Behind the Eclipse

by Pramudith D. Rupasinghe

  My only property, the piece of country cloth, which I was given when I was first brought to Loma village, was wet. The killer cold pitilessly wrung every living thing, and it was well-nigh impossible to survive till it dried the following day. That was the only thing I was worried about.

  ‘My hut fell o!’ Immediately after my call for help, the first light of a firebrand appeared from the main hut of the chief. Then one after the other, lights started moving towards me. For the second time in my life, except when they brought me to the village, I witnessed general helpfulness of humankind which was triggered by immediate thoughts of sympathy.

  ‘Hearts freeze as fast as they melt,’ Oldman used to tell whenever my grandmother used to talk sympathetically about my mother.

  ‘You sleep in my hut,’ the chief said to me.

  I did not have any other thing to do, except to embrace the sympathetic offer of the strangers again. It was merely the circumstances that made me advance my feet towards his hut where the centre of all the mysterious and secret elements of his tribe laid.

  I was given an open area under the Palava roof to sleep. The rough wood panel was cold as ice as it was exposed to the humid weather, though it was far better than the broken Palava hut where I stayed for the last couple of months. Having no place to live made me more and more vulnerable and frustrated, and the compulsion for escaping heightened day by day.

  It was the fourth day after my hut collapsed. I decided to go to the bush and cut some wood to erect another hut. Early in the morning, I walked downhill along the small pathway where the villagers used to walk on daily basis and cut down some straight branches. The fear of the beast and the bush did not allow me to walk deep inside.

  What I learnt in Poro was in practice again. I started putting up my own hut. Some boys in the village even if they did not understand my language and I did not know theirs, came to help me. By the late afternoon, I was completely exhausted, but up to the roof level, the hut had been erected.

  ‘You did this all alone?’ It was the first time I saw the youngest daughter of the village chief.

  She was a full woman, unlike many other women in the village who were malnourished and weather-beaten. Her gentleness and wobbling flesh under her country cloth like froglets in the mud took my memory back to the first day I touched Kumba. Just like pieces of burning coal under the ashes turning into raging flames, when confronted with the wind, my long paused desires started boiling up. Every single nerve end of mine was seeking the sensation they had years ago.

  ‘Desires are the threads that create the fabric called bonds. You weave it by yourself and cover your eyes with it,’ when my uncle wanted to take a woman from another tribe, Oldman told him in a firm voice. I could recall father telling us that Oldman had never talked to him in such a manner before.

  ‘You do not see the forthcoming disasters when you are blindfolded,’ I could still recall some parts of the conversations.

  After a long time, I went to the stream to have a bath and returned to the Chief`s hut to sleep. But I could not sleep. Body pain and preoccupation with various thoughts about the daughter of the chief prevented me from sleeping; instead, I was rolling left and right.

  ‘Creek’ The wooden panel that covered the entrance of the main hut opened. It was reasonable that no one had thought I was awake. The girl had gone out for a call of nature, and the pale moonlight highlighted the curves artistically. I could not but walk towards the woman without sensing the disaster I was about to encounter in case something went wrong.

  She did not realise that I was behind her till she stood up.

  ‘Oh!’ she could not scream because she was shocked to see a man right behind her at night, but grace to the moonlight, she was able to recognise my face with eyes burning with desire.

  She jumped out in hesitation as if she understood what I was longing for.

  ‘Come woman come!’ I told while advancing towards her. She was walking backwards and towards the bush distancing from the main hut as if it were a snare set to trap her. She went and hit a wooden pole I had erected for my hut and fell down on the old Palava roof which was on the ground.

  Before she opened her mouth, I quickly reached her and closed the mouth tight enough to prevent screaming, yet loose enough to let her know that I was gentle enough in my demand.

  I was in a moment of bliss mixed with the fear of being caught which was a thrilling combination, and again I lived a time of creation; germination and fulfilling the purpose of being sent to this earth by the Creator. After the invisible internal flames had boiled the water soaked by the fallen Palava roof and burnt it down after a long pause, I let the newborn woman into her hut.

  ‘She walked out a girl and went in a woman and will come out a mother soon.’ I told a wooden pole of my hut that was standing without a purpose after the roof was broken.

  ‘You have to carry the weight of the heavy roof for the rest of the time.’ I straightened the fallen pole which she hit her leg against and returned to sleep as if nothing happened.

  My conversation with the old kissi man a few months ago came to my mind.

  ‘You say …Night?’ It is a blessing if they do not talk about what happened at night.

  ‘They are their secrets. It is a sin to be exposed to them as it is ours,’ but some secrets remained open and common to men and women irrespective of their tribes. But, when the results of the secrets they kept came out in the society, the tribal division of secrets started to play their roles.

  As predicted, everything was normal the next morning. Everyone, including the daughter of the chief, despite her seductive looks and blinking, was behaving as if nothing had happened.

  I left the hut of the chief early enough to start the work of my hut. By the evening, I was able to complete the hut. I asked the chief for the rough wood panel to make a temporary bed for me to which he agreed right away. That night, I felt like a full man making love to a woman in my own hut. She stayed with me longer than the previous night.

