Thursday 6 October 2011

Bee-wildered

I breathed a sigh of relief as I walked out the door of the Patels’ home. Mrs. Patel was a lovely old woman, bless her, but she always insisted on feeding me Indian sweets or some sort of deep-fried vegetarian snacks. She would take my polite refusal to these offerings as demureness on my part, and would proceed to bring out little plates of the food to me anyway. On this particular day, I had a legitimate excuse not to stay as I had to pick my disabled father up from the community centre, which was a thirty-minute drive from the Patel’s residence, and take him home. I also had to get home early enough to prepare for a work trip early the following morning.
The Patels lived in a beautiful bungalow in one of Nairobi’s prime residential locations. They had these lovely trees that grew around the house. As I walked across the driveway, I admired the mango tree whose low branches almost touched the roof of my car. I resisted the temptation to tug at one of the fruits that dangled just above my head, and got into my car. It was dusk and I would have just enough time to get to the community centre to help my father make his way out of the hall.
In just over a half hour, I drove into the community centre compound and into the building’s parking lot. The harsh, white lights from the ceiling of the parking area were a stark contrast to the dimly lit streets outside. I pulled into a parking spot and stepped out of the car. As I swung the door shut, I noticed a winged insect perched on the roof of my old grey saloon car. Closer inspection confirmed that the insect was a bee. Now, ordinarily, I would not have given it much attention but this bee seemed to behave in a most curious fashion. At first, I thought it might be dead, but then I realized that it wasn’t on its back as I figured most dead insects would be. Instead, it was moving ever so slightly over the faded grey paint, its wings flapping just enough to produce a low hum. ‘Poor little guy’, I thought to myself. ‘He doesn’t look like he’s doing so well.’ I looked up, trying to figure out where the bee might have fallen from. I couldn’t see anything except for those bright lights shining down from the high ceiling.
There were people starting to filter into the parking lot from the hall where they had gathered. I began to make my way towards them, looking out for my father. I spotted him slowly moving through the crowd and I walked over to him. He stopped briefly to smile at me and say hello before he went back to concentrating on his gait. I watched patiently as he placed his walking frame forward and then slowly dragged his feet forward, one after the other, before he repeated the seemingly tedious task. In a few minutes, we had reached my car and I opened the passenger door to help my father into the vehicle. The bee was still on the roof of the car and hadn’t seemed to have moved much but there was no chance it would be able to hold on in that state once I started driving. I got into the driver’s seat and drove out of the parking lot.
Less than fifteen minutes later, I drove into the compound of town houses where we lived. I maneuvered my trusty Toyota into the parallel parking with ease, careful to leave an equidistant amount of space in front of the Land Cruiser behind me and behind the Mitsubishi in front of me. I got out of the driver’s seat and rushed over to help my father out of the passenger seat. As I pulled him up, I heard a distinct buzzing sound. I looked over dubiously at the roof of the car where the ‘dying’ bee had been. Sure enough, there it was, wings flapping and all. Only this time, it had company! There were two other bees not more than a few centimeters from each other that seemed to be in a similar predicament as the first bee. ‘How bizarre,’ I thought to myself as wished my father would move a little quicker away from the strangely behaving insects. I couldn’t understand how it was possible that after having driven home, there were now three dying bees on my car. At this point, I realized that my father was struggling to make his way down the paved path that led to our front door, so my focus switched to helping him into the house, and I put the ‘bee incident’ out of my mind.
As soon as we were in the house and I had gotten my father settled into his favourite armchair, I got down to work, preparing my notes for my work trip the following day. In two and a half hours, everything was in order and I had even packed my bags. I was about to settle down for the night when I realized that I had forgotten to pack a folder of documents which I had left in my car. I made my way downstairs, passing my mother who was reading in the living room, and opened the front door.
It was a lovely night. The almost-full moon shone brightly and seemed to light up the outside better than the dome-shaped lamps that dotted the periphery of the compound. As I walked down the paved path towards my car, I noticed that even the dull grey paint of my beat-up old Toyota shimmered in the moonlight. In fact, it glistened so much that it almost appeared to be vibrating. Really, it seemed like the entire car was quivering into the night. And then I heard it. It was the buzzing that I had heard earlier that evening. Only it was a few decibels higher. I stopped short in my tracks, a few feet from my car and my blood turned cold as I gazed incredulously at the sight before my eyes.
What seemed like hundreds of slowly dying bees covered the entire length of my saloon car in a thick layer, pouring slowly over the sides and onto the ground almost like a dark, viscous liquid. All around the car, there was a thick border on the tarmac that was made up of the insects. Not a single bee could be seen on either of the two cars that sandwiched mine. Yet my car was so fully covered by the insects, it was difficult to tell what colour it was, save for the sides off which the bees dropped to the ground. I stood rooted to the ground, staring in disbelief at this phenomenon for a few minutes before I whirled around and ran, shrieking, back into the house.