WAS IT A CURSE?- BY PROF. MAILU

It was the seventh year since Nathoa killed his wife for adulteration with his friend. He killed her through strangling and reported to the family that she had died of a heart attack. The family bought his report and buried her honorably.  

But, since his wife’s departure, Nathoa had fallen into a process of losing his weight year-in-year-out for a reason he didn’t understand since he ate well, and any medical examination showed nothing of any malice. During his time with his wife, he used to bear a tummy. But the death of his wife appeared to wear that tummy down. Today the waist size of his trousers had reduced nearly a quarter to the original size to accommodate what now appeared to be a walking skeleton. His eyes had sunk into the sockets. 

At his middle fifties, he appeared a dying man double his age. Yet he felt strong, although he fought against being blown away when the wind was strong. The thing was – which only himself knew – his sex urge appeared to have increased. Sleeping with women had become his regular diet. 

One day he was thinking about the last village woman he had slept with when, for the first time his memory faintly recollected the last word his furious wife uttered during the riot of their quarrel when neither listened to the other and before he lost the last grain of temper and decided to silence her with strangling. But now his memory failed to replay his wife’s full sentence. She said something like, “Kill me because your friend raped me and then you’ll live to regret for every ejaculation will take...” He wasn’t sure whether the last word was “away” or “weight.”

Indeed, if the words was: “weight” then the spirit of his wife had left a curse upon him that responsible for the gradual loss of his weight. But did she have the power to deliver that curse? The only way for him to prove he wasn’t dying out of her curse, was to stop sleeping with women and see whether he would gain his weight. But that was too expensive for him emotionally, The thing was, when sex urge attacked him his mind halted thinking until he had finished the business with another woman. It wasn’t difficult for him to sleep with women because he had what most poor village women did not have. Money. He parted with money for the course generously. It was a mystery to him that, in spite of being so thin, his sex desire burnt him... 

With a lot of determination, one day Nathoa shut down his womanizing for months two three months to check on whether he could be draining his weight through ejaculation.  He checked on his weight every other day. Surprisingly, though very taxing to him, the break appeared to pay off. In barely three months he gained nearly a kilo weight! But then, like a drunkard, he fell back into his addiction in full swing to make up for what he had lost. Now he knew his sex addiction would finally pay him with death. Or, could the spirit of his wife have sacrificed him to the shrine of death through sex? For one day he was pouring his male libation into a woman’s body when he collapsed over her and died. The family, as if they knew something, buried him close to his wife.

PROF. DAVID MAILU