  ‘You are my very first man.’ she said caressing my chest.

  I felt an honest pride, yet I was unable to enjoy it because I was playing with fire. In case the village chief knew what was going on, that would be the last day I could breathe under this sky. I decided to leave the village as soon as possible.

  For the next couple of days, just like a rabbit caught between a leopard and a python, I felt torn apart into two pieces. But, the weight of my decision to escape was significantly outdoing, together with my fears, anxieties, and hesitations caused by the traumatic experience in the bush and the bonds that I had developed within the last few days.

  10

  Early morning, even before the birds felt hungry, I started walking downhill along the pathway which everyone used to follow. I believed it to be safer than walking across the bush. At the same time, I was afraid of being caught escaping, though, presumably, no one except the daughter of the village chief knew about it.

  ‘You soon be caught by Lomas,’

  ‘You will be caught,’

  ‘You will be caught,’

  I heard the voice of my grandfather: Oldman. He appeared in dreams a couple of times whenever something bad was about to happen.

  The day before Kumba lost her belly*, he appeared in a wired mood in a dream and begged me to take care of someone whose name was not clear. The following day, Kumba fell terribly sick.

  ‘My big boy,’ I saw Oldman rushing into our hut crying, two days before we left for the bush to find some medicinal herbs for my father. It was another dream I completely ignored as my mind was engaged in thousands of worries and tasks at the same time. Besides that, my hopes were heightened by the heroic determination which was pumped in by the notion that my father was strong enough to hold on till we found the herbs. Therefore, I was trying to avoid the negative thoughts that crept in from time to time and focused on h
opefulness.

  Either my thoughts were not processing merely through the hopeful, positive end or they had already sensed the bitter reality which might be stored in proximate future and I was in a constant struggle in rationalising my fantasies in denial.

  When I heard the voice of Oldman in the bush which was hallucinatory, I was completely conscious that he was gone long ago; All of his post-mundane communications started populating my mind one after the other like black ants gathering around a dead insect. The things that I did not either pay much attention to or completely ignored with no regard started conquering my feared mind and ran all over my body through my veins into my muscles and reached my skin protruding my follicles like the skin of a bread-fruit.

  ‘You will be caught,’ I muttered.

  ‘I will be caught,’ I said again.

  Fear pushed me out of the village, led me along the pathway and again diverted my way into the thick bush.

  ‘Change often occurs out of fear,’ the healer told me while I was taken for cutting.

  I started rushing through the bush downhill and gradually distanced from the common pathway which the villagers used to go. The more I moved out from the village, the more I felt a mixed feeling. I was relieved as no one would possibly catch me, but at the same time, there will be my blood left alone, helpless, among the Lomas in chilling mountains. I felt that I had already built a bond that was constantly trying to keep me attached to Loma village even though many other thoughts caused by fear pushed me out.

  ‘Life is all about maintaining equilibrium between the different external and internal forces that attempted to tear one`s life into pieces. If you allow one side to be greater than the other, life will be torn into pieces, and it will lose the peace of equilibrium.’ Teachings at Poro, by the old man, ruled my thoughts.

  Passing through the bushes, plains, and marshy lands, I had made my way out almost the whole day. The sinking sun had allowed the darkness to take its turn to dominate the bush just the way I allowed my fears to guide me out of Loma village keeping me safe and vigilant through the risky journey and to change the destiny of ending up in an unknown community like the old Kissi man whom I met there in the mountains.

  The tricks that the man had taught, who took me to the bush in search of Jusu, helped me out a lot. When the darkness started swallowing the sun, I chose a safer tree which was high and strong enough to give me a good protection. I climbed the tree and sat on a place where three boughs met one another. Even though the sleep was hindered by the vigilance, I rested in comfort on the tree top.

  At sunrise, I started to cross the bush and at sunset I chose a tree to rest. The fifth night, I was tired and almost fell asleep on the treetop. I heard human voices all of a sudden and woke up with an intense fear thinking that the Lomas had succeeded in tracing my path.

  ‘Lomas, mountains to them are like water to fish; they smell every single change in the bush like wild foxes; they are men of high wild,’ a part of a story about Lomas, related by my grandfather came to my shaken mind. Just like a poisoned arrow piercing through a hunt paralysing it and leading it to a painful death, I felt every single stage of my fate being caught by Lomas. I closed my eyes and tightened my arms around one of the boughs. With closed eyes, I heard the voices closer and closer. They came with the breeze that was blowing across the bush and disappeared in the absence of the breezes.

  ‘You listen to the wind, smell it and watch what it brings! It will tell you what you may encounter at your next step,’ Poro teachers taught us everything for survival in the dense tropical forests that were full of life threatening risks.

  I decided to go a little bit up and watch who they were. As I climbed the top of the tree, I noticed a cloud of smoke far away. It was clearly noticeable, but it was in the opposite direction from where I had come.

  ‘Another human presence.’ I said to myself and got down the tree. I had two choices between going near the village and checking what it was; who was there, or avoiding the direction where the smoke and the voices were coming from and then going towards the south or north.

