And The Lights Came On

By Jane Nannono

A chance encounter with a total stranger on a park bench turns the life of a drifting family man the right way up. For some months, Munaku, a successful businessman, has been wrestling with making a life changing decision. When he thinks he has finally made it, he looks for validation. After meeting with the stranger in the park, he clearly understands that he may have been looking for invalidation other than validation. He walks away determined to put his life back on track. Little does he know that it always gets worse before it gets better.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jane Nannono
• Release date: Nov 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370280629

Jane Nannono

Jane Nannono is a Ugandan. She is a qualified Medical doctor with a degree from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. She has worked as a doctor in both Uganda and Botswana. A widow, Nannono is also a mother of two adorable sons and a daughter. She is a guardian for her two nieces.A voracious reader, Nannono always dreamed of writing novels but that dream had not been realized until now. Nannono currently works and lives in Botswana with her family.As a writer, I write about what I know and what is important to me in my community with the aim of changing it for the better. I grew up surrounded by strong women and I am a strong supporter of women empowerment. It reflects in the strong women characters that I create in my novels and short stories.From last year , I have been honing my writing skills by writing short stories. Two of my short stories: Move Back To Move Forward and Buried Alive in the Hot Kalahari Sand were among the 52 stories from 14 countries that were published in the AFRICA BOOK CLUB ANTHOLOGY VOL1(2014) entitled: The Bundle of Joy and Other Stories From Africa and edited by Daniel Musiitwa.This anthology can be ordered from the Africa Book Club website. I am in the final stages of writing the manuscript for my second fiction novel. I continue to read widely to feed my writing career and just for the love of the written word.

Book preview

AND THE LIGHTS CAME ON

JANE NANNONO

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 Jane Nannono

All rights reserved.

Cover Design: Laura Shinn Designs

http://laurashinn.yolasite.com

Smashwords Licensing Notes

All rights reserved under U.S. and International copyright law. This ebook is licensed only for the private use of the purchaser. May not be copied, scanned, digitally reproduced, or printed for re-sale, may not be uploaded on shareware or free sites, or used in any other manner without the express written permission of the author and/or publisher. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

And the Lights Came On is a work of fiction. Though actual locations may be mentioned, they are used in a fictitious manner and the events and occurrences were invented in the mind and imagination of the author except for the inclusion of actual historical facts. Similarities of characters or names used within to any person – past, present, or future – are coincidental except where actual historical characters are purposely interwoven.

Other books by Jane Nannono

NOVEL

The Last Lifeline

SHORT STORIES

Buried Alive in the Hot Kalahari Sand

Move Back To Move Forward

Dedication

Christopher Kayonga

Remembered with love and gratitude

And the Lights Came On

One ordinary afternoon, a shrewd businessman but a drifting family man, instantly has his life turned the right way up. The unexpected happens through a brief chance encounter with an old man on a weathered park bench. The encounter leaves the drifter totally unnerved and challenged.

A PROLOGUE

There is little agreement about the phases that make up a man’s life cycle, the Bard identified seven, namely the infant vomiting in the nurse’s arms, who grows into the whining schoolboy with his satchel creeping like a snail unwillingly to school, who in turn becomes the lover with a woeful ballad for his mistress, then a soldier jealous in honor, sudden and quick in a quarrel seeking a reputation; only to become a justice or savant, full of wise old sayings and quips. The sixth age belongs to the clueless old man who loses his vision, virility and thankfully his insecurity, the latter as recompense before retiring to his grave and seventh heaven hopefully. For its part the Bible identifies four, a child, for whom the rod should not be spared lest he be spoilt, a youth, who is older than a child and ready for some responsibility like looking after his father’s flock of sheep much like David did fending off wolves and lions as the flock grazed. This youth grows into a man, responsible for his actions and the well-being of others, about whom it is written, therefore a man shall leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife and they shall become one flesh. Emerging from that particular staging post of posterity as an old man, such as Enoch about whom it is written that he walked with God and his son Methuselah who almost lived an entire millennium, at this age he has raised a child into a man who is able and willing to raise a child of his own.

The ages of man are distinct of that there can be no doubt, such that you can’t call a youth a man when he is not, or a man an old man unless in jest at his expense or yours. But it is not about mere appearance, a beard, or grey crown of hair or the lack thereof, or for that matter receding hairlines, aching joints, atrophy, forgetfulness, failing sight, toothless gums and wisdom. For if it was so sayings like wise beyond his years would not have gained currency. That is also not to reckon with acts of God such as Werner Syndrome occurring in one in a million live births which cause premature ageing that begins after puberty. 

