Luka
Luka.
Luka.
There is a small tin of pills on my desk. It is always there. I have another in the car. Another at home, in my bedroom. I usually get held in a trance, staring at the tin.
For over thirty years, every time I look at it, I pick it up, hold it, and one name comes to mind—Luka.
It is strange how some things linger forever, despite all the extraordinary moments life carries us through. Like the sound of his mother crying on a mat. Like the empty look in his father’s eyes. The weight of a name that refuses to fade.
Every time I look at that tin on my desk, I take it, roll it between my fingers. I don’t think about what the pills do, what they are keeping at bay. I just think of him, Luka. Of the first time I ever saw such a tin. The first time Luka coughed and laughed it off. Said he was okay. But he kept coughing. And coughing. And coughing.
And just like that, I am back in the 1970s. To our childhood. To our youth.
Luka and I were almost born at the same time. I don’t remember who came first. We grew up together. Formed a bond—a friendship that went beyond the kinship of cousinhood we shared.
We spent our childhood herding cows across valleys, plains and hilltops. I still remember the bare feet cracking underneath, the dust clinging to them, sticks in hand. Boys, loud and fearless, whistling along with the cow moos and marching hooves.
Luka was always the dreamer. His eyes danced in their sockets, wet with passion. He would speak of strange things, big things too wide for my ears to grasp. He wanted to be an engineer, to build things, to make something of himself. To travel the world and bring back stories.
But to become an engineer? No one in our village had ever done that. He would have to go to university. It needed money, and there was none. His parents made sure he was aware of that.
There was no way he was going to become an engineer.
The only prestigious path that remained open was one carved by faith. His parents, deeply religious, dreamed of seeing their son in the service of God. If he could not build bridges, at least he would spend his life building souls.
Instead of engineering machines, he would engineer devotion. He understood. He looked forward to it eagerly.
And so, in the mid-1970s, Luka finished elementary school and was sent straight to seminary.
Luka shifted focus to another dream. He embraced the seminary like a man stepping into destiny. He wore his new calling neatly, walked with purpose, and devoured scripture with the same hunger he once had for books about machines, about physics and great cities.
His parents were happy. He was happy. The village was glad, on the verge of producing a fine man.
A few years later, he was out of seminary. He took his vows. Luka was no longer Luka. We called him Brother Luka—set apart, bound to a life of celibacy and service in the Catholic faith.
The day he took his vows, his family threw a big party. The whole village turned up, joining in the felicitations. We celebrated. We danced. We cheered. Our boy had made it.
Luka, given his vows, soon after the jubilation had worn off, moved into the Brothers’ residence. It was a quiet, secluded establishment like all Brothers’ residences—its occupants sworn to a life of celibacy. And like all Brothers’ residences, the world outside grew distant and far off.
Next to their establishment was the nuns’ convent, just across the road.
I would visit Luka from time to time. He was my boy, the truest friend I ever had. When I visited, besides avocados and mangoes, I would bring him news from home—news of the village. Then we would spend our late evenings drinking and laughing over old childhood memories.
This happened frequently. Whenever I had time, I would drop by to catch up—when he was not busy, when I was not busy.
Sometimes, on my visits, I would bump into nuns from across the road. Sometimes young and beautiful coming in or out of his room, bringing food or clean clothing. They would occasionally stop, laugh, joke around. Nothing seemed out of place.
Years passed like that. Like that—fast and sure. The visits, the laughter, the quiet understanding. Until one day. A day I still question.
One afternoon, I visited and found Luka in bed. He was coughing horribly. He waved me off when I suggested that he visit the hospital. He said he was sure it was nothing—just another cough. That it had lingered a little longer than expected but would pass. I believed him. I knew coughs linger sometimes.
The next time we met was during church mass. Luka was still coughing. The cough was not abating.
When I asked, he quickly told me he had paid a visit to the doctor near their residence. The good doctor had assured him it was just a cough—nothing to worry about. He had walked away with medicine. I was sure, he was sure, soon he would be fine.
But Luka didn’t. No. The cough clung to him. It refused to let go.
Weeks passed. His voice changed. It turned dry, hoarse, subdued. It was hard to believe it was Luka speaking. It no longer sounded like him.
Then I noticed how his clothes fit. They began to hang loosely on his frame. He was quickly getting lost in their fabric.
He started skipping meals, saying he had no appetite. He didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand.
When I visited, we no longer talked about childhood, or about the news from the village. We just sat outside, in the shade of his room, staring and quiet. When we talked, it was about his condition. Then we would go silent again.
When Luka walked, it was no longer the fast-paced step I knew. He grew slower. Kept growing slower. As if his body was suddenly heavier. As if gravity had grown stronger just for him.
One day, I received news from his parents—Luka had returned home. It was now the mid-1980s. The cough had worsened. But it wasn’t just the cough. Fever gripped him constantly. He could barely leave the bed. He hardly ate. He was losing weight—fast. As if something invisible was feasting on him.
At first, it was subtle. He lost the roundness in his face. His jaw hung visibly. His collarbones became sharper, more defined.
Then his hands turned bonier. His cheeks hollowed. His skin clung to his bones. His eyes sank deeper into their sockets.
