LET me start by saying this: when I was a schoolboy in our village’s mission primary school in the early 1960s, mornings and I were mortal enemies. If mornings were a person, I wouldn’t hesitate to have them tried for crimes against humanity. I’d march them into the village chief’s
BEING rejected once is tough, but facing it three times? Yes, you read that right – three times! That was the number of times women turned down my fellow villager Bunta’s marriage proposals. Two of them were from our village, while his initial heartbreak was in another place. In a
JAMIN, a lean and weathered young farmer, had just finished a gruelling day’s work tending his paddy field. The soft dirt of the well-worn path home caressed his calloused bare feet, and while his body ached from the day’s labour, a peculiar sense of restlessness stirred within him. He couldn’t
WHEN I was younger, my father did not teach me and my siblings by example in the way that teachers in school did, with blackboards and lectures and chalk dust in the air. A semi-literate man, he moved through life silently like a current under the surface, doing whatever needed
LUWI was a married man, a man of integrity, and a man who prided himself on his steady moral compass. However, lately, he was overwhelmed by thoughts that threatened to dismantle the essence of his identity. He was drawn, inexplicably and uncontrollably, to another man’s wife – a woman so
The Proposal Rain drummed steadily on the thatched roof of Alis’ small hut, a humble structure made of thick, rounded logs and bamboo perched atop stilts in the sprawling wetlands—the same swamp where I grew up during the 1950s and early 1970s. Seated on the edge of her bamboo bed,
DAUS had always hoped that he would be the first to go when the time came. The thought came to him decades ago, just a fleeting idea, a whisper in his subconscious. It wasn’t something he dwelt on or something he took too seriously. After all, who could control the
ATAN had always known deep down that fatherhood wasn’t for him. He never imagined himself as a parent tied to responsibilities demanding his soul. But when Lilah had gazed at him years ago, her voice trembling with hope as she spoke of having a child, he couldn’t bear to deny
MY mother was not the sort of woman to cry in front of an audience, nor even in the intimacy of a small gathering, nor even before me, her flesh and blood. If she wept at all – and I suspect she did – it was likely in the dead
The Crooked Mirror and the Stubborn Ink SURA stood before the slanted little mirror hanging on the kitchen wall – a mirror so distressed it couldn’t tell the truth if it wanted to – and stared at the tattoo on her arm. There it was, plain as daylight, the name