‘Now she has grown overprotective of you.’ ‘When you were younger, she loved you so much she could have died for you.’
‘She wasn’t always like this’, he said somberly. There wasn’t the scantiest hint of adulation in those words. ‘Then why doesn’t she attack Libi and Lilo?’ Last time he had gotten away with this answer but this time Lomo wouldn’t let him. ‘Your mother is unwell.’ A succinct and somewhat evasive answer. ‘Why does she hate me so much?’ asked Lomo, ruefully examining the scratches on his belly. He grabbed the kid’s shoulder and gently pushed him ahead, and Lomo knew instantly that they were going to have another little father-son chat until the seashore where Lomo would meet his friend and his father his own. The man looked unperturbed and blithe as usual. Someone put a hand on his head and ruffled his soft curls this could be no one but his father. Lomo could now enter the hut safely but didn’t want to. As he had predicted, she stopped growling and screaming after a while. Now he would force a crushed clove of a native black herb down her throat and she would sleep like a child until midnight or, if they were lucky enough, until the dawn. So his father, having failed at restraining his wife again, had to use his last resort. ‘GO! AWAY!’ she screamed, the only words she seemed to have for her son.Ī loud whack. Scared, Lomo had stopped talking to her entirely lest it should be his innards embellishing the hut next. Once he had dared ask her directly why she loathed him, and the next thing he had seen was a burning twig, snatched from her earthen stove, just missing its target- his body. At the same time he searched his head for the faintest clue about what he, the youngest of her three children, had ever done to incur her wrath, especially when his elder sisters occasionally retorted to their belligerent mother and yet managed to remain unscathed his head had no clue whatsoever. ‘Kwo num,’ never again, he muttered resolutely and tried to calm the inflammation by rubbing some moist soil from tree roots on abrasions, which always helped. Lomo knew pain –it wasn’t her first violent paroxysm, after all– but knowing it couldn’t stop him from being furious with himself, for how could he let her ambush him once again? In jungle, instincts ascertained survival, the more so when your own mother was your most persistent foe. In a lush green jungle dappled with sun, Lomo stood outside their tiny, round hut meticulously adorned with animal bones and dried entrails, his brutally scraped torso, bleeding wherever his mother had been able to reach her sharp nails, depicting her patent hatred for him.