I was worried as a child because all my friends had fathers except me. I used to bother my mom about my father. Whenever she bought something with her meagre salary, I would ask her if my father had asked her to give it to me. From the stories I heard from my friends, it was always fathers who were doing the buying. My mom used to get very angry with me. At one point, she warned me never to mention my father again, but I wouldn’t stop.

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So when I was about thirteen or fifteen, my mom took me to the front of a big house and told me, “Go inside there. They will recognize who you are and show you who your father is.”

I happily ran into the house with a smile all over my face. I knocked on the first door I came to and shouted, “Is my father here?”

A dark, lanky-looking man came out. He looked deep into my eyes and asked, “Where’s your mother?”

I pointed outside the door and said, “She’s standing by the roadside.”

He held me by the shoulder and walked outside with me, holding up the waist of his trousers to keep them from falling down. My mom was standing by the roadside like a statue. I pointed to her, and he told me, “Go to your mother. I will come and see you later.”

I asked, “Are you my dad?”

He repeated, “Run along and go.”

I looked back as I walked toward my mom. He was no longer standing there. When I got to my mom, she said, “Look back at where you came from. Who do you see?”

I answered, “No one.”

Then she replied, “That’s who you have as a father. You have no one.”

I cried on our way home. I asked why my dad had walked me out, and my mom told me it was because he didn’t like me and was ashamed to call me his son.

I asked, “But what is wrong with me?”

She answered, “There’s nothing wrong with you, but there’s a lot wrong with that man. Just cheer up. You have me.”

From that day, I stopped asking about my dad. I remember feeling angry anytime I thought of him. The image of him holding up the waist of his trousers never left me. His tiny beard and lanky body became imprinted on my mind. Even later, as a young adult, I often remembered the moment I turned back and he wasn’t there.

My mom did her best. She went through fire and rain for us. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for me and the siblings I came to have later in life, who also ended up growing up without fathers. She sold everything and sacrificed everything she had to take care of us.

All three of us went to the university. She was present at all our graduations. Even when she smiled, it didn’t light up her face. She had seen so much darkness that she had become one with it.

Just when she was about to reap what she had sown, life did what it does best. I was in Switzerland on a mission when she died. I cried like I had never cried before. I locked myself in my room for three days. I had planned to travel with her one day just so she could experience what it felt like to fly on an airplane, but she left us before that could happen.

A couple of years after her death, I was in my hometown renovating the family house when this man walked up to me. He mentioned his name and asked if I remembered him.

I said no.

He said, “When you were a child, do you remember the man your mom brought you to see?”

Suddenly, the image of that man holding up the waist of his trousers started flashing through my mind.

He said, “I’m that man. Your dad.”

I looked away. When I looked back at him, I asked what he wanted.

He said he had heard I was in town, so he decided to come and look for me.

“For what?” I asked.

“I know you are angry with me and all, but I can explain,” he answered.

He told me the story of how I was born and how he later got another woman pregnant, after which my mom walked out of the house with me, ending their marriage. He said my mom later placed a curse on him that the day he called me his son would be the day only bad things and misfortunes would happen to him. So when he saw me that day, he believed it was a trap. He thought my mom had brought me to him so he would call me his son and the curse would destroy his life.

I burst out laughing.

“Oh, so you believed the curses then? You no longer believe in them? You don’t think they will affect you now that you’re here?”

He answered, “If I die today, I don’t mind. I’m old and ready for death. But dying without making amends with you will make my spirit suffer.”

I told him he had nothing to worry about because I was fine and had moved on long ago. I gave him my number when he asked for it, thinking I would never answer his calls, but he calls, and I answer.

His voice sounds like that of a father crying for help in the wilderness. Something is broken inside him, and it seems he is looking to me to fix it. He doesn’t call to ask for money or material things. He calls because he wants me to visit him and call him my father.

It was only recently that I found out the child he had with the other woman died, and he was never able to have another child, even though he tried with different women.

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He tells me, “I believe it’s because of your mother’s curses. Everything she told me came to pass, one after another. That’s why I was scared that day.”

He calls, and we talk, but going to see him feels like I would be disobeying my mom. What if I do and my mom’s curses come back on me? She was deeply passionate about her hatred for my dad. I don’t hate him nearly as much, but the questions I keep asking myself are: What if I extend the olive branch? Will my mom turn in her grave with regret? Will the curses work on both of us? Or are the curses no longer active?

That’s my only fear. The only reason I can’t respond fully to my father’s call.

—Fred 

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