It was unbelievable. Luka barely looked like himself. He rarely left the house.
A few weeks after returning home, doctors identified tuberculosis. His cough had not just been a cough. It was tuberculosis.
However, despite the medication, the cough didn’t stop. The fever never broke. The tuberculosis worsened. Then came the diarrhea. The constant headaches. The vomiting.
The doctors didn’t understand what was happening to him. Medicine couldn’t help—couldn’t even name what was happening inside Luka’s body. Clearly, it was more than tuberculosis. More than diarrhea. More than the fever and constant headaches he suffered.
And so, from the hospital, we brought him back home. The hospital and doctors could do nothing.
While his dad sat in their compound smoking his pipe and staring into the void, his mum spent the days wailing, carrying her hands on her head. She was sure Luka had been bewitched by the family’s enemies who envied their son’s success.
She would lie prostrate, wail, cry, and murmur. She swore they could have her instead of her only son, Luka. She swore and cursed the skies. Not her son. Not her Luka. The skies could do anything with her—she was old and done for. But her son? What of her son? What had he seen yet? What had he achieved yet? What of the world that still lay ahead of him?
At first, people would rush in to comfort her while she wailed, to sit down with Luka’s father while he smoked his pipe and stared into the void. Soon, it was useless. Luka only got worse, grew thinner and weaker. People began to understand the mother’s pain, the father’s vacant stare—their frustration.
Luka lost all muscle. All you saw when you visited was skin, stretched thin over his sharp bones. Just bones. You could not tell whether he was in the bed—until you heard him wince.
His skin, once run over with a white rash, became spotted with boils. As some healed, others appeared and bled constantly. He could not sit. But lying down, every inch of his body hurt. His state was constant crying, constant wincing.
But it was mostly the constant passing of stool that did it. A portrayal of such a smelly misery that no one could stand. His body was beaten and done. It reached a point where it could no longer hold anything. He lay constantly in his own stool—it would ooze out uncontrollably.
His mother never left that room. Between wailing and crying, she cleaned him up, changed sheets, bathed him, fed him. She was soon so busy that she no longer cried. Her tears faded into a void, quiet stare. A void, quiet stare that remained—even when she talked or managed a faint laugh.
One day, to help, his dad had entered that room for the last time. He had come along with a plastic lining. Gently, he had carried Luka off the bed and placed it between the sheets. It would prevent the mattress from being drenched in stool and make cleaning easier. Then he had walked out quietly, smoking his pipe. Never to enter that room again.
When he wanted to see Luka, he would only peek through the window—then walk away quietly.
Then the stories—the rumors—began. Other sons and daughters of the village were returning. To their homes. To their parents. One by one, almost every month, they came back from the city with the same symptoms as Luka. Coughing. Feverish. Passing stool. Vomiting. Pain in the head. One by one, they fell into their beds.
Juma—the richest man in the village. The only one who had been able to send his son to study engineering—he came back a skeleton, coughing blood, too weak to stand. The Kagendas had sent their daughter to become a nurse. She returned with sunken cheeks and lifeless eyes. Nsiime’s only son had left for the teacher’s college. When he came back, he barely made it off the cart before collapsing.
No one knew what was happening. Fear spread. Almost everyone was sure it was either witchcraft—or had to do with divine punishment. Families whose children had ventured off into the city in search of a better life only prayed: not their son, not their daughter.
It quickly became a familiar sound—mothers wailing. A familiar sight—fathers digging graves, carrying coffins. In the village, we were almost sure each morning would begin with weeping, as another daughter, another son succumbed.
Having suffered and winced in pain, one morning Luka went quiet. He passed on.
What we buried was not Luka. It was a sack of skin covered in rashes, carrying his visible bones. His eyes had sunk so deep into his head, it was hard to tell if they had ever truly been there at all.
And like that, they kept following. More graves. More wails. More quietness in families.
Soon, it was not just our village—our neighboring village, our district. We heard stories from across the country. The same thing. The same fate was befalling other families. It was baffling.
It was in the late 1980s that doctors finally gave it a name—HIV/AIDS.
By this time, apart from the wails that rose from time to time, our village met you with a ghostly quietness when you arrived.
Walking through the village, along that dusty road, you would see graves marked with crooked, wooden crosses from compound to compound. Mothers sitting, staring at the graves, holding their daughters and sons. Men, afraid to talk loudly, whispered as they surrounded their pots of booze, barely holding the straws they sipped from.
Cows mooed less, goats barely moved or jumped, plantations became overgrown with weeds.
HIV/AIDS!
And then I remembered the nuns who had come in and out of Luka’s room.
I was unsettled. But it no longer mattered.
I still remember those wild cries of mourning mothers, the void in Luka’s father’s eyes, the sound of grief echoing through our village—they never leave me.
And never will.
Whenever I pick up that tin of pills—from my desk, from my car dashboard, from my bedroom drawer—it all comes alive. Luka coughing. Luka suffering. Luka dying. His mum wailing. His dad afraid to look at him. Our village absorbed in grief.
HIV/AIDS!
Some names refuse to fade. Some stories never leave you.
And some memories will always live inside you—no matter how much time passes.
EzroniX Short Stories.
