The Boy Who Brought Me A Touch Of God

The prayerboy:

Mohamed. Little boy back in Standard 4. All of 9 or ten years old. We were in the same class. Fast-talking little brat with a filthy mouth, loved to pick on quiet kids and called them names for fun. K***mako, macho kama gololi! Aaahahahaha! He would leave this one poor kid with big wonder-filled eyes blinking away tears.

Mohamed also had the voice of an angel, vocals powerful as ocean waves. We all knew that because he used to do the evening prayers at the township mosque. Sometimes I'd be sent to the market after school and every time I heard that piercing cry coming over the speakers-- Allaaaahu akbar... I'd stop and listen in a kind of trance.

It was pure, beautiful, spellbinding. I somehow knew there was divine essence in it when I had no cognitive understanding what the divine was.

The bully:

Mohamed and I walked the same path home from school. Only he stopped at Majengo where he lived and I went on towards the outskirts of the high school where we lived. I dreaded the times when we ended up walking that path at the same time.

One day he caught up with me and I crossed the road to get away from him and moved quickly ahead. He crossed the street, picked up a coconut shell from the ground and threw it directly at me. It hit me smack at the back of my head with bullseye precision. What I remember the most is how loud he laughed. I turned around and he crossed the street again and scurried off to find another kid to bully.

The assault lingered on like acid in my mind because I wasn't able to smack him back. Soon after, dad was transferred again and we left that town. Mohamed became the vague memory of a mean boy, but the memory of his voice remained hauntingly beautiful. It was the second time as a kid I'd experienced bullying.

First time:

The first time I was ever bullied, I'd had the opportunity to fight the kid. I used to be a non-talking kid and this firecracker of a girl kept prodding me with her wiry finger to see if I could produce a sound. She laughed gleefully every time I brushed off those poky tentacles.

One day I got fed up when her bully self came at me during recess and I fought her off. I saw my little hands and legs going at her like a furious propeller all by themselves. But she had shins like a set of spanners which gave her an unfair advantage. We became friends quickly, and I still never said a word to her.

As long as I made the choice to fight back, incidents of bullying or being treated unfairly held no power over me. It was that coconut shell finding its target that lingered on far too long. Or maybe it's because I could not reconcile Mohamed the mean bully and Mohamed the boy with the voice of an angel who entranced me with a touch of God at a very young age every time he recited the evening prayer.

A Muslim boy in prayer. Photographer unknown