She Is Blind

Chapter Thirty Four: Taking Action

The question hit me like a bullet. I looked at everyone else, and they had their eyes on me too. AB and Jemima looked at me with pity, My mother with uncertainty, as if relying on my father for the final decision, and My father with anger and disappointment written all over his face. I wanted to lie, to say it was just a game, a ploy to make the programme more popular, and I felt sweat roll down my face with each thump in my chest despite the cold.

"Yes I did. She is my girlfriend."

I felt relief after that. I had spat the truth out. I left Gift once and I could not bear to do it again.

"You said what?" My father bellowed.

"She is my girlfriend, the girl I love, the mother of my kids, and my forever soulmate. I love—"

"Shut up." He barked.

His body shook as it an electric current was passing through it, and he then stood up and came and stood in front of me. I was taller than him, but I looked down and closed my eyes. I knew what to expect. My father's anger increased and got more volatile as time passed, and I knew he would soon hit me.

"In our entire family, there has been no infirmity or disease in our bloodline. We have been pure. From the time of the ancestors we have almost screened carefully to ensure no one brings anything into the family, and we have done it successfully. No blindness, or madness, or albino, or sickler, or deafness has been in our family. And my son will not be the one to bring it in."

"But I think—" I muttered, raising my head and looking at him to talk.

A heavy slap across my left cheek cut me off, and I tasted blood in my mouth. I held it for a while and raised my eyes to look at my father. His body shook as though he was convulsing, and for a while behind him, just before my eyesight clouded I saw Jemima hug my mother and start crying.

"Now I think you have gone mad. You are mad. And I will remove it from you. You will never see that blind girl again."

"I will Dad. I love her."

Where I saw the guts to respond him I did not know. Maybe because his slap had triggered an anger that I had forbidden to surface, forbidden to use against my father. But it was there, and it seemed to be manifesting.

"No son of mine will go against my will and remain my son." he shouted again, his saliva dropping in my face.

"Then I am not your son." I said calmly, the anger still in my heart.

His eyes widened, and for the first time he expressed shock. Genuine, sincere shock I almost took back my words.

"Get out of my house. You cease to be my son and heir from today. Get out. And you will leave with nothing but the things you are wearing now. Don't go in my house. Get out."

I almost did not believe my ears, even though I had said it. Somehow it seemed unreal and impossible. And I stood in a daze as my mother fell at my father's feet to beg for me. AB knelt behind her too, and Jemima cried behind him, but I could barely see or feel them. I just felt like it was a dream.

"You cannot send our son away." My mother cried.

"He said with his own mouth that he is not my son, and so it is. No son of mine will marry a blind woman and taint my bloodline." he replied solemnly. "As for you, get out."

"I am sorry Fa—"

Another slap to the mouth cut me off.

"Leave my house."

And so that day, I left my father's house, a month to my twenty-third birthday, feeling too numb and too weak to answer my mother and AB's distant voices calling for me after I had gone. All I was really thinking of was an old documentary on Lions I had seen, where only one Lion or two or three brothers dominated their pride of females and ruled a turf. They let their male children stay until adulthood when they were old enough to mate their mothers and sisters, and then chased them off to go found their own territories. I really felt like a growing Lion myself as I walked through the cold night.