A Secret with Endimbaekena

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Fiction

A Secret with Endimbaekena

Fiction by Karamoh Kabba

It's been raining for the past six days; mostly torrential downpours, some showers, and drizzles. A constant pall of darkness reigns beneath overhanging dark clouds making it difficult for someone to discern mornings from afternoons. It's far from the harvest time, which comes in the dry season. Fruit-trees’ leaves are green and glossy beneath films of dew and raindrops. They fall, drench in dripping drains and carpet the orchard floor in various colors ranging from fresh green, decaying red, brown to rotten black. Rice paddies blossom with chubby green seeds filled with white milky fillings. Squashy seeds in green mangoes are indistinguishable without the hard coating that separates them from the fruity part at maturity. Guava seeds are as tough as tiny ball bearings. A condition that imbues a hopeful community of a prosperous upcoming dry season with anticipation.

But the sound of raindrops on the leaves in the orchard floor is soothing to the ear. It brings some sense of spirituality to the people at this time of the year especially when most families look up to the Supreme Being for their next meal. I live in this orchard at the southern edge of Koidu town, Kono district. It’s here that I call home. Fifty yards down the road, beneath the belly of a hill, is our rice swamp. But for now, many families like ours cook imported rice at this difficult time of the year. And tomorrow will be the last day of the seven-days-rain, an indication that the rainy season is half way done.

Last night's rain was a gentle mix or a muddle of all the three types of rain. But it was comforting. I had stayed up very late struggling with indigestion from eating my dinner at 1:00 am. It's one of those days that my mother merely made it through her daily struggle to provide us our daily bread. I am used to eating my dinner after 10:00 pm everyday but before midnight. It gives me ample time for some activities before bedtime. But the way the rain poured last night on our corrugated zinc roof was as comforting as a ballad from shrill voices of traditional balladeers laden in their instruments: drums, ago-goes, kaylanes and batas. This mixture of traditional tunes bartered my bellyache for a sound sleep throughout the rest of the night.

“Whack!” my mother slapped me on my back with her bare hand, because I am not only late for school, I also soiled my uniform shorts from bed-wetting. I woke up suddenly from my sound sleep.

“Who said you can sleep in your uniform?” she asked.

I jumped down from my bunk-bed. I crossed my right hand over my shoulder blades down my upper spines and my left hand up my lower spines. I thrust my chest forward, rubbed the whack and screamed in excruciating pain. I screamed so loud that the rest of my eleven siblings lined outside to look on in great fear. Because, when my mother becomes angry, it trickles down the family. She unearths everyone's mischief from the past and beat each one of us to complete her frustration and anger.

“I thought you had on your prayday (Ramadan) suit yesterday for the concert? How did you end up sleeping in your uniform and urinating in it?”

“Whack! Whack!” She slapped my jaws left and right as I rubbed my back.

“You are going to school regardless. Hurry-up!” she exclaimed, turned around and left everyone galloping away in a commotion and fear of her temperament.

The prayday suit my mother took out for me to wear to the school concert yesterday wasn’t fashionable for the occasion. My chance to impress many who would see me for the first time in my street clothes. Besides the prayday suit that my mother keeps in her trunk for special days like yesterday, I’ve no other decent clothes. I’ve only one uniform set that I wear Monday through Friday before my mother washes it on the weekends in preparation for the following week. But it’s always very shabby especially at the end of the school year before I am ready for another uniform set, which my mother often purchased at the beginning of a new school year. Indeed, they’re the best clothes ever that make me feel a bit savvy unlike the well-kept prayday suit that’s not so cool. Especially the present uniform that I’ve now; it’s tailored to my size by a youths’ fashion tailor. It fits so well that I hardly want to take it off after school. Indeed my mother had beaten me several times for failing to take my uniform off after school.

“Here’s a banana. Food will be ready by the time you return,” she had said and sent me off. I also had a banana for breakfast that morning before I left for school. She harvests them before they fully mature. She keeps them in a cupboard under immense temperature to hasten ripening. On days that she cannot find ripe bananas in the cupboard, she boils green ones for breakfast. She alternates bananas with mangoes or guavas during the harvest time in the dry season.

“I wish it wasn’t mandatory to attend the concert,” I thought aloud.

But I sneaked back into the house no sooner she engaged my sister in a discussion. I changed into my school khaki shorts, my sister's V-neck T-shirt and left. I forgot to take the shorts off when I returned from the concert, ate my late dinner, washed it down with plenty of water and went to bed.

It's very embarrassing for me to go to school in a uniform drenched in my own urine. I attempt to hangout with some wayward boys in the township. But they too don't want me to be around them. They call me coward because I don't have the nerve to do what they normally do in the local market. They always have money to spend from pick-pocketing and robbing shoppers and local merchants. At school, I don't have friends because I am too poor. Even toothpaste we considered a luxury item in my household. Perpetually clad in dirty and ragged uniform, barefooted and no money or food to eat during lunchtime; I am an embarrassment to any one who wants to befriend me. Befriending me always attracts provocation upon those who did so. On such days like today that I cannot go to school, I will spend all alone.

It's about 2:00 pm, and I’m seating in my usual lookout post on a concrete slab by a building in Maraka-compound, in a corner at the edge of a cluster of houses, hunched against the wall, patiently looking straight ahead for the women to come out with food remnants. There is plenty of food in this overpopulated immigrant community in the heart of Koidu town. These Maraka immigrants have come to Koidu town purposely to trade in diamonds. The houses at Maraka-compound are much clustered that their roofs touch each other. The drainage system is almost impossible to control. Gutters are merely covered. Overflowing rubbish is pushed down the open gutters into a little river called Mwende, which runs down adjacent of Maraka-compound just at a viewable distant from were I am seating. It’s also always afloat with garbage. Many people throw their garbage directly into the river. The stench of food, flooded gutters and human waste are very strong at this time of the day in this community. Every household is presently either eating or dishing food. At one point every day a waste truck is pumping out human excrement from a latrine, or a broken pipe is oozing something. The broken ones at the back of the buildings emit foul-smelling steam forcefully like a mini volcano that is ready to erupt. But Maraka-compound is unlike my own neighborhood where our bodies feed on their own muscles. Basic human needs, from food to clothing, are plentiful here. Even the food remnants that I am here patiently waiting for are enough to feed several families in my neighborhood.

As I ponder how these Maraka immigrants live in such wealth in Koidu town while we the locals go on empty stomachs, I saw Endimbaekena (where there’s little for survival), our family dog. He’s been here with me once and has since remembered to come back on time, on a daily basis. He's seating at a visible distance from me, but focused to see me. The acute concentration has overcome even his powerful olfactory sense. We are both looking in the same direction from different angles, and in great expectation for the Maraka women to bring forth the food remnants to the trash bins. Many other dogs have taken strategic positions. They’ve all been waiting patiently for the women to come out with the remnants. But others growl, snarl and bark at each other, making a brave dogs’ battle spectacle.

From houses’ rooftops on the opposite side from where I am seating, vultures clasp open wings and clutch crooked claws on mango trees close by the garbage bins in this no man's land, from which they land in the bins with single clasps to scavenge on carcasses. As they draw in on the carcasses, agama lizards glide away up sidewalls of the buildings, scared away by vultures from feeding on little scavengers. As they draw in on the waste bins, agama lizards glide away up sidewalls of the buildings.

Each time I cross Endimbaekena’s path here at these garbage bins, we both walk back home together bellyful and my mother expresses great appreciation and love for him. Indeed, she doesn’t know of my secret with Endimbaekena.

By Karamoh Kabba Copyright © 2004
Posted 06/17/2004