Safara finally meets his son after months, but is startled by a strange phone call
What you need to know:
- To change the topic, I grabbed one of the toy guns I had bought and told Neo I was ‘Russia’ and he was ‘Ukraine’ and that I had just invaded his homeland and that...
- Hooky rain will never be defeated,” Neo squealed, and before I could say “Kyiv,” the little lad was peppering me with those bullets, while diving into the closet and rolling expertly on the ground, like a TV Commando.
I arrived at the hospital on the day of Eid-al-fitr to find my son Neo, in pain, with a drip dangling from his arm. He lay in bed whimpering like a pup.
“My boy,” I cried, dashing to his bedside in the private room that his mother had put him in.
“Daddy!” Neo said, stretching his hands out. We had not seen each other for months because his mum, Laura, had cut me off. I held him, fighting back tears.
It wouldn’t do for my seven-year-old boy to see me cry.
“Daddy, am I dying?” I could almost hear Neo ask if he saw me weeping.
Of course Neo wasn’t dying. They had just gone for a school picnic over the weekend, and the meal provided by the school had given him a tummy bug.
He had begun throwing up in the wee hours of asubuhi, so Laura had panicked and brought the boy here to the hospital, in what I later learned was her new car.
For now, though, she was quite bitter – for once with the school and not me.
“Imagine all that money I pay for fees and meals then they poison my baby?”
“I am glad I contributed nothing to his poisoning,” I joked, but then regretted it as Laura shot daggers at me. She never liked my wits, even before our split. “You make light of everything,” she would often cry.
“Like a god,” I’d always say, by way of touché.
As the morning went on, Neo seemed to get progressively stronger, and I could tell a small part of it was having me, his daddy, there, after nine months of absence.
He chatted non-stop, trying to fill me in on all the details of life while I, Baba, was away – and wanted to know what I had been up to, while I was “so lost.”
“I was lost but now I’m found, my dear Neo.”
After a hospital lunch which he barely touched, so I ate it all (and found it pretty tasty, contrary to what they say about hospital food), I went and bought a couple of those expensive soft rubber pellet guns that Neo had asked for the Christmas before last, but which I had told him were way too expensive back in 2023, Deck.
To my amazement he asked, “Daddy, now that I am sick, these toy guns are not too expensive?”
I stared at him in genuine amazement.
“Neo, how can you remember something that I told you 15 months ago, verbatim?”
“Daddy, what is vapour-team?”
“Si mi ukushow huyu kijana wako ni bright sana,” Laura piped. “But because you are selfish, hautaki kumlipia school fees, Mike.”
“Daddy, why don’t you want to pay fees for me?” That was Neo. “Is it because last term I was number five out of 75?”
“Oh no, Neo.”
“If I am top three this term, will you pay my school fee for next term, daddy?”
Laura just stood there, enjoying the interrogation.
To change the topic, I grabbed one of the toy guns I had bought and told Neo I was ‘Russia’ and he was ‘Ukraine’ and that I had just invaded his homeland and that –
“Hooky rain will never be defeated,” Neo squealed, and before I could say “Kyiv,” the little lad was peppering me with those bullets, while diving into the closet and rolling expertly on the ground, like a TV Commando.
In the middle of this ‘hot war,’ the phone rang and it was the Gangdong mall owner whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to this year, that’s how busy the hustle is.
“You miss me, mista Safala?” the Chinese mandarin shrieked into the phone. “I need a girl immediately!”
“I know the feeling, sir,” I laughed into the phone.
“Get your brain off gutter,” the tycoon said. “I need a good girl for crazy business.”
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