by Peter Kimani
And then to my utter astonishment and that of the entire congregation, Kanage burst into a hymn of pure pleading joy:
Pass me not, o gentle Savior
Hear my humble cry
While on others Thou art calling,
Do not pass me by.
Savior Savior
Hear my humble cry
While on others Thou art calling
Do not pass me by.
"My son, what can I do for you?" the Maker of Living Stones asked, obviously moved by the man's devotion. He was still struggling to disengage his hand, without seeming to, but Kanage would not let go.
"In church you said ask and it shall be given?"
"Yes, yes, my son, and also knock and it shall be opened. What can I do for you?"
We pushed and shoved one another trying to get a better position from which to witness more clearly this battle between a white and a black hand. We also enjoyed the English sounds coming out of the noses of Kanage and Livingstone.
"Can I please wear that which you wear on your head, for a moment?"
"What, this?" the mzungu asked, a little astonished, touching the helmet with his left hand.
"Yes," Kanage said, "it is beautiful, it looks holy."
"This is for the sun . . ."
"But you wore it right through the service?"
Suddenly the mzungu saw an opportunity to disengage his hand with dignity. "Okay," he said. With his free left hand, he took off the helmet and put it on Kanage's head.
Smiling with all his teeth, Kanage immediately let go of the handshake to adjust the helmet, enjoying being the center of attraction and general envy.
Kanage was about to give the helmet back when he beheld the mzungu's hair. It was silky and silvery, and it fluttered gently in the wind, as if about to fly. Kanage was struck dumb with an insane admiration of the flying hair. He even forgot that he was handing back the helmet, and he held it in the air, frozen.
"Would you like to keep it?" the Englishman asked, thinking that the freeze had something to do with Kanage's reluctance to give up the helmet. "I have a spare one in the car."
"Yes, yes," Kanage said, as if in a dream.
It was a sight to see, the Englishman walking back to his Ford Model T, his head uncovered, Kanage, under a sun helmet, a step or two behind, and then Salome behind him, then the crowd of congregants, with laughter and all sorts of comments, following. The Ford Model T had an open roof, and as the guest of honor drove away, his silky hair could still be seen fluttering in the wind.
Oh! For hair so soft that when blown by the wind it flutters like the wings of an angel about to fly!
Kanage went home, a hero of sorts, but so possessed with the one desire and unquenchable longing that he walked slowly, wondering how he could possess such hair. Or was it a longing for the impossible? He sighed: Oh for hair that can fly. The solution lay in the helmet. In bed, he took it off and hung it where Salome could not trample on it accidentally. In his head trying to figure out how he could make his hair grow silky. And then suddenly he saw the light.
The condition of the Englishman's silky hair had something to do with its being shielded from the sun by the pith helmet at all times. Kanage thought that if he too kept the helmet long enough on his head, his hair would grow equally long, soft, and silky. And from that day, he never took off the helmet, in public at least.
At first his wife and their two children, Gacagĩ and Gaceri, were amused. The neighbors too—they saw it as a fad, a passing cloud. The village nicknamed him Bwana Ngũbia, in full Bwana Ngũbia Kanage, but which he himself anglicized to Lord Gofear Carnagey. Then he got himself rebaptized with the new name. Later Mr. Ngũbia, or Lord Gofear, or Lord Carnagey, or Lord Gofear Carnagey, acquired an old bicycle, and this suited him fine. A two-wheeler was not exactly the same as a four-wheeler, but to him it was the equivalent of the Englishman's open-roofed Ford Model T.
The hidden, like the forbidden, always excites curiosity. In time we became very curious about his hair. How did it look under the helmet? Had it turned silky like the Englishman's? It became a game to see if we could ever catch Kanage without the helmet. Even children stalked him. Sometimes, people would visit his house unexpectedly under all sorts of excuses, asking for this and that, water to drink even, but they never caught him without the helmet.
Inside the house or his office he would first ensure the door was closed. He would then hang the helmet on the wall. But let somebody knock at the door: Kanage would rush to put it on, once bumping his leg against a desk, another time his forehead against a post in his house. Thereafter, he installed extra locks so that if a caller turned up unexpectedly, it would take his wife some time to fiddle with the door, which bought Kanage the moments to get to the helmet and put it on.
Except for the terror of being caught with his hair uncovered, Kanage was otherwise quite satisfied, nay delighted, to hear people talk of how well the helmet sat on his head. Some said: This helmet is exactly like the ones the whites wear! Others, No, Kanage's is special. The Maker of Living Stones once wore it.
And then arose a few domestic complications. Salome wanted a sun helmet of her own. But they did not know where to get another one. Oh, if only the Englishman had brought his wife along, that way the Kanages would have inherited two helmets. They decided to wait for his return, but soon became impatient. When he did not return to the church, Salome demanded they share the one they had—Kanage wear it for one week, then Salome would wear it for the other.
Kanage would not hear of it, not because he would not have liked to share, but for fear of exposing his multicurled black hair, even for a minute, before it had lost its curls and grown long and silky. Salome got irritated. She rebelled. She said in that case, she would be opening the door immediately when anybody knocked. And to show that she meant it, she had all the extra locks removed.
