Behind the Eclipse

by Pramudith D. Rupasinghe

  My grandmother was simply astounded by what she just heard. For her, it was distressing that not only Oldman but also his brother had to leave without having the chance to become an ancestor.

  ‘Two powerful souls in our family,’ she said.

  She released a deep sigh of consolation. My father gave his hand to her to stand up. It was not usual to see people hugging in my society in the 1940’s. My father held grandmother in his hands for a moment.

  ‘Broh is alone; he is trying hard to heal people, but the curse is very powerful this time. It looks like no one will survive in neighbouring villages too. We’ve got to be careful too. Many villages had been burnt down to earth in Guinea. It is like a wildfire,’

  ‘Are you going back?’ It looked like it was all that grandmother knew to ask.

  ‘No,’ he was firm. He said looking at Kumba who was circumspect about what she would hear from his mouth. Her face suddenly became radiant with a line of hope and happiness. But I was not in a position to believe that there was any sign of hope anymore left in our village too. It was not far enough to escape from a curse that was fast spreading into every nook and cranny.

  I knew that when my father was around, Kumba was not for me. The death of Oldman, father`s return and fast spreading Bush-curse had already started to stir me to dislike the place where I was born: the bushes I used to play around, the person who gave me blood, the hut that protected me from the pouring rains and the burning sun, the woman who made me a man, and the memories I used to cherish. That night, when my father stepped into our hut, I did not feel my freedom and autonomy any longer within those clay walls, and the sense of protection that I used to feel.

  ‘When a boy is grown up, father becomes his first opponent; that is how the rules of nature have been set.’ Oldman said to my uncle once he had found uncle`s fifth wife with a belly for his son.

  When there are two grown up males in one herd, the wild goats have two options left: either to fight till one`s skull is cracked or to flee for hope.

  At times of hopelessness that reigned every single bit of air, every single drop of rain and every single piece of sand; shadows of death were over every single life around me. My thoughts had become unclear like muddy waters in the raged Lofa river in rainy August, but I did not have the courage to groan like a lion like the raged river did except to plead for the passed soul of Oldman to show me a way out. I forgot that he had been sent out without proper rituals, and so could not hear me.

  That night did not bring me any comfort but plunged me in an abysmal pensiveness which usurped my sleep. The air was heavier than it used to be. The healing and relaxing homely smell had turned foul as if everything was possessed by evil spirits. The silence between my parents that merged into the thick darkness indicated that their life was no longer the same. The monotony of humming of the crickets was disturbed by a mountain owl from time to time as if it was trying to find a sign of hope even though there was no response from the other side of the mountain.

  ‘Till you fight your own battle, you will not realise how hard life is.’ I was already missing Oldman. He was already gone, but his words of wisdom were still alive and guiding me as fireflies in the night.

  ‘Being an ancestor should not necessarily be facilitated by anyone. It’s all about what good the person, who passed, had passed to the next generation, which could be used for making the descendants` lives better, making them good human beings.’ I was lost in a monologue till I heard the first word of my father to which my mother did respond.

  ‘I feel cold,’ he told in a trembling voice.

  ‘You hot like fire,’ it was the first peaceful conversation I heard since my father returned home.

  Shivering with fever was nothing new for this part of the world. Whenever seasons changed, Malaria took our lives to its torturing grip and left us shivering with fever, mourning with body pain which became a common phenomenon.

  ‘Mosquitoes are like witches; they carry death’ Mother sounded worried. I could not figure out whether it was out of mere sympathy, affection or love. The inconsistency of women often acted as a bridge between the man and woman. The woman, who was burning in wrath a while ago, looked to have been melted by her own fires of emotions, even though I had already been distant enough from both of them to see the minuscule nuances among love, affection and merel sympathy.

  The perplexity of my mind might have vanquished in the humid air in thick darkness. The kind words of my mother, and on top of that, the tiredness that I had accumulated during the long walk in the bush had sent me to a deeper slumber with locked ears, closed eyes, and numbed nerves; I remained completely disconnected from the outside world for a while.

  07

  When I was awakened by the ‘rooster,’ the natural alarm, our world had been changing irreversibly without anyone knowing about it. Under the same hot sun, but covered with a thick blanket of dark clouds, shadows of death were already forming around us. Less than one week ago, Oldman closed his eyes forever, and his elder son was now struggling for life. My father had already reminded me of the people I saw in the village where I met him with Broh. His eyes were like fireballs; he barely talked and did not move at all. Everyone was in our hut praying to the Creator and busy preparing the traditional medicine. My mother was cleaning the mud floor where my father slept the previous night. My grandmother seemed to have forgotten the death of Oldman so quickly and was in an indefatigable struggle to keep her first son alive; her first child; first living thing that came out of her own womb.

  ‘He is a strong man,’ one man said walking out of our hut. It took a while for me to understand what he meant.

  ‘It`s hard, not many people survive,’ one woman in the crowd said.