Anyone who has sailed the River Nile at its source in Jinja,Uganda, is familiar with the scene, a rolling patchy green hill featuring John Hanning Speke’s pink obelisk marking the spot where the English soldier and explorer first stood to behold the source of the great river, where the Great River begins and Lake Nalubaale otherwise named Victoria; ends. The water ripples forth from a subterranean spring, as if gathering itself and taking one deep breath then one final look around before setting off on the long journey North.

Further South to Cape Point in Cape Town, South Africa, where the warmer, murkier Indian Ocean meets the clear blue and cold Atlantic Ocean, the two waters don’t mix you couldn’t mistake one for the other like a pair of matching socks or shoes or gloves, or for that matter a caterpillar and a butterfly. In the same way you cannot mistake a man with a boy. I have heard it called coming of age where you leave behind childish things and become a man, stop eating baby food or being bottle fed and feed yourself, wash yourself and dress yourself. This definitive and disruptive transition though somewhat self-evident still comes as a sudden awakening to some.

For instance take the case of Apollo whose first day at boarding school at the prestigious Nyakasura School situated about 7 miles from his home in Bukwali, Fort Portal provided a similar awakening. For some one accustomed as he was to coming home from his nearby primary school for lunch made by his doting mother, graduating to high school meant going away to boarding school. At first he found being away from home comforts for three months at a time, unsettling. This was before he learnt to hire a bicycle and carry his suitcase, mattress and other belongings, to the school himself, then return the bike to its owner in Fort Portal before walking the 7 miles back to Nyakasura.

On the first day he needed his older brother Shadrach to accompany him. His brother owned an orange Vespa, he had bought with the money he made from trading coffee when the market was bullish. He rode with Apollo sat at the back suitcase in tow and they headed to the idyll in the shadow of the Rwenzori mountains featured in Ptolemy’s antiquated map of the world in the halcyon era of the Roman Empire, in which the Greek savant theorized that South of those mountains lay the source of the great river, a theory later proved true by John Hanning Speke. So it is in the shadow of these hallowed landmarks that Shadrach and Apollo made their way through kempt banana plantations and staff cottages with white washed walls and chimneys, for it got cold in the mountains. Apollo was apprehensive, but he was happy to be going to boarding school, it meant he was not a child anymore, he would be away from the overbearing care of his mother and to lesser extent that of his father. Nyakasura represented something of a promised land, a reward for his obedience and docility, long hand for being a good boy. He knew he was entering a realm of opportunity but he had also heard of the giants, the older boys who bullied anyone who could not stand up for himself. Apollo found this speculation disquieting.

What struck him most after he bid Shadrach farewell at the main gate and was led inside and past the carpentry workshop by a prefect, was the khaki kilt his guide wore; a legacy of the Commander, Lieutenant Commander Ernest Caldwell that is, a retired Scottish naval officer who founded the school in 1926.To Apollo the kilt looked like a lady’s skirt and he found it baffling why the older boy would wear it with straight face? By the time he was asked by the prefect to wait outside while he entered what looked like the staff room, Apollo had reasoned that this was the exception rather than the rule but as he contemplated this, he was accosted by a gang of three goons disguised in those wretched khaki kilts who proved that the kilt was no exception but a rule, a rule that apparently also required him to give up his belongings to the fell three for nothing in return except to avoid of grievous bodily harm.

The good thing was that I kept my pocket money on me and it was not taken. It was a formative experience and for the rest of my school days I vowed that no one else would be bullied. I organized a band of likeminded vigilantes who intervened whenever a junior was bullied by the older boys usually in Senior Three or Senior Five. We used to cane them until they stopped, bullying.Apollo would later recall and he is fond of saying that the bullying incident was the making of him. He grew up to become more responsible and less like a child. But perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule where Apollo has clarity, for others the exact moment of coming of age is murky like the debate about the source of the Nile. It is accepted widely that it is Lake Victoria the largest fresh water lake in Africa yet others claim that it is in fact one of its tributaries, River Kagera in Rwanda, a river that deposits 80% of its water and infamously the corpses of the victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide into Lake Victoria.

Whatever ambiguity or uncertainty exists within the individual over when a boy becomes a man, is not shared by society which has devised rituals, bullying aside, to clarify this. Presumably to get more people to act their age. Rites of passage like circumcision are familiar to boys on the cusp of adulthood from Mbale in Uganda to South Africa’s Eastern Cape. It has to be said such eye watering rituals are tame all things considered.

Ohm, a Masaai Moran or hunter, who is proud of his heritage so much so that if you met him that would be the first impression you got of him, followed by the tale of how he and his brethren, a band of teenage boys hunted a lion.

"Ever walk the Maara