WAR WITHOUT END

WAR WITHOUT END

It was in the middle of the night — a very long, dark night. The heavy thudding of boots could be heard as the soldiers approached the main door. Then came a sudden, very loud banging at the main door. Almost immediately after, a stern raucous voice barked a command.

“Open the door now or…!” The voice was coarse and scary.

Barely draped in her sleeping wrapper, dada Edina scurried out of bed. She rushed straight to the parlour, only to be assaulted from without, by the sound of a mighty, exploding kick which burst the front door shutters open. Confused and afraid, she was pleading with the soldiers who shoved her aside as they stamped into the parlour, spilling into the rooms. Searching the nooks and crannies, they were screaming a cacophony of curses and making threatening growls.

“Where is he!?”

“Where is that bloody civilian!?”

“If young men like us don’t confront the enemy, who would defend Biafra?”

“Woman, fetch your son before we find him…or else!” They were scowling.

Soon they roughly dragged Sami out from beneath the heap of clothes in which he had hidden himself. Barking and howling at Sami, they forced him to frog jump from his bedroom to the parlour, while they pelted him with abuses. Sami, who turned seventeen a few months ago, was visibly bewildered. He was scared stiff.

“Please spare him. He is just a boy — a little boy…and…and my — my only son. P-please take me and leave him. I will go with you…just spare my son.” Dada Edina bitterly wailed her plea, thrashing about on the bare floor; naked except for the loose undergarment she was wearing. But the soldiers remained heartless; heedless to her plaintive cry.

Taking Sami with them, they hasted away. The thudding sound of their jackboots gradually faded, as, into the dark night they melted. Throughout the rest of the night, dada Edina sobbed until her voice became hoarse and wearied.

So upset, I could not sleep for the rest of the night. Suddenly I felt so lonely. An uncanny feeling of dread came over me, and I became thoughtfully afraid I would never see Sami again — a ghoulish thought strain which I resolutely consigned into the remote recesses of my consciousness from where it emerged. Sami was my first cousin. I was fourteen while he was just three and half years older than me. I learnt many survival skills from him including how to make and lay basket fishing traps in the stream, and snares for catching bush fowls. We were very fond of each other. I had visited my aunt dada Edina’s home to spend some days with them. Dada Edina was such a kind lady. Ever so cheerful, she loved giving and sharing without sparing even the little remaining in her possession.

For several days after the soldiers forcefully took Sami away, dada Edina would, every evening, expectantly sit at the bare wooden sofa in their veranda overlooking the main road.

“I am waiting for Sami my son. He is on his way coming home.” She would respond to anyone inquisitive enough to ask her why she was observing such a routine.

Father, seeing how distraught his younger sister, dada Edina had become, resolved to make inquiries about Sami’s where about at a nearby military base. The little information father could gather was that the last batch of fresh conscripts had been conveyed to an unspecified training depot. He therefore called off the search for that day. It was late in the evening when he arrived home. Dada Edina, in obvious anxiety, was already waiting for him. She hurried straight to father, her elder brother, who she always fondly addressed as dede, an appellative title used when respectfully addressing an older person other than your parent. Dada is the feminine form of dede.

Her drawn face wearing her grief, she cast an imploring gaze into her brother’s eyes. Then she uttered a pathetic cry:

“Dede m’! — tell me my son Sami is alive — that he is on his way back! Oh no, my son is…not gone! Please tell me, that Sami lives…that my only eye has not been plucked out! Ah do…do tell me dede that my son is alive — and well! Is it not so?”

Father’s face held an expression of utmost empathy — such compassion so paternal. He was not just dada Edina’s elder brother, but also played the role of a father to her as they were growing up, their father having died while they were still children. In a moment, father understood her sister’s exceeding grief and mental torture.

