CHAPTER TWO

She wasn’t sure how many voices she was able to hear now at the age of twenty four, but all she knew was she had to learn to hide it really well. She had to be able to ignore them good enough less she would be called possessed or crazy. She had gone too far now to be called these things again. Those days had to be long gone and forever in the past.

It was during her first days at the orphanage that she knew she had to be smart about all her dealings. Before then she had lived happily with just her mum, far away from prying eyes and judgemental stares. It wasn’t until one night that her mum had explained that she had to leave  where she had come to know as home, that she realized that there was really more to life than what she had grown up thinking. It wasn’t like she was a curious kid while growing up, she simply managed to live a content life out in the woods, where the only thing that ever matter was her mum and her friends and other basic life amenities that her mum had made sure she got.  

She didn’t know why she had to leave her home, but her Mum had carefully explained to her in their native tongue that she wasn’t going to let her languish with her in the forest. She told Kira that had too much potential, that it would be unfair for her being her mother to allow her to be punished for a crime she knew nothing about.

Kira didn’t understand what her mom meant when she had said she had to do right by her, but she had to be obedient non the less. They seemed well enough where they lived, so she never understood why her mother wanted her to leave and go to a place she knew absolute nothing about. She didn’t even know such a place existed until her mum had mentioned it, adding that it would give her lots of opportunities to make friends her age. She had lots of friends where she was, even though they would always hide whenever mum was in sight, and she would claim that she didn’t ever see them, but she had friend non the less, and she wasn’t looking forward to creating or even getting new ones. 

She still believes that the voices she hears even today are memories from her childhood back at home, but on some days it feels like they are more than just memories. And these later days were more frequent, but she had just chosen to categorize them as residues from her past in fear that she might think too much into it and give them the strength to control her like the had done at first.

After her Mum had decided one night to mysteriously drop her off at what she later came to know as the church gate, she could only try so much to connect to anyone or anything. It was on that night that her mother had told her that she deserved so much more than what she was being offered, prior to that day, she never knew that something like a world existed beyond the trees and bushes that that surrounded the home she was born into.

On that night, she had promised her mother as she was going to leave her in front of the church gate for the nice people of that world to find her and take care of her, that no matter how much she wanted to run after her to follow her back the way that they had come together, that she was only allowed to be brave. She was to wait til they opened the gates to find her, and if they asked about her mum, she was only allowed to say she was dead.

And so as she watch her mum’s slender figure disappear into the shadows of the night, all she could was seat still just as she had been instructed, wiping the tears with the back of her palms from time to time until she fell asleep right there out in the night, worn out by all the tears she had to cry, and the thoughts of abandonment she had to sieve through in her head.

The kids her age in the orphanage didn’t really make it easy to have friends. They called her “crazy Mowgli”, and it wasn’t until she was able to read and write that she could truly understand what the words meant and how she had come to be known as that. It was then she found a copy of “The jungle book” in the orphanage library and read it so furiously and nonstop,until she got to the last page. Lucky for she was a smart child, so the art of reading wasn’t for her a much difficult to learn. She was mostly fueled by the determination of wanting to know what all the books had to say. Maybe she thought, that it would help her understand more about this strange world she so suddenly found herself in, and maybe if she could understand that, than maybe it would begin to make more sense to her, why her mum had felt the need to leave her in it.

The part about Mowgli was to an extent true since she used to live in a forest and she had actually told her minder how she used to live there with her mum and other friends.

Now the part where they called her crazy didn’t quite add up. To the best of her knowledge she didn’t possessed any characteristics of a supposed crazy person, so it just didn’t make any sense. She had initially thought that it was because she had told the ever lovely Sister Geraldine that had brought her to the orphanage in the first place about how she had friends still leaving in the forest.

 At first she was appalled that there were still kids like kira out in the woods, that she asked Kira to immediately take her and some other men down to where she used to live with the other kids.