He decided never to remove the helmet. At work and at home, in the bathroom or toilet, walking or sitting, he had it on. In bed, too, he kept it on. Salome decided to wait till Kanage was deep in sleep, snoring, and then she would take it and try it on, walk about, or simply look at herself in the mirror, just to see how it sat on her. Once, hearing him snore, she decided to remove the helmet to try it on and also to see what change may have come to his hair. But Kanage woke up as from a nightmare, clutching his helmet in both hands. He was sweating.
"What's the matter?" Salome asked innocently. "You just woke me up!"
"A nightmare," he said. "Satan was trying to remove the holy crown from my head."
Salome fetched a Bible with a big cross on its cover and placed it on his side of the bed. Kanage went back to sleep, but his two hands were still clutching the helmet.
When he woke the next morning and found himself safe from the nightmare, Kanage broke into a hymn about the dangers of sleep:
The fruits of sleep
Let us take care
We don't get our hair shorn off
The source of our power
Like Samson who lost his hair
All because of sleep.
Thank God everything was in its place. And then doubts. How could he be so sure that his hair was still on him? He became curious about the condition of his hair. He wanted to see if there were any changes to it, in length, shape, color, or texture, whether indeed it had had grown long and silky and brown. The desire became irresistible.
Kanage stood in front of a mirror and tried to take off his helmet. It wound not move. He tried again. It would not move. He shouted for Salome. Even she could not move the helmet: it was stuck to his head; it had become part of his body.
"This is no longer a joke!" Salome exclaimed, but what she wanted to do was laugh out loud, though she did not succumb to the desire. As for Kanage, this was a horror: this was not the change he had been looking for. Should he go to a barber or an artisan to help him remove it? Or should he simply rush to the hospital, the emergency ward, for its surgical removal . . . ?
But wait! T
his was a miracle. The light in his eyes where she expected tears took Salome aback. He thought of telling her about his sudden revelation, then changed his mind. He had just realized his great good luck.
Now he would be able to sleep and even snore without the fear that Satan would remove it. There was no chance of anybody ever finding him naked, as he liked to say about a head without a helmet. Maybe the process of hair changing color and texture begins with the helmet growing roots in the head. He composed a song:
A helmet for a hat in and out my hut
Nothing hurts my heart's joy
No harm to a hermit with a helmet.
He wished he could meet the Maker of Living Stones again, because only he could really explain this phenomenon. Or could it be that Kanage's helmet was especially blessed? Oh, how could he meet with the Maker of Living Stones? Just to let him know that the helmet he inherited from him was especially blessed? Or that Kanage had so taken care of it that it grew a life and had become one with his body? But the Englishman never came back to the area.
And then a new worry begun to tarnish Kanage's newfound joy. Now that the helmet had become one with the body, how would he know the current condition of his hair? Whether or not the black curls had turned brown and soft and silky and straight? He would be like everybody else: not able to look at their heads, except through the aid of a mirror. And being stuck to the head, the helmet would not let him even touch his hair? But his head was his and he had every right to know what grew on it!
An even more intense desire to know how his hair looked seized him. He turned over ways by which he would outwit the helmet. He tried standing for long periods in front of a mirror, but all in vain. He tried to place the mirror on the floor, to see if he could detect the reflection of any part of the head not covered by the helmet. Even a few strands of hair would have satisfied his curiosity, but alas, it was not to be. The helmet covered the whole head and whatever grew on it.
And then one morning, in front of the mirror, he noticed that the helmet was bigger than when he first wore it. What? Were his eyes deceiving him? Was the helmet growing? He asked Salome if she could see any difference between the helmet then and now. Yes, yes, wonders will never cease, she exclaimed, it is growing! He could not believe it. A living helmet? His helmet had become alive? And it grew like any of his other organs?
Kanage and Salome talked of how they would keep this from Gacagĩ and Gaceri, but alas, the children had heard everything. They came out of their room and surrounded him, asking him if he could let them play with the helmet, shake hands with it, or else just touch it. Eventually, reluctantly, he let them touch it. Please take it off and let's play with it, like with cats. It would not come off, and they went back to their room, disappointed. But their curiosity had given Salome a brilliant idea, and she told it to Kanage.
"My grandmother told me this story. There was once a little man, John Gakuhĩ, a bearded grown man with the body of a child. His owner, John Showman, a white man, a hunter, had apparently got him in a forest from faraway Congo. He put John Gakuhĩ in a cage, like an exhibit. People lined up to see him, and paid for it. Showman, the white owner of the black exhibit, took the exhibit on a tour in many countries and he made a lot of money, enough to buy himself a plantation in the colony.
"Rumors said that finally some furious young men said that John Gakuhĩ was not an animal, and they organized themselves and plotted to capture Showman, free Gakuhĩ, and then put Showman in the cage for show, so that John Gakuhĩ would also raise money from the white exhibit. But Showman got wind of it and stopped the exhibition. Yet others say that Showman simply starved Gakuhĩ to death, soon after the income from the exhibition had secured him a plantation.
