Kalima

 

The Arrival

I

 came to N’gombe Ilonda not to be found, but to forget. The village was not on any map, and perhaps it never had been. It lay nestled between a forest that whispered in forgotten tongues and a river that flowed both forward and back, depending on who was watching.

I arrived at dusk, when the sky wore its bruises like a memory. The path behind me had vanished, swallowed by the silence of the trees. My feet ached, but the ache felt earned—like penance. I had walked for days, guided only by a story told to me by a dying man whose eyes had already begun to see the other side.

The air in N’gombe Ilonda was thick with something I could not name. Not mist, not smoke—something older. It clung to my skin like forgotten prayers. The villagers watched me from behind half-open doors and curtainless windows. They did not speak. They did not smile. But they nodded, as if they had been expecting me.

I found lodging in a hut made of clay and woven reeds, offered by an old woman who never asked my name. She simply said, “You will remember what you came to forget.” Then she vanished into the folds of night.

That night, I dreamt of a woman standing in moonlight, her eyes like rivers that had seen too much. She did not speak, but I felt her voice in my chest. When I woke, the dream lingered—not as memory, but as presence.

The shrine stood at the centre of the village, crumbling and overgrown. Vines bloomed with silver flowers that opened only under the moon. I was drawn to it, as if something within me recognized its silence.

And then I saw her.

She stood barefoot in the shadow of the shrine; her gaze fixed on the stars. Her presence was not sudden—it was as if she had always been there, waiting for me to arrive at the right moment in time.

I did not speak. Neither did she.

But something shifted in the air between us, like a page turning in a book I had never read but somehow knew by heart.

What was I trying to forget? Not a person, not a place—but a question. One that had followed me like a shadow stitched to my soul: What is the purpose of knowing, if knowing brings no peace?

I had spent years chasing truths in books, in debates, in the quiet corners of thought. I had studied the great philosophers, dissected their words like sacred texts. Yet the more I understood, the less I felt. My mind grew vast, but my heart remained a stranger.

In the city, I was Kalima the thinker. The man who could unravel paradoxes and speak in metaphors. But beneath the intellect was a silence I could not name. A silence that grew louder with every answer I found.

N’gombe Ilonda was not a place I had planned to find. It was whispered to me by a man whose eyes had already begun to see the other side. He said, “There is a village where the soul remembers what the mind forgets.” I did not believe him. But I followed the whisper anyway.

Now, standing in this village that seemed to breathe with its own rhythm, I felt something stir. Not clarity. Not revelation. But a presence. As if the air itself was watching me, waiting for me to ask the right question.

And then there was her.

She did not speak. But her silence was not empty—it was full. Full of things I had never dared to feel. Her gaze did not pierce me; it invited me. To remember. To feel. To become.

There is a kind of silence that does not come from the absence of sound, but from the exhaustion of thought. That was the silence I carried.

I had spent so long trying to understand the world that I had forgotten how to feel it. Knowledge had become my armour, and in wearing it, I had grown distant from the very life I sought to comprehend.

What is truth, if not a mirror that shatters the moment you try to hold it?

I used to believe that wisdom was the highest pursuit—that if I could name the nature of suffering, I could escape it. But suffering does not yield to language. It is not a concept to be solved. It is a presence, like wind or fire. It moves through you, reshaping you without permission.

In the city, I had debated the nature of the soul. Here, in this village that breathed like a living thought, I began to wonder if the soul was not something to be defined, but something to be remembered.

Perhaps forgetting is not the loss of memory, but the loss of meaning.

And perhaps love—true love—is not found in the meeting of minds, but in the recognition of something eternal. Something that was always there, waiting beneath the noise.

I did not know who Amara was. But in her silence, I heard the echo of a question I had never dared to ask: What if the heart knows what the mind cannot bear to understand?

Before the village, there was the city. And before the city, there was the hunger.

