Time passed, and Robert and Stella got married. They had a child, and they named him lazy. This only made his father more furious, and he completely disowned Robert and his family.
As the years went by, Robert's father started to regret his decision. He began to miss his son and grandson, but he was too proud to admit it. One day, he decided to visit them secretly. He was shocked to see that they were doing much better than he was. They were happy, and they had everything they needed.
It was then that he realized that it was not Robert who was too old to be single. It was him.
The Tailor of Obalanga Village
Old Mzee Ocen had measured half the town for their wedding
suits, and yet no one had ever seen him measure a smile.
He worked from a narrow shop in Obalanga Centre, its shelves
stacked with bolts of cloth in colors that seemed to argue with each other — a
shouting orange beside a sleeping grey, a green so bright it looked freshly cut
from a leaf. Customers came for his stitching, which was famous, but they
stayed for his silence, which was famouser still. Mzee Ocen spoke only when
spoken to, and even then, sparingly.
The young men of the town had a theory about this. They said
the tailor had once been in love with a woman who left for Soroti city and
never came back, and that he had sewn his heartbreak into the seams of every
jacket since — which was why, they joked, his suits fit so well: grief makes a
man precise.
Mzee Ocen never confirmed or denied this. He simply threaded
his needle and let the village believe what it wanted.
Then, one dry-season afternoon, a girl no older than ten
wandered into his shop, trailing her mother's wrapper and clutching a torn
schoolbag. The strap had split clean through, spilling exercise books onto the
tailor's swept floor.
"Can you fix bags too?" she asked, before her
mother could apologise for her.
Mzee Ocen studied the bag the way he studied cloth — turning
it over, testing the remaining strength of the fabric, measuring with his eyes
before his hands ever moved. Then he sat the girl on his cutting stool and went
to work, humming under his breath for the first time in as far longer as anyone
in that shop could remember.
Word of it spread, as such things do in small villages. By
the following week, three more children had "accidentally" torn their
bags, and Mzee Ocen had somehow stopped noticing the extra work it made for
him. He fixed them all, humming the same tuneless tune, never once raising his
prices, never once explaining himself.
The young men revised their theory. Perhaps, they decided,
the tailor's heart hadn't been sewn shut after all — perhaps it had simply been
waiting for something small enough to need mending.
Mzee Ocen, for his part, said nothing. He only reached for
his needle, and smiled the way a man smiles when no one thinks to ask him to.