  I had heard that subgroups of Mande tribe were distributed across the North and North-west regions whereas the West coast was occupied by the invaders from another part of the world called Congo-people. They had come in by big sailing ships, landed on the Atlantic coast and occupied the whole coastal belt restricting it to the local tribal communities. They spoke the language of the man without the skin: the chicken-skinned white one. And they carried a cross hanging on the neck. Once, my father said that he met one of them in a neighbouring village where they had come to meet the village chief.

  ‘Chicken skinned had come with Congo-people to Guinea border. They say they brought an Almighty who was more powerful and merciful than our Creator,’ my father came back home furious and scared. Oldman was listening to him and said.

  ‘Bush is for the Bushmen, and our Creator rules it,’ he laughed out.

  I decided to walk away from the village and advance to the West. If I walked straight on condition that I survived in the bush, I would reach the western coast of Liberia one day. But, I did not have a clue about when I would be able to reach and how long it would take. Probably, before the next full moon, I would be able to arrive at the coast where Congo-people lived; the place where no one knew each other unlike in the tribal villages. I thought that it would be the perfect hideout and an ideal location for a brand-new start. The new beginning that I was longing for after a chain of catastrophic events would be a reality in the place where the cultures merged, soaked in the salty waters that came from the other side of the world and disappeared in the sea breezes leaving nothing but unknownness.

  Days and nights rolled away, and I moved further from the place where I had started which I felt safer and confident. I avoided walking across the plains and river banks as there was a probability of being noticed by either animal or human beings. Many days, I had only a few mangoes or bananas in my stomach. I felt that I had already become a walking skeleton and developed a severe cough which bothered me mostly in the night making me a possible prey to the predators.

  My grandmother used to give us ginger leaves whenever we coughed. ‘The evil will jump out when you chew this,’ she used to say. I decided to take a break as I was becoming weaker with every passing day. The next morning, I located a safe tree and set a snare, hoping to eat some meat of any animal. Before I climbed the tree, I searched for some ginger bushes and grabbed a handful of leaves to chew during the night.

  I just sat on a bough when a roaring sound was heard in the bush right under the tree. ‘No way,’ I said to myself. It should be a leopard. I felt that I had set a snare for myself, and my plan to have a rest would end up resting in peace. When I was in Kissi village, we often heard about leopards. They used to kill goats and chicken and sometimes they attacked the humans as well. On top of everything, climbing a tree was not a big thing for a leopard. The whole night, on the one hand, my mind was preoccupied with the leopard, and on the contrary, I was exhausted. I had fallen asleep without my knowledge and woke up hearing a scream right behind me. I thought that time had come for me to join my ancestors. I did not see a thing below the tree. It was all dark, and I had completely forgotten about the snare under the tree.

  ‘Heeezzzz,’ again the painful scream was emitted into the humid air in darkness adding a dreadful mysteriousness to the night in the bush which was full of secretive elements. Nonetheless, this time I realised it was my snare which had worked and I would have either an edible meat or the leopard down there. I felt consoled whatever it was. The risk I was going through had gone down a bit as, in case the leopard was caught in, it would not be alive to kill me. And if another animal was caught, it would not bother to climb a huge tree when it had an easy meal.

  I could not wait to see what was waiting for me down there and, at the same time, I was battling with my own thoughts because I did
not want to see a yellow skin with black spots.

  With the sun rays that started peeping through the green canopy, I took a deep breath and looked down. As it often happened, the human mind would always anticipate the worse. I noticed spots; just a blotchy skin and still it was fighting for life.

  ‘I would not go down till this beast dies,’ I thought.

  Out of curiosity, I looked down again. There were spots this time too, but the skin was brownish and instead of paws and killer nails, there were tiny hoofs in small legs.

  ‘A deer,’ I yelled without my knowledge. For a second, I forgot that I was in the bush and there was no one around who would understand what I said. Instead, the animals might react to the hint of the human presence.

  I hurried down and pulled out my hunt out of the snare. Before roasting it, I had already felt a pang of hunger that sucked every single cell of my body. I felt as if I was going to faint.

  Poro was a blessing while in the jungle. I made a little fire in the middle of the bush and roasted the beast. I did not have sharp things to cut the meat or clean it. I ate whatever the places that I was able to chew and tear. I ate as much as I could as I knew very well that it was not possible to take meat with me. Not only carnivore animals but also the evil spirits loved to eat meat. Therefore, I did not want to invite troubles in the middle of nowhere. I decided to leave the remains in the bush and cover the ashes with fresh leaves because leaving the live traces of recent activities in the bush could be a strong clue for tracking me down if someone was after me.

  After four nights in the jungle, I reached an open area which I had never seen before. I felt the human presence even though I did not see a single human being. The place was vast, and there were small pathways between the areas where there were some grass like plants. When I got close, I noticed that it was a muddy place. The water was blocked, and the plants were in mud. I slowly started walking in the small paths that divided the fields of green plants. I felt safe and relaxed a bit, and a sleepiness was gradually growing inside me. I was tired and hungry. I did not have the energy anymore as it might be the fear that brought me so far. I lay down on a small path between two muddy fields.