She Was Only 12...Part 2

My annual 3 days "holiday" with my mother was up. I was only waiting for the evening to arrive before being taken to my grandmother's (paternal), two villages away. A two-hour walk or if I were lucky, someone may be heading towards that village on a bicycle.

Before the evening however, I decided to see my maternal grandmother who lived a few buildings away from my mother's. I seem to like her then, and she calls me by a tribal name that literally means, "My father".

I had wondered why she decided to call me that, so I decided to ask her. "You are my reincarnated father", she replied. I tried to make meaning out of the "reincarnation" thing but couldn't at the time. There were other sensitive things she said after that. I was interested in those things than the reincarnated father that I was.

"You are my reincarnated father", she started.

"What I do not understand is why my father decided to return to earth as an illegitimate child". She even went ahead to express some doubt on me being her real reincarnated father, as told her by her family's chief priest.

Perhaps, "the oracle lied", she concluded.

"This might be the reason my mother told me not to come here", I reasoned in my head. My mother had told me not to come, but I didn't understand why. I actually assumed she didn't really meant it. I could not find any reason why she wouldn't want me to.

I knew nothing at this point.

Someone had told me how she treated my mother so badly when she was pregnant at 12. She had given my mother all kinds of concussions to eat and drink, and encouraged her to drink anything possible to abort the pregnancy.

But the more my mother drank the concussions, the more she seemed to be dying instead of the baby in her womb. At this point, they were trying to cover up the pregnancy. They wanted it aborted so that no one gets to know about it.

I had found out later that she tortured my mother for bringing shame to her and the family. She drove her away from the house eventually. As promised, she (grandmother), left a deep mark on my mother's tummy, a physical attack aimed at forcing the pregnancy to fail.

The story of my grandmother was that less than 2 years after she nearly killed my mother trying to abort her unwanted pregnancy, she too became pregnant for a man that wasn't her husband.

At this point, my mother's father (maternal grandfather) had to divorce her, forcing her to relocate to her father's house, a few blocks down the only street in the village where she lives to this day.

It was at this point that my mother returned to stay in the same house (her father's house) where she (my maternal grandmother) was forcefully ejected from, following her adulterous pregnancy.

Of course, my maternal grandfather was devastated, I learnt. He vested his anger heavily on my mother too, depriving her of everything except the room where she was putting up. He even prevented other people from helping her as well.

In all of these, everyone blamed my mother for getting pregnant.

No one said anything about the man that impregnated her.

Even my mother's elder brothers were as docile as hell. They just played along, making me to think that they may have been bribed.

Life in the village is such that everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows everything. So it was easy for people to see the 13-year old (she was 12 when she became pregnant), struggling to feed herself and the unsolicited baby.

The man that impregnated her was nowhere in the picture.

People were throwing left over foods to her from a distance. They were careful so that my grandfather wouldn't notice.

Soon after, I developed all kinds of diseases.

First, I was running short of blood every now and then, fainting in the process. Then Pneumonia, Measles.

Finally, kwashiorkor followed.

She wanted to continue her education as well. She was in junior high school when the pregnancy happened. She wanted to continue. She wanted to become a nurse - a dream that died as the pregnancy survived in her young womb.

People started volunteering to care for her child. That was how my journey of moving from one family to another, one relative to another, started.

None of the places was a home. Everybody knows the story. No one wanted to be associated with the situation for long. The longest was with my paternal grandmother. I had no paternal grandfather, so he was out of the picture.

At aged 3, I returned to mother's arms again. For some reasons, one afternoon, she cried out that I had died.

The only "hospital" available was one untrained Chemist, whose only main medicine was paracetamol. He was a mobile doctor - carrying his box of medicines on his bicycle wherever he went.

The mobile hospital and doctor came. The doctor declared me dead. Grave diggers were called. They dug a small grave. They wrapped me in a white linen. It was time to bid the world farewell.

Then I sneezed.

TO BE CONTINUED