Falling For A Villain

Chapter 1.

'I'm I preg...nant?' Rachael's subconscious yapped again, scaring the hell out of her. Why couldn't her mind shut up for once? She walked back and forth under a fig tree, her breath rapid and shallow. She tried to focus on the weather. The cool breeze in the sunny afternoon. It was of no use. Her periods should have come by now. She sat on the grass for the fifth time, scratching her head until her fingernails were stained with blood.

Kimathi, her home village, lived a conservative community where it was culturally unacceptable for a woman to get pregnant outside marriage. Single mothers were greatly demonised and suffered a lot of abuse and brutality from the villagers. Sometimes, from their own family.

Girls who therefore found out that they were expectant outside wedlock, experienced fear and panic. They knew that they would be taken through a very humiliating ordeal, as soon as they were found out. So many girls had died trying to secure abortion, to save their skin.

Much more was expected from Racheal. She had completed high school in the previous years. Being a bright student, she had been greatly supported by the villagers to pay her school fees through harambee and other fundraising projects. The villagers therefore expected her to go to greater heights and serve as a mentor to other village girls. 'Can't you be like Rachael?' village mothers would ask their daughters when scolding them.

* * *

Rachael wasn't under the fig tree by chance. This tree that stood behind her mother's hut was sacred. Her grandfather had sacrificed more than a thousand cattle under it. 'Ngai,' he had pleaded with his God. 'If I and the remaining Mau Mau freedom fighters die, let there remain a girl and a boy from this village to continue our community.

She desperately needed help. If Ngai had granted her grandfather's request, he couldn't fail her. At least not this time.

He was the grandfather she never met. He had died by the gun as he fought for land and political independence from the British colonials. The settlers had enslaved them in their own land and could flog them for petty offences. That prompted the community to start a fierce rebellion named as the Mau Mau, which was an anagram for 'get out get out' in their local language. A struggle that led to the eventual defeat of the white man. But it was for a high cost. By the time it ended, hundreds of thousands of the ethnic community had been massacred as they tried to lift that yoke off their shoulders. Dedan Kimathi, the hero who headed that liberation movement came from this village. When he was assassinated, the village was named after him to honor his bravery.

'If only my grandfather were still alive, maybe life would have been different...'

She mumbled amidst sobs, staring at the Aberdare range where Mau Mau bodies were dumped in mass graves. It wasn't only the Britons who had slaughtered their grandfathers. Their fellow countrymen had collaborated with the British to squash the rebellion. The home guards.

They didn't have the slightest empathy when they sold the blood of their brothers for pocket change. Gains they later used to buy themselves tracks of land when Kenya gained its independence. While those who fought for it, or their surviving families were forgotten in poverty. This had left a bitter rivalry between the home guards' and the Mau Maus' surviving families.

* * *

'Rachael!' Her mother called.

She wanted to answer but the bile that had risen in her throat shocked her, killing her words in the throat.

'If she has gone to see that home guard's grandson again, I will kill her today.' Her mother rambled.

Still seated under the fig tree, she could hear her mother scolding her, but wondered why she was even bothered. It was too late.