The man all by his lonesome

He came aboard our tour van from a different van. We were on a game drive in the Maasai Mara, the Acacia-pecked savanna landscape spread infinitely beyond us. God’s own land. He was in his 50s, white mop of hair sticking out the sides of his baseball cap. Spectacles. Tall. Very tall. Maybe Middle-eastern. Turkish. Or Yemeni.

He had expensive photography equipment, peering at the pride of lions and cheetahs through his lens, the camera whirring constantly. He even took pictures of a hyena. He looked miserable. His misery was beautiful. I was intrigued and drawn to it. Misery, pain and sorrow draw me like the tide to the moon.

Later, I saw him at dinner. It was a tented camp. Rustic, luxurious and resounding with safari sounds. He sat alone in the same clothes he had on during the game drive: an expensive dress shirt, brown pants, sneakers. He picked at his food with his gleaming silver fork, the only thing that seemed to gleam, because there were no lights on in his soul.

Someone had drawn the curtains tight. He ate his lovely lamb and mashed potatoes, polished off the plate. He ate with his iPhone in one hand, scrolling through whatever it was he was reading. All around him the dinner chatter circled him, the clinking cutlery offering an even sadder soundtrack to his misery. By the time the dessert came by, his chin was on his chest, his chest moving up and down in the sleep of loneliness.

I saw him again the next morning getting into another van, a plethora of cameras with long snouts dangling from his shoulders. He was chatting with the Maasai guards and guides. He was laughing. His laugh seemed odd, ill placed in the narrative he had created… or the narrative I had conjured up in my mind.

LET'S GUESS....

I wondered about him. Wondered what his story was. A lone man in a luxury lodge with his expensive cameras, going for game drives in his well-tailored dress shirts. Maybe he’d had a health scare – say, a small heart attack – and as he stood in the hospital’s bathroom, in those horrid gowns that leave half of your buttocks out in the cold, he had told himself, “You know, it’s never that serious. I have to start living now. Once I’m out of his gown I’m getting onto the next plane out to Africa.”

Maybe he had been diagnosed with some illness and he was terrified and he was down in the Mara to remind himself of life, to tick The Mara off his bucket list before he kicks that bucket. Maybe a month earlier his wife of 25 years had walked into their bedroom, clutching a towel across her breasts, hair wet from the shower, and said, “This is not working, Asian. I want a divorce. I want to be happy.”

Bewildered, he had slowly sunk onto the bed, followed by his breaking heart, and asked, “I thought you were happy?” and she had sighed and looked out the window and said, “I haven’t been happy for 10 years!” ‘Asian’ means ‘lion’ in Turkish. So he had booked a flight to the Mara to see the real lion.

Maybe he was on the run. A drug dealer. A human trafficker. A gun runner. Things had gone wrong in Amsterdam, his cover blown, the Interpol on his tail. He had quickly packed a bag, bought the first ticket out – which happened to be to Nairobi – and in the dead of the night he had called his woman, a luscious French girl half his age and whispered in the telephone, “Clara, I have to leave tonight, bébé, I can’t say more right now but I will call you in 45 hours,” and before she could fully wake up and say anything he had whispered hurriedly, “Je t’aime,” and hung up.

He is now laying low in the Mara, then Zanzibar, then at the shores of Lake Kivu in Rwanda where he will spend evenings staring at the beautifully strange steaming lake. Or maybe he just found out that his only child wasn’t his child after all and he came down to seek clarity and ‘reconciliation’. Maybe he is battling with his sexuality. Or he just discovered that he loves cross-dressing.

Or he could just be the kind of guy who goes on holiday alone. I don’t want to imagine this to be the case, that he is the kind of guy who wants to have “alone time” thousands of miles from home in a lovely tented camp. That he loves nothing more than to nap over his dessert. That he likes the idea of being out here alone, in the charmed wildness of the Maasai Mara, in the resolute silence of the plains.

I hoped that he finds whatever he is looking for in Africa or at The Mara. Or wherever his misery drags him next. I hope one day he will look at those pictures in his Canon, of the pride of lions walking against the orange setting sun and think, “That was worth every moment of my life.” Hell, I hope he meets someone in Africa, someone happier than him, someone who will not let him sleep over his dessert.