"My idea is this! The Englishman who gave you this helmet is a maker of living stones. And you, my dear, have nurtured this helmet to life. He makes living stones; you make living helmets. Maybe we can put you in cage and exhibit you in the market, and charge money for the sight. We may end up owners of a plantation."
"And who would pay money to see a helmet?"
"A helmet that grows? Before our very eyes? Who would not want to see this marvel?" she argued back. "If now they follow you in the hope of catching sight of your hair, what about when they hear that the helmet has a life? We can put up letter boards: COME AND SEE THE MAKER OF A LIVING HELMET. Who would not want to witness this wonder?"
Kanage wouldn't hear of it. He was not going to play an animal in a zoo. "I want all talk of an exhibition to end," he told her.
But it did not end.
Rumors say that it was Salome who hinted to a neighbor, who hinted to another, who hinted to yet another, and so on, till the whispers became a roar. Others said no, this was not so, that it was his children who bragged to others about Daddy's live helmet. People began to talk about the miraculous transformation of the helmet from a thing to an organ, some intensifying their praise of him as Kanage the Maker of Living Helmets. Some even claimed that there were plans for an exhibition of Kanage in an open field.
The more the Kanage family denied the rumors, the more they whetted people's curiosity. Where there is smoke, there is bound to be fire, people would say. He became an object of everybody's gaze; wherever he went, people would cast eyes in his direction. People started stalking him, and no matter how intensely he tried to shoo them away, they still followed him or just cast their eyes in his direction, muttering, Look at the helmet growing on Kanage's head.
In school the children could hardly listen to what he taught, they were more interested in his growing helmet. Some asked him to let them touch it, but he would not. Others asked "innocently" if helmets could really grow. Like plants? Animals? Did they breathe, did blood flow through them like in other limbs? Could helmets breed little helmets? Ask your biology teacher, he told them. Was it true that he was going to be an exhibition? I don't want to hear more nonsense, he barked at them.
One day Kanage went home early just to get away from the incessant questions from his students. As he tried to pass through the door, his helmet got stuck against the frame. He shouted for Salome to help. Fortunately, she was harvesting some potatoes in their backyard. She tried to push him. Then she squeezed herself through and tried to pull him from the inside. Nothing doing. She then left the house, and after some time she came back accompanied by a carpenter. The carpenter went about his work in silence; he widened the entrance, and Kanage was finally able to pass through. Salome asked the carpenter to widen all the other doors in the house. Fortunately, the doors into the classrooms were wide enough to let him and the helmet through.
The helmet now looked like the conical roof of a rondavel, a huge mushroom, or an umbrella. Always under the shade—good for the skin, no sunburns, he would say. But soon the helmet became too big for the newly expanded doors into his house. He started sleeping outside. Very good, it was like camping in the open, Kanage told Salome. Fresh air, at all times, he added. Protected from the sun and the rain, he did not need a house and a roof.
In time, the helmet grew too large for the door into the classroom. So he held his classes outside, and lectured his students about the importance of fresh air.
Soon word reached the press about a growing helmet. With their cameras, pens, notebooks, and cameras, reporters descended upon us. Scientists too.
I know very well what you young people are asking yourselves: Did they video him with those camera phones? You would love to see them, wouldn't you? I feel like laughing at your questions, but you are not to blame. In those days there were no videos or phone cameras, no iPhones and all the digitals you use today.
Kanage decided to go into hiding. He wrote a letter to himself, as if it came from a doctor, giving himself sick leave, and Salome took it to school.
"And don't you tell anybody about my hideouts," he instructed her before she left.
He first fled into the forest of Kawangware.
But in the forest, the helmet kept getting caught between trees, impeding his mov
ement.
"I will flee into the desert," he confided to Salome. "Like the prophets of old, like John the Baptist."
Salome became his only human contact. Even though she felt sorry for Kanage, she was happy that she had not been able to get the helmet she had so desired. It was not good for a home to have two prophets, let alone the two being forced to live in the desert.
His sudden disappearance raised eyebrows. People started asking questions first to themselves and then to each other. Rumors of his death started. But we never heard anything about his funeral, some said. He was buried in secrecy, others added. Why in secrecy? others would ask. Don't ask unnecessary questions. Don't you know that Kanage is a man of property? Maybe he is . . .
And thus began another more sinister rumor: that Kanage was bewitched to death.
Let me say that even I did hear the rumors. Some said they had sighted sorcerers flying on saucepans. They had started with their beloved teacher. Now these sorcerers would end up killing the whole village. Sorcery must be uprooted, some demanded. But who would dare to murder wonderful Kanage, the teacher of their children?
Some started casting silent glances at Salome, seeming to ask, Where is your husband? Others whispered among themselves: they had always known that the woman had odd ways. Some even jumped to the side when they met her on the road. In church, too, nobody would sit next to her. Salome went to seek help from Solomon the Truth Teller. When he saw her, he dashed inside and came back with a big Bible, and clutching it close to his chest the whole time, he talked to her. Even after Salome explained that Kanage was simply hiding, the preacher seemed to harbor some doubt, and would not let go of his shield against the devil. In the end, Salome confessed that her husband was hiding in the desert.