In the morning we walked him to the freeway where trucks passed. He only had a magazine with him that he got from a tourist shop that had beautiful pictures of the city. He would show his tribe and his family how beautiful it is in the city and how wonderful the buildings are.

He knew this would not make up for running away. He had spent two years in the city and surely a lot had happened while he was gone. He just did not know what that was. Maybe things had changed, the people, his brother Lindo.

After being turned down by the truckers, Nindo saw a van slow down in front us. The van, filled with vegetables, was going out of the city and told Nindo to hop on. As he left, we could see in his eyes that he did not want to do this alone and asked me to come with him. He said I would be able to get food, water and all the other necessary things that a kid needed. I just would have to keep quiet. The silence would cater for me, he said.

“Whenever you are hungry or sad, you don’t have to say it because they know. They know everything Sunny, they see everything. You don’t have to worry,”

I agreed and we went to Boredo together.

The Boredom people were waiting for him, well for us. Nindo said he would know the bushes when he saw them since he spent his whole life exploring them. Indeed, he knew them and knocked on the window for the driver to stop. He looked like an old farmer, only in the city to drop off stock to these companies that sold “fresh vegetables” at extremely high prices.

When we got off he gave us some apples and drove off into the sun. We now would face the unknown. What would the people have in store for us?

When we arrived, I saw the people quietly sitting under the shade of trees that had probably been there for hundreds of years. When they saw Nindo they opened their eyes to a look with sincere surprise. Maybe they were not expecting to see Nindo ever again. However, they said nothing. They only looked at him as he walked past to his mother’s hut. Their eyes showed a look of judgement, happiness, shame, sympathy and confusion. So many emotions conveyed in a person’s face.

The hut was empty, no mother and no Lindo.

We looked around, since we could not ask the people. The people of Boredom were all around so you need not ask. The person was always somewhere around. As we searched Nindo saw his brother and called him but he could not hear. Sitting awkwardly by himself, we went to him and he could not believe his eyes. It was his beloved brother Nindo. He sobbed when he saw him, got down to his knees and quietly started crying.

“Lindo where is Mama? Where is Mama? I cannot find her anywhere. Where is she?” Nindo asked.

Lindo kept crying and Nindo suddenly he remembered that his mother was sick, though she chose to not raise any concern about it. Nindo’s mother had died a year ago, he soon found out. She was sick and left Lindo to become a man by himself in the tribe.

Nindo had no words, he could not say anything. He only started crying while gripping on to that magazine he took to the city.

***

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