She heard someone call her name. Strangely, the voice came from above. I am sure it was Zacchaeus – the tax collector. It’s only Zacchaeus who climbs fig trees. Her heart fluttered and palpitated faster enough than the Japanese Mag-Lev.. Because she had been caught red-handed, by God (as she thought), on, I think, the most emblematic act of sin in His presence. Sins are sins though. There are no sins with baby faces or with wrinkled faces and elbows that look like the chin of a turtle.
She stopped and turned, like Sofia the robot, to look. A sigh, heavy enough to part The Red Sea, escaped from her O-shaped mouth. “Mommy!”, she exclaimed. How did she know what she was up to? She wondered and even worse got shocked how her mother, at her tail-end of 50’s,could climb a tree. She was perched precariously on a branch of a tree like a bat. She was not expecting any company at her ‘scene of crime’. She had seen to it that not even their scrawny starving dog had seen her.
“Please don’t do it, my daughter.” Her mother pleaded with love sandwiched in between imminent tears.
“No, mommy! I am tired! I don’t want to take it anymore!” She spat back, her voice filled with anger and despair.
Saying these words, Blessings, a 15-year-old girl, was seething and boiling inside. The bleak picture of her nightmare was still fresh and clear in her mind. She could see the way she was being turned from side to side by that cruel good-for-nothing gigantic man, whose sweat stench was unbearable and still lingering in her nostrils. It felt like a bad taste in her mouth. A taste that should be spat down and covered with unfertile soil to never germinate.
She would get hanged before she could get this monster’s ugly face with ungainly lips off her mind. A picture of how she had struggled to get off his hands in vain before passing out was playing on repeat in her head. I really don’t like this man now. If I were there, I would have gone spider on him. When she came to consciousness, she was lying prostrate on the red volcano soil in a coffee plantation at the foot of a hill that had a long name. Her frock was crumpled and drenched with a thick dark fluid; it was blood as she had made out.
It was now clear in her mind that she had been defiled. It did not add up to her going through such an ordeal when her name suggested otherwise. Did she deserve this? She surely didn’t and if we were in the Old Testament, I would have stoned this man myself. Where was God? She must have wondered..
Did she go through this because she was weak? Was it now a crime to be a weaker vessel? She was only a poor innocent girl whose thirst for education had taken to tuition on that Friday evening when the world came crumbling down on her. When she got home, she took a shower and locked herself in her room to attend her ‘pity party’. She dared not tell anyone; to save herself the shame and rebukes from everyone. Especially her chauvinist father. Come on guys! This was a shame that Blessings did not go looking for. It was forcefully stuffed into her pockets.
To her all this was an unfortunate turn of events and her life was never going to be the same again. That happenstance had left a permanent scar in her life. Her mother, an astute lady, had kept an eye on her for a couple of days and had realized that she was no longer the daughter she had raised. She had approached her and after sweet-talking her she had spun the whole ordeal to her. She took her to the clinic, went through the processes and went to report, though late, to the police.
Everything was well. Until it was not. Blessings missed her periods. This had peeled off a scab of a bottomless wound. She had education, goals to achieve. And now a baby? Surely, suicide was the only panacea for her case, so she thought……….. To be continued.
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