  I was silent, but my inner-voice was loud enough for me to hear what my mind was saying. Kumba appeared with a pot of hot herbal water. Her sight, all of a sudden, broke my pensiveness. But her tears reaffirmed that my mind could have been right.

  ‘The First son of a man should do his funeral rituals: then only, the deceased would be able to join the ancestors and become one of them,’ it was my grandmother who was worrying just after the death of Oldman. She said it a few days ago. I was looking at my father whose life was gradually being taken away leaving a mixed feeling in my family members and me. Even though there had been no sign of love or intimacy between my mother and father after Kumba`s arrival to his life, seeing the tears that she was trying to hide behind her selfless efforts in taking care of my father ached the soft side of myself. Kumba`s fragile nature always melted my feelings like palm-butter in the hot season. Her swollen eye beds and dirty clothes were the pieces of evidence of how she had passed last night. It looked like she was not only in a constant struggle for the life of her provider but also for the one who gave her a sense of security and future in life.

  ‘Bring the other pot into the old woman`s hut,’ said my mother to Kumba.

  The very first words they exchanged after a long time made me assume that, apparently, the rivalry caused by a man seemed to have come to an end with the fatal sickness of the same man. Both of them were fighting tirelessly for his life.

  ‘A dead man near the river bank,’ one of my uncles who had gone to prepare for a ritual by the river returned shocked and shaken. His voice was trembling, and he looked like a bear stung by wasps; nervous and upset.

  ‘This time, no one is going to be alive; no one is going to be alive; no no,’ he was repeating hysterically.

  Being mindful amidst any complexity was one of the highlighted characteristics of my mother. ‘Tell me what happened?’ It was my mother.

  ‘There was a dead man on the shore,’ uncle replied. He was still shaking.

  ‘Did you recognise him?’

  ‘No, no. I came back straight away,’ his reply was enough for my mother to give a kind of clue about what had happened to my father too.

  ‘B
ush-curse has returned,’ she muttered without showing any sign of weakness or, may be, in complete indifference.

  I could not but think how the others thought of the deteriorating conditions of my father. My feelings were straying in a grey zone where Kumba`s full youth and my love for the one who gave me the first cell were constantly relaying. Upon the death of my father, I would be the only man for Kumba since Oldman had already gone. Amidst many uncertainties, I was certain that I would be the only one who could step onto the mat of Kumba, but when I lifted my eyes over her shoulders, I saw my father who was struggling to live.

  When the sun started falling into the mouth of the demon, my father started vomiting blood and peeing completely scarlet. I felt he was trying to tell us something, but no voice came out. He kept on looking at me as if he wanted to hand over all his responsibilities to the next descendant of the family tree and then he looked at Kumba. Instead of tears, pure blood started oozing out of his eyes.

  ‘Oh bad luck, Broh should have been here,’ one old man said to my grandmother.

  ‘Hm.’ she sighed as though she did not have tears to cry anymore or she had accepted death as an inevitable fact of life which was the end of all the sufferings. She witnessed the tragic accident that her husband encountered, and then, his progressive paralysis, followed by the untimely death. And now, her first son was caught in the Bush-curse and was battling to catch hold of his last breath. Suffering and witnessing human sufferings were a vital part of maturity. She looked indifferent, but I felt there was something more profound than what her outlook said.

  ‘We all die, but how you die is determined by what you do and where you are,’ she said to him.

  Kumba looked a bit disoriented. I thought it was because she was awake last night and she was exhausted.

  ‘After the witchcraft, she lost her belly*, and the witch has not entirely left her. She is still possessed,’ I heard my uncle telling someone who was among the crowd.

  He was referring to the miscarriage that Kumba went through and subsequently; she had developed some manic behaviour. Whenever she was hurt or angry, she screamed and cried hysterically and then fainted.

  ‘My boy, come with me,’ it was my uncle who wanted me to go with him to the bush to find some herbs for rituals. It was early morning. Time had flown behind us and taken most of my father`s life.

  ‘We do not have much time left. The bush is dangerous at this point, but we have no other way out,’ he kept on explaining.

  ‘I will also come,’ the man who took me to the village of the brother of Oldman too joined us. His presence was a strength to me as I had already been in the bush with him.

  ‘We have to go against the sun. It’s a walk of a couple of hours along the river, and then we will have to cross when we start to hear the wail of the falls,’ the man explained.

  ‘I have been there with my father immediately after my Poro,’ uncle said.

  ‘Now that the wind is blowing towards us, and the river being rough, we might hear the falls sooner than usual times,’ he added. As a boy at his early adolescence, I could not understand the rationale of what he explained to my uncle. But today, as an adult who lived over half a century, I am amazed by the extent of wisdom and knowledge the old generation possessed.

  My uncle was in his cub-age, and he did not respect either pieces of advice or opinions of others. He decided to cross the river immediately after we heard the roar of the falls.

