SAD SOULS

By Baba Galleh Jallow

Sometimes, he felt the tears welling up his chest and gathering at the inner corner of his eyes. He felt the weight of sadness and the urge to just let the tears flow. No, it was not out of resentment that he felt this way. It was not out of some serious injury or offense done to him or his. Nor was it because he never seemed to catch up with the financial times, living as it were, from hand to mouth. It was, instead, because he felt so sorry for all those sad souls out there, who, lacking nothing, yet lack everything and are wilfully blind to everything that is so clean and beautiful in human life. It was those sad souls who spend their entire miserable lives raging and fuming at nothing in particular and everything in general. For is it not so sad that some people spend the only precious life they have being angry at their innocent brethren, making enemies of people who have done only good to them, vainly trying to stop the sun from rising or the moon from shining, or indeed the very wind from blowing. And, boy do they succeed so well! And do they make such stupid fools of themselves?

Sometimes he got so mad at the stupidity of humanity. At the insane stupidity and silliness of puny little creatures who think that, for reasons known only to themselves, they are better than their fellow human creatures. Walking around town, he often feels like spitting in the faces of idiots who regard their fellow human beings as they were some piece of shit. They haughtily look at their fellow beings with their eyes dimmed, as if they were looking at some gory detail, their noses turned up, as if they were forced to sniff some putrid rot, and their entire bearing smacking of an arrogance entirely unfit for human nature. Sometimes, he would regard these sad souls in the same ugly way, and if the need arises, tell them to go eat some shit. Sometimes he would simply smile and feel so sorry for those sad souls. For sad souls are those perpetually obsessed with a false feeling of superiority, behaving as if they stood upon some elevated pedestal, while whomsoever they face wallows in the stinking gutters of some alien life. Looking at these deluded creatures, his angry mind’s eye often went beneath their pants, and there, surrounding a tiny black hole in their backsides, he would see the caked pieces of brown shit that serve as ample testimony that mankind can only be mankind. For most of those who behave so arrogantly in public think it hygienic always to wash their hands after using the restroom, but they never wash never what deserves washing most. And so they strut around with their caked pieces of shit all day long, even as they pretend to be holier than thou and more clean and elevated than the heavens up above, even more pious than the sacred River Ganges. A tear for those sad souls.

Hell no! He was not one to subscribe to the biblical virtue of turning the other cheek. A slap on one cheek is as good as a slap on another cheek. Contempt and hatred was as good as contempt and hatred. Which is why sometimes, he just felt like playing the payback game. He found it maddening that most often, it is those people you pick up from the gutter, wash clean, place on a pedestal, nurture and nourish, treat as your very own blood brother or sister, shower with loving kindness - it is those very same people who turn around, and for no reason whatsoever, make you their enemy number one. Feeling secure on the high pedestal on which you place them, they drop their pants and try to shit on your head. They go about the earth telling stinking lies about you, pretending that they are you, claiming to attend the colleges you attended, got the degrees or certificates you got, held the positions you held, and reduce you to their underlings all in the name of God knows what. They wish in their green hearts to physically write you off the face of the earth, make everyone believe that you never existed, that you were just some sick piece of their imagination. And as if such outrageous conduct is not sufficient, such people will have the audacity to go tell your wife or husband that you are in love with some old wealthy hag, or some rich sugar daddy. Such people whom you have lifted and benefitted will then go about the land telling everybody who cares to listen that you were a thief and a crook, that you go about swindling your former employers, stealing their money and running away because you could not pay because you were some poor little bastard.

Aye, they would say that and many a thing besides, forgetting meanwhile the many heinous crimes they themselves routinely commit against their brethren. Such as eating both their share and their poor brothers’ share by lying that their brothers were sick and bed-ridden and could not make contact with their benefactors, but that they said thank you. By diverting what belongs to the generality to satisfy their insatiable lust for gain and fill up their private bank accounts. By scheming and plotting with adversaries to get their brothers expelled from the land, or prevent the very offspring of their brothers from getting to some other land.

Such people surely deserved his anger and revenge. He could easily place them like an article in the public gallery and subject them to the most severe ridicule. He could portray them as fat mother hens good only at messing up the yard with a dozen stinking droppings, or some stupid long-legged cockerel good only at cackling after hens and crowing in the dawn. Or he could portray them as sickly pigs living on the fetid rot of smelly gutters, whose only use is forever grunting and twisting their puny little tails. And he could depict them in a hundred different ways, each ugly, each true to their slimy, wretched characters. But sometimes, he felt they really were not worth his anger. That they were instead to be pitied, because they were such miserable creatures who spent all their lives with the fire of green envy and jealousy burning their blind, devil-consumed hearts. Sad souls.