It is the story of a woman whose life and some of the disturbing decisions she made I didn't understand before she died.
I met her about nine years ago at the motor park.
We called her 'Convulsion.'
It was what everybody in the park called her.
She was a beggar - the kind who begged for no reason at all even though the passengers she met in the filled-up buses never knew.
She twisted her right arm and distorted the shape of her mouth a way that made it almost difficult for her to speak clearly every time she got to a bus to beg.
She said she had convulsion as a young adult and it damaged her - mentally and physically.
She told her story with so much pain in her voice that you'd become all teary if you had no hold of your emotions.
She never mentioned her children. Her story told of the rejections she had faced in life and how she was now left with nothing but to beg for alms to be able to feed.
You'd never believe her stories weren't real even if she turned around to tell you that they were.
But it was an inside-something.
Only people like us who sold in the motor park knew the truth but nobody would say.
The hustle!
It was the reason everyone was there and no one was going to spoil another's.
So, Convulsion went on with her thing for a long period of time, and soon, she began a popcorn business.
We learnt it was so big that the traders in the motor park wondered how a woman so healthy would earn so much more from deceiving people than the traders who actually worked so hard.
We learnt she was planning on some other businesses before she met a day she never knew she would.
No, it wasn't her death yet.
It was the day she went to the wrong bus to beg.
She had begun with her story and before she could finish, a lady called her from the backseat of the bus.
It was her daughter - Convulsion's daughter!
The bus passengers didn't believe it at first until the woman melted. She drowned in shame.
I wasn't at the spot of the incident at the time it was all happening but I learnt that there were no scenes.
The daughter left in embarrassment and that would be the last time the people at the motor park saw Convulsion.
Convulsion showed up many months later to continue on her deceitful way of earning but the people at the park wouldn't have it anymore.
The people at the Park starred at her like she was from a different planet where the habitats looked nothing less than disgustful.
People laughed at her, but she stayed.
Convulsion was still at the motor park after my Mother and I left and months later, we heard she was dead.
Although the cause of her death is unknown to me, her story still shocks me - her decisions.
I try to think in her favor sometimes, to say she may have had reasons to be the way she was.
That she might have been too unfortunate to be one of the mothers whose children neglected at her old age.
But no matter how I try to roll the dice, she was wrong.