Not for food, nor for wealth—but for meaning. I had always been haunted by the feeling that life was a riddle whispered in a language I had once known but forgotten. I devoured books like they were sacred texts, hoping one of them would remember the answer for me.

I taught philosophy at a university where minds were sharp, but hearts were dull. We debated the nature of time, the illusion of self, the ethics of existence. But when the lectures ended, we returned to lives that contradicted every truth we claimed to believe.

I remember the day I left. It was raining, though the sky was clear. I had just finished a lecture on the Ship of Theseus—how a thing can change piece by piece and still be called the same. I looked at my reflection in the window and wondered: If I have replaced every part of myself with ideas, what remains of the man who once felt?

That night, I walked out of my apartment and never returned. I left behind my books, my name, my carefully constructed identity. I followed a whisper—a story told by a dying man in a hospital bed, whose eyes had already begun to see what mine could not.

He said, “There is a place where the soul remembers. Go there, if you want to feel again.”

I did not believe him. But belief had become a luxury I could no longer afford. So, I walked. Through towns that had forgotten their names. Through forests that did not welcome strangers. Through silence so deep it echoed.

And then I arrived.

N’gombe Ilonda did not greet me. It received me, like a memory returning to its source.

The villagers did not speak of gods. They spoke of echoes.

They believed that every soul left behind an echo—a vibration that lingered in the soil, the wind, the water. These echoes were not memories, but truths that had not yet found words. The forest, they said, was full of them. That’s why it whispered.

Children were taught not to ask questions, but to listen. “The forest answers only when you stop seeking,” an elder told me, her voice like dry leaves. “And the river flows backward when you remember too much.”

There was a story about the shrine at the village’s centre. It was built not to worship, but to contain. Long ago, a man had tried to name the divine. He carved symbols into stone, trying to trap meaning in form. But the divine cannot be named—it can only be felt. The shrine cracked, and the symbols bled light. Since then, the villagers let the vines grow over it, as if to protect the world from too much truth.

They believed in the space between things—between breath and word, between thought and silence. That space, they said, was where the soul lived.

I began to feel it.

Not in visions or voices, but in the way the air moved around me. In the way my thoughts slowed, softened. In the way my questions began to dissolve, not into answers, but into presence.

And then there was Amara.

She did not speak the lore. She was the lore. Her silence was not ignorance—it was knowing too much. Her gaze held the weight of centuries, and when she looked at me, I felt as though I had been seen by something older than time.

It happened on the third night.

The moon was full, swollen like a secret about to be spoken. A low hum stirred the village—not from mouths, but from the earth itself. The villagers emerged from their homes, barefoot and silent, carrying bowls carved from baobab wood and filled with river water.

No one summoned me. Yet I followed, as if my feet remembered a path my mind had never walked.

They gathered at the edge of the forest, where the trees bent inward to form a natural circle. In the centre stood a stone basin, cracked and moss-covered, filled with still water that reflected no stars.

The elder who had given me shelter stepped forward. Her voice was barely above a whisper, yet it carried through the trees.

“Tonight, we remember what the world has forgotten.”

One by one, the villagers poured their bowls into the basin. The water shimmered, then darkened, as if absorbing something unseen. When the last bowl was emptied, the elder turned to me.

“You carry forgetting like a cloak,” she said. “But even forgetting leaves footprints.”

She gestured for me to look into the basin.

I hesitated. Then leaned in.

At first, I saw nothing. Then—shadows. Not of people, but of moments. A child’s laughter. A woman’s hand brushing mine. A book left open on a windowsill. A door closing. A train departing. A face I had tried not to remember.

The water did not show me visions. It showed me echoes—the emotional residue of a life I had tried to abandon.

I stepped back, breathless.

The elder nodded. “The soul does not forget. It waits.”

The villagers began to hum again, a sound that was not melody but memory. The trees swayed, though there was no wind. And for a moment, I felt as though the village itself was breathing through me.

Kalima - Kindle edition by Mwiinga, Mazuba. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.