That night Josa could hardly sleep. He kept on tossing about the bed his thoughts locked up in a woman. Although the bedroom was pitchy dark he kept on staring at the ceiling seeing nothing however much he opened the eyes. But seeing nothing appeared to symbolize the fatal line between him and Sii, the only woman he would love to spend the rest of his life with.
Up to now, and in spite of his aggressive advances and employment of whatever persuasive language he could get from his arsenal, Sii had said nothing beyond smiling at him. He had tried his best to break Sii’s smile into laughter hoping that thereafter the laughter would translate into an invitation for him to enter the kingdom of her life. Although he knew it was a deceptive thinking, he suffered from the conviction that he and Sii had been born for each other
“Sii, where are you?” He whispered to the dark bedroom, knowing too well that Sii would not hear. He wished he had the power to penetrate into her dream world and market himself to her aggressively that night. He had been interpreting that her elusive smiles had been merely saying, “Please follow me.” Sii, a primary school teacher, looked so close to him yet so distant from him. Tomorrow at sunrise, he resolved in bed that night, I’m going to deliver my wishes to the rising sun to help me win over Sii. Praying to the sun was something he had learnt from his grandfather.
Once upon a time when Josa was a boy his grandfather had shared with him his religious sentiments by saying, “Josa, I have never gone about doing any important thing without praying.” He gave Josa an example of one of his methods of praying by saying, “In order to pray for the most important thing I would wake up before sunrise, get out of the house and stand at a raised ground facing the sunrise direction. Since at that moment the sun greets us with the biggest gravities its spiritualism, thereafter I would deliver my wishes to the rising sun.
The gravest and successful prayer I ever made was about winning the heart of your mother when she was a girl. I was a poor man who wanted so much to marry her but I had no material things with which to attract her consideration. The only thing I had at my disposal was praying to the Supreme Spirit to help me win her heart. Her family would never dream of letting their daughter marry a poor man who did not even own a goat. So I delivered my wish and prayer to the rising sun to break her heart for me; and surely the spiritual potency of the sun did it. I married your mother to everybody’s amazement.”
Josa had been one of the lucky young men in his village to have studied up to university level. He had just graduated but, unfortunately, he was unemployed. To help him to break Sii’s heart, his university certificate was not qualified by material things other than the name – Degree. You can say that degrees cannot be eaten; otherwise, a degree without money is like an axe without a handle. His rival after Sii had less education than Josa but wallowed in the glamour of his father’s wealth, something that gave Josa nightmares. He felt as poor as his grandfather had felt while looking for the bride.
To Josa, losing Sii was a killer disease. He felt strongly that he would perish if he didn’t marry her. He had a problem with religious beliefs because his knowledge in physics argued against those beliefs. But now that he was confronted by a grave need for something or anything which could help him get Sii, he was haunted by his grandfather’s belief. The Christian background in which Josa had been born and brought up was against worshiping idols. The sun was nothing else but an idol. Christianity demanded that prayers should be directed exclusively to the Almighty God, although nobody knew what Almighty God looked like; where he or she lived, doing what. In fact Josa had been praying to that Almighty God to break Sii’s resistance. However, he had noticed that the more he had prayed the more Sii had increased her distance. That finally made him conclude that the Almighty God, after all, was either not listening to him or was against the marriage.
As it is said that a drowning person catches even a floating straw in an attempt to save himself, Josa had been going about catching all kinds of straws, groping seriously in the spiritual darkness too. In the event of doing so he decided to follow his grandfather’s path of faith. You never know, he thought, the deity of his grandfather could be potent. If the Almighty God was the creator of the sun which, as we know it
On the material morning Josa woke up excitedly from a dreamless sleep. It was at dawn, exactly at the right time. He jumped out of the bed and prepared himself for going to pray to the sun. He sneaked out of the house quietly and walked away about three hundred paces from the house. He chose a nice and raised ground where he stood looking at the sunrise direction waiting for the Sun to emerge. It’s dawn painted the eastern clouds piously with what appeared to be steaks of the blood of the birth of the new day. He positioned himself the delivery. As the Sun emerged he prayed, “Dear rising Sun, please, please, give me the power with which I should address Sii to listen to nobody else but to me regarding marriage. I want her to be nobody else’s wife but mine. Dear Sun, when I meet her this morning open up all her ears to listen to me and accept everything I say.” Upon finishing the prayer he felt instant hit by a storm of absolute faith that he would succeed. He walked back to the house to prepare himself for going to meet Sii. So, after the preparation he stormed out of the house and trotted to the location where Sii would find him. He placed himself strategically where he would see Sii from a distance as she descended to cross the valley and then take the climb to confront him.
Sii was climbing the slope from the valley when she spotted him standing by the side of the path. He held a tree toothbrush he had prepared and had already used. “Oh my God, Josa!” she cried. “What the hell are you doing here at this time?” She halted walking. Josa took over the walk to meet her. He avoided answering her until he had received her hand for greeting after throwing away the tooth brush. “I slept in the bush waiting for you,” he tried to crack a joke. Full of the morning endearing and warm smile she cried, “What the hell is that?” She had never seen the new degree of seriousness in his face.
“Do you want me to tell you the truth?” he challenged.
“That you slept in the bush waiting for me?”
“The reason why you found me here. I came to escort you to the school.”
She let out a romantic laughter that seduced him to join her laughing after which, wiping his mouth unconsciously, he added. “Sii, I came to tell you that you should be the wife on no any other man in the world but Josa’s wife. I brought my whole heart in the basket of my love. I now empty that heart to you. Sii,. You must marry me.”
“When?” she surprised him.
“Let’s go, I’ll tell you when,” he took the lead on the path because he knew she wouldn’t accept take the lead. It was a chilly morning and, as they walked, he had the feelings that they were the only human beings in the world. Soon they emerged to a dirt road that encouraged side-by-side walk. He noticed that her face had suddenly changed and wore an intense feeling. Somehow, he felt he had said everything that should be said that morning. In fact, he didn’t walk long with her before he said, “Sii, my mission is accomplished. Take a faster pace and get to school. We’ll see each other later, today or tomorrow.”
Nine months after the historic morning meeting, Sii and Josa eloped. He took her to Mombasa where he had got a job. Eloping was the only way they could break the hardness of Siis’s parents. The move was a shock to everybody and stories started spreading that Josa had used love charm to grab Sii.. One afternoon, a year and a half when Sii had delivered their first child, Sii asked seriously, “Josa, what actually did you do to me that morning we met? Something mysterious hit me. I also saw that you didn’t want to talk much. You didn’t even live to the promise that you had come to escort me to the school.”
“What else would I have done to you?” he asked with a mean smile. He had never told her anything about praying to the Sun. He had no intention of revealing to her anything about it. He knew too well, she wouldn’t believe him. Or perhaps, one day, he would thaw and say something about how he broke her spiritual hymen… Astonishingly, praying to the Sun had worked successfully. The incident had changed the geography of his religious belief… If only he could share it with someone else…
