Niang

I am sitting on a plastic mat reading as my body cools from a scorching afternoon bike ride from Toubacouta. The glaring sun during those twenty kilometers had done on number on my skin and hydration. I sunk my teeth into one of the four small but ripe mangoes, bought along the roadside from a group of talkative women. The sweetness flowed into my mouth leaving behind stick fingers and strings of fibrous membranes lodged between my front teeth. I am content.

I hear my mother Aram's voice call me from the compound side of my hut. I imagine she is curious about my where abouts or simply wants to touch base after a long day. She makes her way through my hut and appears around the corner. She is somber. The words that flow from her mouth leave me speechless as I struggle to find words for thoughts failing to pull themlselves together. She repeats her news as if I hadn't understood. I manage the basic, "I understand, Yes, I know him". She leaves and I sit in the solitude of my backyard, the leaves of the manioc plants whispering quietly the sad reality hanging in the air. "Niang Sagnane...Niang Sagnane...died, he died, his body is on the way...he was sick...better....sick, then dead....what a shame, so young, nice guy, no wife or kids yet....". I floundered about inside my brain trying to sort it all out. I feel the full force of unanswerable questions mounting on the back of my grief , aware of the lonely road on which I am travelling.

Niang, 22, brother of a good friends in the village, dead. Why? In Africa this question is arbitrary, perhaps asked but kept unanswered, unknown. Was it a matter of money? Mis-diagnosis? Apathy? Perhaps it was a terminal disease or the result of malnutrions lingering consequences? Who is to blaim? Colonization? The government? It doesn't matter now, he's dead. Y'Allah wrote the letter. Niang obeyed.

I listen, from the darkening, empty field beside the small school just beyond my compound, the village's walls, to the rhythmic scrape of shovel against dry sand. Some men are preparing the earthly bed. They will wrap his stiff, cold body in flowing white cloth before lowering what hours before had been a son, brother, friend.