The Voice of Wisdom

 

He was so old, his shoulders sagged and his back was hunched. He prowled, strong enough to carry his own arms and legs, through the alleys of his youthful days, as if he were in search of his youth, lost in the shadows of time some many years ago. But he was also very wise and sane. Although the contours of his face would have made him appeared in his early sixties, the painful memory of a tragedy he witnessed long ago had shrunk his body; but his inner soul never weakened or was deterred. There was a strange vacancy in his eyes and a hollowness to his face, which, dramatically, suggested that a piece of him was missing, somehow. As haggard as death, he knew more than his long painful years of toil would profess. Unfortunately, most people in the village had begun to question his sanity. They would say, “Poor Jalldong Kiirr, he’s outlived his own soul.” He had not. In fact, he felt and cherished every moment of his existence more than any man that ever lived on Earth. He carried himself high, yet humble.

Although Jalldong Kiirr was old enough to be my grandfather, I never called him that. He was the best friend I ever had. Despite his old age, I would never in a zillion years have traded him with another soul. He was the best thing that happened to me in the deepest way. For he shaded my child’s vision of a perfect village with all the colours of the world and prepared me to walk into the real world fearlessly, but always aware of this infinite diversity.

He taught me, challenging my childhood naivity, that my village was not the entire universe, and that my people were not the only people in the world. One evening, as we sat under a baobab tree on the bank of the river Nile, he pointed at the dying sun, setting far in the west behind the mountains and spreading a blanket of golden radiance on the water, and he said, “Have you ever asked yourself where the sun goes when it leaves our village behind in darkness?”

My immediate impulse was to say, “Hey, I know, it sleeps when we sleep and it rises when we wake up to warm us.” But instead, I remained silent.

The fact was that I was becoming fond of him and respected him very much. So whenever he brought up some fundamental issues that I could not comprehend, I would just keep silent. He would look at me and smile. That evening he did just that. He looked down at me and smiled broadly (a smile that lit up his wrinkled face). I always loved to see him grin and smile. For some reason that expression on his face, that smile, made him my playmate in body and soul (sometimes we would play around and laugh all day long). That smile also brought beautiful colours to the rose of his life, which was wilting on the road of time.

“When the sun sets and the darkness invades our village, it rises upon lands far beyond, where there are also small boys like you and a grandpa like me,” he said, still smiling broadly at me and ruffling my hair playfully.

“And how do you know that for certain?” I asked, looking up into his eyes demandingly.

“Because I’m the oldest in this village,” he said jokingly, but not without an unmistakable tone of melancholy lurking at the back of his voice as if expressing his eternal sadness that no one seemed to hear the voice of wisdom within him.

“And the wisest man,” I added, not to impress him but rather to share my true feelings about him. His face shone triumphantly like a pupil told by his teacher that he is the most intelligent in his class. He was always very pleased that I was there to listen. But I was very grateful that he was there too. He was inspiring music to my young, savage soul. Whether he knew it or not did not matter. We were friends. Sometimes we would sit, either on the riverbank or in his hut, and he would talk and talk. He would tell me fact upon fact and I would listen. To him, I was a child with a vision.

He probably knew more than he could tell me in a lifetime. One day, I looked closely into his hollow eyes and realised that he sensed the universe around him and that which is far beyond the darkness. He felt it so deeply and knew it so well - like a guarded piece of a legacy handed down from his ancestors; only he did not claim it as his own. He had the greatest and the deepest respect for anything and everything in nature, more so than any man I would ever come to know throughout my entire life. He felt that there was a piece of soul in everything in nature; be it animate or inanimate, it was alive in his eyes. He knew the universe through the cycle of Sheng and Doye (sun and moon). The movement of stars high in the sky and the cock’s crow low on earth gave him his sense of time. The howling wind, the migrating Savanna birds, the falling leaves of the baobab tree, the antelopes flocking to water reservoirs and the changing colours of the meadows all unfolded the changes in seasons. Nature must have been his only and one very intimate book that he read over and over and knew it page by page, chapter by chapter. He knew it all by heart. No teacher. No classroom. It was all there. Wide open.

Of all the mysteries, ours was a friendship based on understanding and misunderstanding in a deeper sense of human compassion. It was but an entanglement of so young a soul, empty and yearning to be recreated and filled with the wisdom of an ancient. An ancient soul, full of springs of life; a soul wanting to give and to forgive the naivety of a fatherless child, to tell him stories and to sing him songs of the past. We were swept together and bonded by tides of our own circumstances. A bond of life, you may call it.