As old seasons died, new seasons were born but the boy refused to fizzle out of his mind the agony he had undergone during initiation. The clanging of bells, the smears of bull dung, Mauka’s deadly slaps and the thread by thread removal of the bandage festered on his heart. His mind burrowed in the blazing furnace of experience, the capital he had invested in the transition enterprise.

        With time, Kisiang’ani compared it with the outcome. Society had taken him for a ride. He had gone at loss and could not see the future of the rite. Kisiang’ani who had counted on circumcision to appease Mauka to relinquish a coin towards his education felt cheated. His father’s nonchalance surprised him. His extravagance nauseated him. Kisiang’ani spurned Mauka’s decision to sacrifice a rotund bull for his circumcision and naught for his education.

           Moreover, Mauka’s insistence on former rules made the boy see the rite as a triumphant excellence of failure. His heart blazed with a strong internal agitation. His father was ‘that right man’ and them ‘those always wrong culprits’. He was ‘that always decorous father’ and them ‘those foolish ingrates.’ How obnoxious! He was the devil of their home and a haunting spirit of their existence.

        Kisiang’ani saw him as the worst of men who seemed not to care a jot about anything. His was a crooked path to loss. The boy summarized his father as a man of no affections, a man with no purpose ( save for dissipation) and a man of no ability.

      He remained a darling of former rules and dressed a sour visage. The air in the home was so very miserable. It was defiant and despairing.  His hopes plunged down the cliff. Kisiang’ani erected in his heart high mountains of hate against Mauka, his kinsmen and everything around him.  

  For his plight, he held Kimila-  the customs of his people- culprit. Here was a culture in which brutes were crowned heroes, a culture in which vices were virtues and virtues vices; such a culture was worthless. Their home remained that poor and miserable slum. It was always below the pass mark of human habitation; today a replica of yesterday and tomorrow. Kisiang’ani went back to weeding erobo in Chebyuk to pay his fees.

        By June 1958, he realized that their farm was still fallow. Their neighbours had ploughed their farms as early as February and grown maize, beans and potatoes. Their crops blossomed as the Mauka’s gawked ugly with weeds.

      Mauka had made a step farther in his gross extravagance. He had acquired a new wife, Machuma. Consequently, he was seldom at home.

     His absence had detrimental effects on the economy of home. It barred any attempt to farm as his blessing was missing. Butilu or Kisiang’ani could not release his oxen on the farm. It is this stringent rule that made the young man doubt the purposes of initiation.

       Mauka made yet another mistake that embittered the young man. He had sold half of the farm to a Muyobo and migrated with his new wife to Kitali. A widow with six children, Machuma was a quick witted female. She was out for her main chance and before Butilu realized, Mauka was gone. With tremendous charm, she convinced Mauka to sell the land and move to the white settlements in Kitali, a region acclaimed as a sea of riches due to the presence the white man there. Many sons of Mwambu stayed on the settlement to offer permanent labour.

      Mauka had abandoned squatter life twenty years before and trekked all the way to Mount Masaba to grab a piece of land. But with Machuma’s romantic influence, he had reverted to Kitali as a petty land owner.   

      With the entry of polygamy in the home, there was a shift from worse to worse than useless. The home became a boiling pot of combats. Mauka’s hate for Butilu and her children rose to the summit and he was so incommodious whenever he reappeared from hibernation.  

       It was a life so terrible. There they were; children who were accustomed to obey under coercion, children who were bound by custom to watch their father assault their mother for asking him to give an account of the monies got from the sold pieces of land. Here was a son who was to applaud with automaton obedience a father who never cared what went down his gullets. Kisiang’ani’s endurance was running out fast.

       He could not understand whether customs were a moral license to marginalize some people. Perhaps they were guillotines set by men to kill women and children. Why would Mauka deny him the rights that custom stipulated? Why wouldn’t he be permitted to release oxen now that he was a man?

     If Buchacha had visited their bushy home then Mauka would have been in for it. Obviously, he would not have tolerated his father’s weakness. These were days of dissipation and Kisiang’ani had never seen his father sober. It made him doubt his great ancestry. The revelling made everything in the home squalid and their repute a squalid tale of poverty and misery. In all Cheleba, their home was besmirched as a place where sojourners neglected the hoe and suffered as casualties of hunger. Consequently, it was a place with children of ancient faces, subdued voices and pleading tones. Whenever a hen went missing, fingers were pointed at their home where a hen was a grain of fear at the Buchacha’s.