[b] I sat on my mat in my mother’s wretched hut and watched as the clouds gathered with a vengeance. The cloth that had been blocking the dust from entering the hut now lay on the ground; and the cold breeze freely came inside. It clanged the silver pans together as if its aim was to wake my mother up. I was glad when the wind stopped and it began to rain.
Mother tossed and turned in her sleep, murmuring words as if she were having a conversation with someone. It wasn’t the first time mother was talking in her sleep. She often chanted and was known to most villagers as a strange woman.
I stood up quietly and picked up the piece of cloth to cover the single window in the hut. Then I sat back down on my mat, sleep-impaired, staring straight at my mother; but my mind was far away.
I remembered a night similar to this one, some years ago. My brother had only been seven years by that time. He had insisted that I took him to the grand durbar that had been organised by all the neighbouring villages. Durbars were always well attended by chiefs, queens, princes and basically all members of the royal families.
A gathering of royals wasn’t something that happened every day, so I was naturally interested in making an appearance. However, my mother had specifically warned me not take my brother along, no matter how much he begged.
Unknowingly, he followed me to the durbar and when I got home later that day, I found out that he had gone missing. I was filled with fear and my mother was completely overwrought. That night there was a great storm, one of the greatest to ever hit the village. My little brother never came back. Since that day storms always reminded me of him.
“Nandi, where’s my cover cloth?” Mother asked, suddenly bringing me back to reality. I was surprised that this storm had woken her. Usually mother slept through everything.
She tried to sit up on her mat in order to lean on the red clay walls. I rushed over and helped by lifting her arms. I got her cover cloth which had been blown by the wind some feet away from her; and put it over her shoulders and arms.
She sighed and even in the darkness, I could tell she was smiling. “Thank you, my daughter,” she said. I sat beside her and put my arm around her.
After a while she asked me, “Do you remember?” But I remained silent. I wanted her to think I was asleep. The last time we had talked about my little brother was about two years ago. That was the same time we decided that our search for him had proven futile.
As I sat beside my mother with my back to the wall, I felt some sort of liquid trickle down my back. When I looked up, the increasingly numerous drops of rain entered my eyes.
“Nandi, are you awake?” Mother asked in panic. “Can you feel that? Papa Okoro did not patch the roof with the palm fronds you gave him.”
I sighed in derision. Uncontrollable tears blocked my vision as I remembered all the trouble I’d gone through to get those palm fronds. I had to do some farm work for some nasty village folk before getting enough coins to buy the palm fronds at the market. My feet were calloused from all the thorn plants I had accidentally stepped on at the farms.
“Don’t worry, mama,” I said reassuringly. “I will go and visit Papa Okoro tomorrow.” But I had very little confidence because we didn’t have any money.
Our hut was falling apart. If this storm didn’t finally destroy it, the next one would.
The sound of the rain drowned every noise both distant and near. But the sound that I heard next was different from the usual sounds of tree branches falling or splashes of rain hitting against leaves.
It was almost as if someone was playing the village drums. But as it grew nearer, it sounded more like someone was hitting a stick against a pan. The sound was coming from the only window in the hut that led out into a thickened scrubland.
“Mama, can you hear that?” I asked the greying old woman sitting next to me. I felt her grow stiff-cold with tension.
“Mama, what’s wrong with you?” I asked. Mother was usually melodramatic but she was rarely afraid of things.
“They’re coming for me,” she whispered. With the rains falling heavily, I could barely hear her. But the sound coming from the bushes outside did not stop.
I looked at my mother in silence. I was a much less superstitious woman than she was. Mother believed in spirits and ghosts. But most of the time she exaggerated. That clanging sound could be anything from a bush rat trying to hide from the rain to the wild wind knocking things together.
The sound seemed to upset mama so I decided to take a peek with our home-made lantern.
“I’ll be right back,” I whispered to her with a smile I knew she couldn’t see.
“Where are you going?” Mother asked sounding like she was almost in tears. “Don’t leave me here, Nandi. They’re coming for me.”
