Sohorr the Invisible Rat - Part One
By Baba Galleh Jallow
Sohorr the rat was an infamous rodent among the animals of our little town. He was known to be a very frivolous dude whose defining characteristic was envy and a particularly malignant streak of hostility that he frequently unleashed on innocent and unwary folks. Thankfully, Sohorr the rat had been cursed with invisibility; so that while his angry shrieks and vitriolic tirades are always heard by our common townsfolk, their source always remained a mystery as the puny little rat could never make himself seen, however much he tried.
Sohorr the invisible rat had not always been invisible. In an earlier life, he was pretty visible to the naked eye and was one of the semi-prominent animals of our little town. In that life, Sohorr had a mule on which he loved to ride. He also had quite a bit of disposable property that he habitually carried around on his back and loudly boasted about to whoever cared to ask, listen, or argue a point with him. “Do you know how much disposable property I own?” he used to snarl at less fortunate animals. “Haa? Do you know that I can buy you and your entire family triple times over?” And so whenever his clever rivals wanted Sohorr to make a fool of himself yet again, they would pick an argument with him and obliquely make reference to pretense at ownership of non-existent disposable property. Whereby an angry Sohorr would launch into a shrill tirade about whether they knew how much disposable property he had and did they even know that he could buy them all with their families! 
Bragging about his disposable property aside, Sohorr the rat was also notorious for his meanness, which was more clearly manifested in the joy he took in physically bullying lesser animals and dependents, as well as in his characteristic hatred of poor animals trying to pick a crumb from under his fat table. Sohorr habitually threatened his dependents with expulsion and would menacingly slash his paw in the air with a loud verbal threat of “If I slap you will die! Do you know who I am? Get out of my sight! In fact, don’t let me see you here ever again!” He had no compunction whatsoever in humiliating lesser animals in public and actually took pride in inflicting such humiliation. For after each incident of humiliating a poor lesser animal, Sohorr’s dry face would beam with contentment and his whiskers would stand erect like several small needles on his snout as he boasted “Hai! Kii dafma pareeh yab man! Alafitang yab laleh! I can even buy his family! You know how much disposable property I got? Hai! In fact, he’s not gonna come here again!” And then he would launch into one of his long mean squeals of laughter and go get a good drink repeating all the time, “Hai! Amang long fang! Hamut ma sakh! Kii mun naa koo jenda boy!”
Sohorr’s meanness in that other life was no news to his own family. The story was told of how when one day Sohorr heard that his ailing hungry mother was in our little town looking for him, Sohorr disappeared into his special secret hole, having told all the lesser animals to say that they did not know where he was. His ailing mother was convinced that once Sohorr learnt that she was in town, he would run to her in all haste. And so she patiently waited by Sohorr’s normal hole, whose entrance was under tight lock and key. After several days of waiting, the starving mother went sadly back to her own village, still worrying that her darling son might have been in some form of danger. When Sohorr’s spies reported to him that the old woman had left, Sohorr triumphantly emerged from his secret hole and loudly boasted of his genius. “Hai!” he exclaimed. “These old women are such a pain man! I have my own problems to take care of! I don’t wanna see any old hag! Let her go home! Why should she disturb me when I send her something all the time?”
Since Sohorr the rat was so mean to his own mother, it was no surprise that he was also mean to all other animals. Neighbors, relatives, and his own same-parent siblings were subjected to his meanness of spirit. Starving beggars who appeared at his door were treated particularly harshly. He would angrily jump up and claw them in the face and ask them to get out of his sight and go get some work. When other needy animals came looking for him, Sohorr would ask the lesser animals to say he was not around and swiftly dash into his hole. When his own siblings came looking for him, even just to say hi, Sohorr would dash into his hole thinking that they had come to beg him for some grain. He would later emerge with a wide grin on his snout and complain of lazy parasites that wanted to live off of other animals. “They should go get some work,” he would angrily snarl. “I have no time for them. Why do they always come to me, haa? Do they think I have no head?”
It was because of such extraordinary meanness that Sohorr the rat was cursed with invisibility in his new life. And the fact that he was invisible made him very very angry. So angry that he assumed multiple identities which he expressed by using different tones of voice on the streets of our little town and other meeting places. When he squealed about something with one voice, he would wait a few moments and squeal his support of those same things with another voice, so that other animals would say that the first voice was right. But his invisibility was not the only thing that made Sohorr the rat so angry. The fact that he was a rat and not a cat, a dog, a sheep, a lion, a horse, or some other larger animal also made him very very angry. Since he thought he was such a clever rat, Sohorr the invisible rat devised various ways of dealing with the many aspects of his anger.   
 
                                          

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