The hyena boys came to Bonaventure, which was serendipitous, because he was used to avoiding the world before the world spurned him. For one, his white albino skin flecked with dark spots made him a regular target of mockery. When Bonaventure was younger and his father was around and could barely afford to send him to school, his peers often taunted him to come outside in the midday heat.
They dared him to come to the playground without squinting, one palm raised to block stray sunlight. They likened him to a pillar of butter melting in the sun. They asked if he was a vampire banished to the shadows.
Moments before the hyena boys arrived, he sat under the shade of his father’s bacha home, getting ready to set out for the day. He took off his singlet and filled a bowl with water from a jerry can. After washing his hair, he wiped his mossy armpits and took a chewing stick from his pocket.
He poured more water into the bowl and soaked his shirt. With a small chip of soap, he washed while moving the stick in his mouth. The bacha house was part of a labyrinth of hovels made from all kinds of materials pulled from vehicles that none had any use for.
The lot was once a mechanic village, and their house was farther out, near a solitary mountain of garbage, surrounded by overgrown grasses and situated close to the transmission tower. He couldn’t afford to pay the slumlords much. Even though the nauseating smell of rot, putrefaction, and sogginess came to him in waves, he had sworn to his father to keep the bacha house.
As pitiful as it seemed, his father was all he had. He had lost his mother’s love to liquor before he understood what love was. But liquor did more than that; it consumed her body, dried her up before ending her life.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