  ‘My man, this is dangerous, the area is full of crocodiles and the bush is thick on the other side of the shore,’ the man insisted him not to hurry and to walk a bit more till we found a shallow point where the shore of the river was less bushy. Before the man finished his words, my uncle jumped into the waters and started swimming across the river. The man knew about him, but he did not expect him to be that short-sighted in the bush where the human was the weakest.

  ‘When the Creator took us out of the wild, he took out the skills of survival away.’ Oldman used to say whenever my father used to go to the bush. He always said that the human being was given a brain and their abilities of thinking, but the physical strength was taken back from them since the day they left the wild. We used to sit hours and hours listening to never-ending stories of Oldman before he encountered the elephant in the bush. Many of those stories lighted my path in life even today.

  ‘Don’t you come?’ My uncle screamed from the other side of the river.

  ‘Sh!’ The man put his finger in the mouth and signalled him not to shout. He asked him to come back. But the response from my uncle was not what he expected. He insisted us to come to the other side of the shore where he had been. But the man firmly insisted that we should not get there until we arrived at the right place.

  ‘No bad bush for the bad child,’ the Man muttered.

  All our attempts to make my uncle understand on the potential risks of taking the other side of the riverbank fell flat, and we decided to give up asking him to come back. Instead, we continued walking parallel to him along the safe side of the bank. We walked a few hundred meters along the river bank and entered an area where there was a stream that had branched off from the main river. There, my uncle looked a bit puzzled and seemed to have understood the gravity of the mistake he had made. The rough and deep waters were not favourable for crossing the river; on the small island between the main river and the branch, there were two well grown-up crocodiles bathing the fresh sun rays as if they were waiting for one of us to jump into the water. The further he moved along the bank, the wider the gap between us became leaving my uncle alone into the thick jungle where hungry predators were waiting for an easy prey. On top of everything, the isolation in the wilderness allowed the evil spirits to conquer the human soul and possess them. If he continued, he would not be able to remain alive for long, but it was evident that none of us was in a position to cross the river. The man who came with us suggested my uncle walk back a bit and cross. It looked like his last attempt was to get him to understand that the way he followed would not work.

  ‘Go back and cross,’

  ‘I hear the falls, it’s near,’ my uncle replied with pseudo-confidence as he often used to do whenever he wanted to defend himself against someone.

  ‘Let’s go, he won’t listen to us,’ the man pulled my hand vigorously and started walking along the shore until the sight of my uncle walking along the other side of the shore, blurred with the distance and ultimately disappeared into the bush.

  ‘He will learn a lesson this time,’ the man snarled.

  We were trying to save one life, and it was most likely that we were going lose all of our lives. The more we walk, the further we would get from my uncle.

  ‘We are probably too late to save the life of your father,’ the man said.

  Before he said that, we had more important task left at very proximity of our hands; I said, ‘We have to find uncle.’

  ‘Yes,’ the man said in agreement.

  ‘His life is in our control whereas your father`s destiny is more than partially in hands of the Creator,’ he added.

  I did not take much time to comprehend what was behind his words. He was right; absolutely right, though his words could be found a bit rude and indifferent to a son whose father had been battling to hold the last breath. In sooth, he was practical and direct which I found more appealing than trying to give false assurance. The probability that my father was going to survive was very marginal which gave me a sudden current of pain across my heart. I had never felt a close emotional bond with him before. The words of the man made me almost cry. It was rather a confirmation of my father`s death which was untimely in present context but was common in those days. Many children used to die within a few months after their encounter with the first sunlight of their life; mostly mosquitoes were the ones that picked the newborns by the sting of death. Besides that, the Creator cursed those who were born weak and sent
them back to where they came from because they were not made for the rough life on the earth. Some of them rot to death with oozing wounds and rashes; others shivered, vomited and pooped to death. A significant number of survivors in the childhood were taken back to the hands of the Creator in the bush. Sometimes the ancestors decided on them when they were alone in the darkness.

  ‘When the ancestors want you to come to serve them in their afterlife, they suddenly call you. You will get either a severe chest or a head pain and fall down on the ground and eat soil before you die. Sometimes, angry ancestors might appear inside the huts and wait for the revenge. That happens when you have prolonged conflicts with them or if you make them angry just before releasing their last breath. Often, when you intentionally avoid doing the proper rituals in facilitation of transfer to a better after-life among the ancestors, they return as snakes and bite you at night.’ I can still remember my grandfather explaining to me about the importance of the funeral rituals.

  Others died from misadventures related to witchcraft. While handling the spirits, they gave up their lives untimely. The ultimate survivors like Oldman were rather unlucky than lucky to retain their lives till the skin kissed the bones, stomach refused food and water rejected to pass through the belly and to pass away detesting the life and living. But they left behind a lot of lessons and the wisdom that they had accumulated while living through generations; in the hands of the descendants which made them immortal for generations to come.

  ‘Wait!’ The man pulled my hand telling me with his gestures to listen to the wind.