Tuesday, 16 June 2015

The man in a blue car


My memories of being young are filled with much fun and yet at the same time periods of longing to know whose I was.
My first memories of my mother were those of a very angry person but also of someone who cried a lot. I did not know why she was usually angry or crying till much later when I was older.
My father left my mother alone in his rural home village and never made contact nor provided support to her to raise the 2 young girls that they had . He left the village to go and seek employment in town under the promise that he was going to come back for her. My father re-married in town  and my uncle who lived in the same neighbourhood told my mother about it. I think my mother held on to the hope that he was coming back for her and as the years passed on she grew angry and sad.
In the years that I lived in that village I do not remember seeing families with dad and mom , either it was something beyond my comprehension or truly many were female headed families left behind by their 'town' job hunting men that I didn't know what fathers meant. I really don't remember seeing many males or I was simply unaware of the gender divide.  I have no recollection  whatsoever of my friends with fathers or of what fathers did with their children. Its either I was too young to remember or this was not part of my world. My mother told me that we (my sister and I) were bought from the hospital and that was the only truth I knew back then and that was enough. 

My world changed though when one afternoon while we played by the school where my mother taught , a blue car stopped near where we were. Our instinct was to run away but we didn't because the person inside on passenger side was known to us.This was also my first encounter with a car. Before this moment, the only thing in the car categories I had seen in my entire 5 years of existence was a bus that passed by the road through the school each single day and we would stand by the road to wave or simply flag the bus down and we would be too happy when we were acknowledged by driver or the bus passengers. I also don't know how I got to this village but my mother says I was born in a mission hospital some location north of my father's village.

Back to the blue car story, a man followed us and specifically asked my sister to get in and said he was her father from 'town'. I don't remember if my sister got in the car but what I remember is that my sister didn't get home to my mother with me that day and my mother was very upset . She told me that the man was going to poison my sister . I later found out from my friends who had followed the car that this blue car was parked at my grandmother's house and from then onwards I was told I could never visit my grandmother again because they were going to kill us( this grandmother was my father's mother, I later got to understand).  I was confused because I loved my grandmother and was treated preferentially and enjoyed being at her home because of the so many treats she had waiting for us when we visited which was every other day.
That day marked the journey of intense longing: to know this man in a blue car and why my mother didn't like my grandmother and this man in the blue car.
One other specific thing I remember with the blue car encounter was that this man only claimed to be my sister's father and never mine which I didn't mind, but this too set me on a journey of wanting to know then who my father was.

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