“Blood of Jesus” she had shouted when Kira had began the exciting task of leading them down the path that was supposed to take them to her home but the excitement quickly dampened when Kira soon realized that she didn’t know exactly which way led to home. From the interaction that had passed between Sister Geraldine and the mini army she had brought along, it seemed she was leading them to a bad forest that no one was supposed to ever enter.

Sister Geraldine proceeded to pull Kira by the ear and yelled to her face about how she was trying to prank them, but of course she had gone off on the rant purely in English, which made it impossible for Kira to fully understand then where she had gone wrong .

At the end of the day, Kira was taken back to the orphanage, and in order not to arouse suspicion and even more questions, Sis Geraldine has told who ever cared to listen that Kira was a casualty of an ethnic war some years back and she had had to live in the bushes for a while and fend for herself.

She told everyone that Kira had to make up imaginary friends while she was in the woods just so she could cope with the loneliness.

She had managed to convince every one with this story, except of course for Kira. She has been almost twelve years old when her mum had left her in-front of the church that night. The memory was so clear that it hurt, but mother had promised her that it was for the best, and even now in as much as it was different being here, she was sure now that her mother had been right all those years ago. And for that she missed her even more .

But for the last part of the story, the one sister Geraldine told everyone, as she became older, it became more likely. Her mum had always countered that she was always talking to herself  whenever she had claimed she was talking to her friends. Her friends would also always immediately disappear pr run away rather every time they saw her mum coming, so it was always impossible to show her mum that she was in-fact wrong, and that she indeed had friends.

About six months after she was placed in the orphanage, the first set of voices came long, and it was one for each of the kid she played with in the woods. She almost began to believe what Sr Geraldine had said about them being imaginary friends.

But they weren’t imaginary friends if she could clearly remember playing games with them and touching them. If they were imaginary friends she wouldn’t be just be hearing them as voices now that she was at the orphanage, she would have still been able to manifest them as she had done back when she was in the woods. So Sis. Geraldine was wrong but its not like it mattered that she was. There was no point trying to prove anything to her anymore. Not then not now.

In all her beauty, kind eyes and melodious voice, Kira knew she was wrong.

At first when the voices came, they weren’t as coherent and clear as they were to Kira these days or on this particular day on the bus. Back then they had come as a wave of multiple tirades all at once in Kira’s head.

They were all speaking at once, like they were trying desperately to be heard, but all they gave to Kira was an excruciating migraine.

For a twelve year old who had just been abandoned by her Mum in a world that had nothing in common with the one she had been living, it was more than overwhelming.

Everyone thought she was going crazy, so maybe that was where the crazy in “Crazy Mowgli” came from. She was found on multiple occasions talking to herself and begging who no one could see to stop tormenting her.

She would cry her self to sleep most nights only to be awaken by the constant litany of voices only moments later. So for the long months until she mastered how to silence most of the voices, she knew nothing about sleep.

Silencing the voices was a necessity that required a desperate measure, but for how exactly she was able to do it, no one knows.

Some girls would claim that they saw her every night during those sleepless nights of hers, shaking and crying in her bunk asking nothing and no one in particular to shut up repeatedly.

No one of those girls ever had the courage to ask her what was going on. If they weren’t entirely scared of her when she had first come to the orphanage; The timid and wild eyed girl, who only knew how to speak her native tongue of Igbo, but with the thickest dialect, who knew nothing about anything that seemed to matter to a regular human, they definitely got scared of her then. She had somehow upgraded herself from “Crazy Mowgli”, to being referred to as “the possessed girl”.

She had no friends, not that she had cared to make one when she had first came. The girls were all hell bent on practicing and perfecting their grammar like their lives depended on it, that no one had time or space for “crazy Mowgli” who only spoke the strongest version of  “vernacular” .

Every one just treated her like she was a ticking time bomb of dirt, waiting to explode and stain everything around her. Every one simply made sure that they wouldn’t be the one around her to at all just in case she did in fact explode.

It just seemed easier to sneer and laugh at her from a distance. No one was brave enough to come close, and no one care enough to want to be friends with the strange girl that was sometimes caught talking to herself even though she tried so hard to hide it.