The woman had a droopy walk and seemed to carry a third of her weight on her walking stick, which was taller than her. She wore an oversize furry coat and a long flowery dress. Her left leg stood on a medical boot, the kind that has a thick sole to make up for one shorter limb. It weighed her down like a shackle and took twice as long to lift as the other leg. Underneath her long grey hair, deep wrinkles told her age. She must have been at least eighty years old. Her eyes reminded me of my grandmother's- kind, yet piercing and authoritative. We greeted her in Swahili and she muttered something back, before reaching into her coat to pull out a wrinkled handkerchief and wiping her nose. We told her that we were old friends of Ekime from Nairobi, Kenya and we were looking for him.
She looked at us in new-found energy and told us that her name was Nasiche, or the one born with the locusts. There was something otherworldly about her demeanor but she was compelling and inviting. She motioned us to a grassy section a few yards ahead. We followed her, almost foolishly, watching her shoulders swaying like an upside down pendulum with no fixed pivot. Karanja and Wacuka looked at each other in bewilderment and followed us. Wacuka was a cheeky girl. She was almost in tears of suppressed laughter. I did not find anything funny with the situation so I threw her a warning glance. Nasiche sat down and folded her dress respectfully under her feet before tapping the ground next to her twice with her walking stick. We guessed that she wanted us to sit down and so we did.
Ekime, she began, had disappeared about eleven years ago. He had been “swallowed by the dam.” After these words, Nasiche paused and looked at us. It was like she wanted to gauge how close we were to Ekime. I was the only one who showed emotion. My face seemed to edge her on to continue with the story. One night, she continued, Ekime and a friend of his had followed the strange sounds from the dam and never returned. She said that his mother had gone to his room in the morning only to find him missing. He had left his reading lamp on the whole night, under which were a few strange drawings and an open book. She told us that after reporting the matter to the police, the constable had arrived at two o’clock in the afternoon with two Arab gentlemen and confiscated the boy’s drawings among other possessions. Ekime’s sister, however, had managed to take the book before the police arrived. We would later come to find out that the book was J.H. Brennan’s Time Travel, a New Perspective.
By this time, we could not help but think that our fellow students must have been looking for us. It had already been two hours since we had left them. Nasiche’s stories were surreal and the way she told them was compelling. Stephen King should meet her, I thought. She told us that the Ugandan Navy had searched for the boys’ bodies but never found them. The villagers held nightly vigils by the waterside, praying for the boys’ return. Their prayers were never answered. Well, at least not in the fashion they had hoped. A letter had arrived the following year in the mail, signed by Ekime. Nobody but Kaikara, Ekime’s father, knew the contents of the letter. After receiving it, Kaikara and his wife had sold their land and moved to a different part of the country, away from the Lake. They had changed their mobile phone numbers and no one at the local church knew their whereabouts.
It was almost five o’clock and Nasiche was getting ready to go back home.
We took her phone number and promised to return the next morning to say our goodbyes. The University had reserved decent lodgings for the students nearby and so we decided to join the rest of the pack. I could see from the faces of my two companions that they were as eager as I was to solve the mystery of Ekime’s disappearance. Together, we would soon forge a plan of action
TO BE CONTINUED