“Mama, no one is coming for you,” I replied seriously. “They would have to get through me first.” I rummaged through some pile of polythene and came up with one that we usually used to cover ourselves from the rain.
Mother kept murmuring certain words at me. Sometimes she could chant some words I knew nothing about. And I never asked what she was saying because I knew it would only make me more confused.
I covered my head and shoulders with the polythene and stepped outside the hut. I heard some thunder in a distance but I was more curious than afraid.
Living on the outskirts of the village, mother and I had only few neighbours and when my brother went missing mysteriously, people began treating us strangely. Once I heard some rumours that mother had used him for her rituals. Many villagers believed mother to be eccentric.
I run through the rain very fast and when I was almost at the back of the hut, I slipped and fell in a heap on the muddy ground. The water soaked through my dress immediately and it was a struggle to stand back up. Thankfully, there were no stones that could scratch my legs.
Although the noise had died down somewhat, I could determine where it had come from earlier. And I went with the lantern right behind the window of my mother’s hut. I searched around slowly, lowering the lantern to the ground and that’s when I saw a hand holding a stick. The rest of the body seemed to be covered by the bush.
I took in a deep breath and placed the lantern closer to the bushes. I would’ve felt more relieved if I had only seen the hand holding the stick. But it revealed a heaving body which gave me a very unsettling feeling.
Notwithstanding, I went closer to the body, placed the lantern across the figure which was still breathing and . . . was that blood on his clothing?
Mother had been a dressmaker for quite a long time before branching into herbal medicine so I knew a few things about fabrics and threads. The light from the lantern was dim but there was no mistaking it. The coloured threads that had been sewn in between the softness of the expensive fabric were not ordinary. It wasn’t something one saw every day.
My first instinct was to help the man. If I didn’t take him inside the hut to be warm, he would certainly die in the rain.
I began to shake him to wake up but he didn’t budge. What if he were already dead? With all my might I pulled him through the mud and plants. At the side of the hut, I tripped on a stone and almost fell down. I watched helplessly as the only lantern mother and I owned fell down on the ground and broke. It was an old family treasure that father had handed to us the same year he had died.
Almost in tears, I pulled the stranger all the way to the entrance of the hut. I removed the polythene which had done nothing to shield me from the pouring rain.
“Nandi, what have you done?” my mother asked, reaching for her walking stick. My eyes were already used to the darkness and I went to kneel before her.
“I brought a man here, mother,” I said, holding her shaking hands in mine. “He’s hurt but the herbs I bought yesterday can heal him.”
“Something great is about to happen,” Mother said. But I was busy looking after the man to pay any attention to her.
I looked for the candles which we usually kept in the corner of the hut and found some matches to light them. I mashed up the herbs with a smooth stone and placed them on the man’s wounds.
After all was done, I went back to my corner; but sleep wouldn’t come. Mother was silent so I guessed she was already sleeping.
In the morning, I woke up thinking about the man. I looked around the hut, went outside and searched in the compound, behind the hut and as far as some neighbours’ hut. But the man was not there.
When my search proved futile, I went back to the hut to take care of mother.
Upon reaching mother’s side, I saw something wrapped in a cloth sitting in front of her. Mother was poking the object with her stick.
“What is that?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “The man left it here.”
I took it carefully; it was a little heavy, and unwrapped it. For several minutes I stood mesmerised at what I was seeing.
I knelt down before mother and said, with tears in my eyes. “Gold coins.”
“Are you sure?” Mother asked, stretching out her hands to feel them. I gave them to her and she touched them delicately.
“Yes,” mother confirmed with a faraway look on her face. “Gold coins.”
I smiled.
“Now we can get a new roof,” mother said happily and I hugged her.
Times were still hard for most people, my brother was still missing and we never found the wounded stranger. But with the gold coins we had a new hope[/b]
[b][color=red]Sometimes good deeds are rewarded in years to come but sometimes they are rewarded within moments[/color][/b]