Without uttering a word in response, father enfolded his younger sister, Edina in an emotional embrace. In anxious uncertainty, dada Edina kept staring with tear-glazed pleading eyes into her elder brother’s face. She saw that unmistakable solemn look of concern in them, and feared that something terrible may have happened to her son. And she let out an enormous heart-rending wail, weeping profusely on her elder brother’s shoulder.

“Do not weep, Edina, my goodly sister.” Father comforted her.

“Sami is not dead…He is safe and sound…He will soon come back home.”

But dada Edina, quite oblivious of her brother’s words of consolation, kept staring into vacant space. She felt sick in the stomach. Her head began to spin. Then the world whirled round about her. The skies and the earth seemed to have conspired against her — weighing and pulling her down; depriving her of breath, all at the same time. And she passed out.

When she later recovered consciousness, surprisingly, she was calm. She sat up on the mat, looked around her and declared:

“The One Almighty Father who dwells above beyond all others — He who neither sleeps nor slumbers — He whom I reverently worship, would never let me down. Sami my son shall surely return to me alive and well.”

Then her voice, a vibrating velvety contralto, gently rang out as she, in our native tongue, prayerfully rendered that sweet soulful song:

‘Give to the winds thy fears,

Hope and be undismayed

God hears thy sighs and counts thy tears

God shall lift up thy head.

Through waves and clouds and storms,

He gently clears the way;

Wait thou His time; so shall this night

Soon end in joyous day.’

Faithfully, dada Edina, believed that her son was alive. Patiently she waited for the ‘joyous day’ of his return. Days turned into weeks, weeks became months — several months, yet there was no news of Sami. When the war which raged for thirty traumatic months eventually ended, and some of those who willingly enlisted, or were conscripted into the Biafran Army were coming home in trickles, Dada Edina would always join the families of the returnee soldiers in rejoicing, thanking God for keeping them from harm’s way and bringing them home safely. And whenever the stories of such returnees from the war were told to her hearing, she would with glad expectations, remark:

“So shall such joy and rejoicing also be on that day — the very day my son, Sami, would return home to me.”

For quite a while, about three years after that genocidal war, many times I had to involuntarily look over my shoulder to search out that person behind me whose voice sounded very much like that of Sami. Sometimes I would chase after someone in the crowd, who struck a close semblance to Sami. I also have had some pleasant memorable dream encounters with him.

Relentless, the years rolled by. Several years — nearly two decades after the cessation of violent hostilities, my aunty dada Edina, the eternal optimist, remained steadfast in her belief that Sami, her son had survived the war, and would return someday. Sadly, for dada Edina, twenty years after the war, her only son was still not back home. For her, the war never ended. It remained a ‘war without end’.

Early in the morning one fateful day, dada Edina woke up. Straight away she laved, and made herself a light breakfast. Donning one of her best attires, she heartily announced that Sami would be coming back that very morning. She therefore positioned herself at her usual watch post — the sofa at the veranda overlooking the main road. Just before mid-day, still sitting there, watching and waiting, she dozed off. Not long after, she was heard saying in that faltering voice of one entranced in some sublime reverie:

“Sami my son, what kept you away so long? Where have you been all this while? Why are you walking away from your mother? Come and embrace your mother, my son…”

Then her voice became indistinct; less audible. Soon it trailed off.

And a brief moment of solemn silence ensued. The clouds stood still. Even the gentle wind swaying the foliage momentarily seized its breath. All nature seemed to pause, perhaps in sincere respectful acknowledgement of the very moment that ‘woman of faith’ passed on. Seated at her watch post; patiently, hopefully waiting for her only son, Sami, to return home from the war, dada Edina quietly slipped through the veil to the other side of life.

Right from that night those soldiers took Sami away, I always prayed God to bring him safely home. Therefore, when Sami did not return home from the war several years after, during which dada Edina died waiting, I felt that there are a lot of unanswered questions in man’s understanding of the Supreme Being, the human being and the relationship between both. I still feel so. As such, I resolved to go into the real self within, through contemplative silence, beyond the confines of religion, philosophy and all mental sciences, to find and know God better.