy could allow. He was not a tourist after all.

  He spent the rest of the blank day in the hospital, on that bench in the lobby actua
lly.

  He waited until it was dark before setting off for the mayor’s place. He could not have gone any other time as he was now holding his peace.

  He had not changed his clothes until that time neither had he cleaned up. But he knew what had brought him to the town. And it wasn’t a fashion parade.

  He was sure that he would be leaving the next day.

  Chapter Nine: Hééb

  Zach followed directions given to him by a friendly elderly woman who was hawking roast corn until he was standing before what was a large white and high mansion with a rather wide front yard. It was night already. There were two lamps fitted onto the two concrete columns of the gate that lit the open street before it.

  Zach stood there watching absentmindedly after haven knocked as hard as he could, when it creaked open and a man in his early thirties walked out of it. The man had a swagger to his gait and was mindlessly humming a song.

  Hééb, the mayor’s valet was going home for the night when he bumped into a stranger. Of all the things that made him smug and distasteful, Hééb was known in and around Nānti as very possessive of his boss. He certainly had no plans of changing in a night’s notice for stranger who lacked ‘courtesy’ in the way he addressed him.

  Zach took the cue and walked up to him. ‘Sir, good evening. I want to see the mayor.’ Zach was as bland as it was normal with him, as he was as courteous as good sense demanded of a grown man to another grown man. But those were not enough for the valet. Zach had a way of rousing the insecurities of self-defensive people like Hééb—by paying no attention to their need for ‘special’ treatment.

  The man looked at him with hateful surprise in his eyes. The face was far from familiar. The look seemed to say in an inaudible but coarse voice: ‘What the hell…’ He weighed the man. He could be one of those looking for a favour from the mayor, one of those wretched and ignoble people taking advantage of his boss’ generosity. But he sure was not carrying himself as one. He was too imposing for a favour-monger.