One time, a mother called me. She lived on the other side of the village stream along my grandfathers shamba. She asked me how old I was. I said I was 14. She added me a sugarcane she had cut. She asked if I knew her son, Mutuma. I said yes. I see him all the time. Himself and his younger brother Mutethia. She asked me to be his son friend. I looked at her, worried. His son was younger than I was. I looked at the sugar cane I was holding, the ripe shinny sugarcane on my hand and I nodded in agreement.
She encouraged me with desperate plea of a mother who meant well for her son. But persuasively. She asked if my mother was a nurse, the one that owned that clinic near the local health Centre. I said no. the woman was a family friend. She only came around to visit my mother from time to time.
She nodded and tied and retied her headscarf. She described a few occasions where she saw us together with her son on the village playground. She asked me to come back by this time the following day, I would meet her son. She persuaded me until I ate half of the sugarcane. I wiped my mouth and hurriedly left.
I came back the next day as agreed. True as the sun that shines in the sky. Mutuma started throwing us stones, me and his mother. He picked up a large concreate and lunched it at his mother. He threatened that if I ever came near their shamba again, he would break my big head.
The woman gave me another sugarcane. This time round, she made it two. She pleaded with me and apologized on behalf of her son. But that was the last day I went there.
I suppose it is not easy for mothers to watch their sons become outliners. To accompany them through decrepit paths without any possibility of helping them. I suppose for fathers watching their sons lead the kind of lives they choose – making the same mistakes they once made, but unable to help them - must be excruciatingly difficult.
Mutuma, today just as you might have expected. if a bird was singing the same names of living men, his name would be missing. I don’t know the real story. I heard he was picked by mob justice and they decided to practice body building techniques with him, before handing over his barely alive body to the authorities.
That was the last time anyone ever heard of him. You can speak to your children with the eyes of one who has seen, you can graze their skins with the knowledge of a heart that has been put through trials, but there’s very little else you can do. A life’s salvation is a personal affair.
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