It was in the town of Zomba, where the mist rolled down from the mountain like a tired ghost seeking to rest, that stories again began circulating about Bwalijo. Everybody knew him, although nobody truly knew him. To the people in the town, he was nothing but the fellow who slept against the market wall, covered by a jacket that had seen more rains than blessings. But once, he had been a man of name and reputation—a farmer, a father, a husband whose granaries used to be full of maize as if they had eaten the moon as well.
A house is someone’s skin. Without it, one is exposed to the world. Bwalijo was exposed not by design but by the ruthless tricks of fate. His father had left him his ancestral house in Machinga with great fanfare, but this was disposed of bit by bit to clear hospital bills when his wife, Yamikani, fell ill. The doctors had spoken of an illness that ate away at the body slowly and dissipated money faster than any harvest could mature.
When she finally did die, Bwalijo’s hut grew quiet. The laughter of children had long since disappeared. Rain seeped through the thatched roof like unpleasant memories. The scent of cooking fires that had once told of warmth and community had passed on. He went to Zomba, that old colonial town where mountains kiss clouds, in hopes of finding work—and perhaps forgetfulness.
But forgetfulness is a sly spirit. It hovers in hunger and stirs at loneliness. It followed him even as he walked through the dust of trading towns, through villages where they looked at him as if he were a ghost returned to walk among the living.
Every morning, before the sun rose over the Mulunguzi hills, Bwalijo would get up from his cardboard mattress against the market wall. He would fold it up, as his wife had always folded their reed mattresses, and sweep the shopfronts before the traders were up. Some traders paid him five kwacha; others verbal insults only. He swept anyway.
He would remind himself, “A man who stops working stops living, even if his stomach is full.”
At midday, he sat next to the maize mill, where the scent of newly milled flour teased his stomach. Women strutted by with baskets balanced precariously atop their heads, men sprinted towards offices, and boys yelled airtime prices into the air. Nobody saw him, however. He was like such an old bench at the bus stop—there, but unseen.
One day, the rains fell early, a deluge down from the mountain in grey veils. The wind howled along Zomba’s thin streets. Bwalijo fled under the veranda of a church.
A young pastor appeared, his boots as shiny as the faces of new converts. He eyed Bwalijo.
“Old man,” he said to him, “you must not sleep here. It is God’s house.”
Bwalijo raised his head, his eyes serene but weary. “My son,” he replied, “and where shall a child of God find rest if not at the Father’s doorstep?”
The pastor’s face unclenched. Between the stiffness of rule and the call of compassion, his heart failed. Finally, he said, “You may stay overnight—but not always.”
That night, as rain drummed on the iron roof, Bwalijo dreamt of home—the smell of roasted maize, the rhythm of pestles pounding grain, Yamikani’s laughter floating above the sounds of village life. He woke at dawn to the cold and to the ache of remembering.
Days passed. The church women began gossiping. They begrudged that he enjoyed homelessness, that he begged not because he was poor but lazy. They had forgotten that poverty is rain—it rains on anyone regardless. When the elders finally told him to be gone, he bowed his head with no ill will.
“Even a bird must spread its wings when the tree is heavy,” he murmured.
He found his next home beneath the bridge over the river, along with others like him—men who once drove lorries, women who once sold fish in the market, boys who had fled hunger from remote villages. They were a small group of the overlooked, bound by shared adversity.
There, they built a way of life. They worked with scraps, mended torn clothes, and made use of stories from the dim light of a communal candle. On a full moon night, they sang songs of their childhood—songs from Nkhotakota, Mchinji, and Nsanje—songs that told them that they had, at one point, been somewhere.
One evening, a girl called Pumbwa came to the bridge. She was the daughter of a cook in a restaurant and had with her a basket of leftovers—rice, beans, and pieces of chicken wings. She distributed them among the group, then sat to listen to Bwalijo speak.
“What kind of life,” he began softly, “is there to lead without a home? A houseless man is a tree without roots. Hunger passes, grief heals, even sores close—but homelessness accompanies you into your dreams. It teaches you to look at the world differently, and at yourself too.”Pumbwa’s eyes sparkled. “But, Agogo, cannot you return to your village?
Bwalijo grinned faintly. “The nation is lost. The house is lost. The folk who made me brother are lost. What would I return to? Sometimes it is the past itself that drives a man out.”
The others nodded. They too carried invisible wounds. For them, the bridge was not home—but a zone of waiting between remembering and forgetting.
When cold winds swept across Zomba, the bridge dwellers held fast to one another. They told tales of harvests gone by, of wives beside firesides, of children they would never see again. “We are like chaff tossed by the wind,” said old Thole, another of the men living beneath the bridge. “But even chaff has a function—it nourishes the earth.”
One night, when the stars vanished and rain returned, Bwalijo shared the remaining dry maize with a boy named Mandondo. “Take it,” he said. “A man does not eat alone when another is hungry and watches.”
Mandondo refused at first, but Bwalijo did not relent. “Don’t shame the hand that gives,” he said. It was his practice; he gave even when he had nothing.
That night, Bwalijo didn’t sleep once the others had. He listened to the river’s murmurs and thought about his wife. “Yamikani,” he whispered into the darkness, “did you sleep where you died? I walked for so long, and the world was too heavy.”
At sunrise, when the mist crept whitely from the river, Bwalijo did not move. His cardboard bed remained still, his folded hands on his breast. The first light lay on his face gently, as a mother rouses a child.
The ones who resided on the bridge came slowly, softly. Mandondo, his voice trembling, said, “He is gone.”
They laid him to rest along the riverbank, where the reeds curved and the stream sang. They marked his grave with a stick inscribed in charcoal: Bwalijo wa pa Msika—Bwalijo of the Market. No relatives came back to mourn, but the passersby on the bridge sang quietly:
“A man who has no home is a man who has no roof over his soul.
And yet even the earth will hold him,
And the river will recall his name.”
The water whispered over his grave, as if in answer.
Weeks passed, and the citizens of Zomba forgot him. The market women forgot to inquire, the pastor preached new sermons, and the children had other stories to share. But sometimes, when a fog crept once again down Mulunguzi mountain and the street lamps of the town twinkled like slumbering eyes, an old vendor would pause and remark, “Eh, remember that man who swept here? The fellow with the gentle eyes?”
And another would say, “Ah, yes, Bwalijo—the one who said a man without a home is like maize without a granary.”
Then they would nod in silence as though they knew something too great to be spoken.
Because homelessness, as Bwalijo once said, is not merely absence of shelter.
***
