ETHIOPIA · RURAL HIGHLANDS · UNNAMED VILLAGE
I travelled all over Ethiopia alone, in a Toyota 4Runner, sleeping in local hotels and eating injera in village restaurants. I loved it. This story is about one evening I have never been able to leave behind.
The sun was setting and the grass on both sides of the road was high. I had been driving alone for hours, which in Ethiopia is not unusual for me. I had a map — paper, the kind that requires interpretation — and on it, a small mark indicating a village. That village was where I intended to sleep. I could see the lights in the horizon and the tin roof structures with an occasional brick home. I had done this many times. The routine was standard. You arrive, you find the one hotel, you negotiate a room, you sleep, you leave in the morning. Ethiopia is a country that is comfortable with this kind of travel, partly because Ethiopians are, in my experience, among the most naturally hospitable people in Africa, and partly because of something specific in the history between our two countries.
Emperor Haile Selassie imported Indian teachers — mathematics, science, the practical subjects — in large numbers to staff his schools. A generation of Ethiopians was educated by Indians. When an Indian turns up alone in a remote Ethiopian village, there is often a recognition that has nothing to do with the present moment. You are, somehow, already known.
There was one restaurant in the village. There were perhaps fifteen people inside when I arrived, and they all looked up when I walked in. I found a table, sat down, ordered injera and a beer, and settled into the particular pleasure of being a stranger in a small room — watching, listening to a language I do not speak, reading the social geometry of who sits where and who talks to whom.
That was when I noticed him.
He was in his mid-thirties, I would guess. Unremarkable in the city – but clearly not from here. He was the kind you occasionally see walking down Bole Road. Creeps who are comfortable in their space and know how far they can push it. What made him different was the girl with him. She was perhaps ten years old. And he was paying her the kind of focused, exclusive attention that adults rarely pay to children in public: laughing at her jokes, leaning in, fully present to her in a way that excluded everyone else in the room.
Over the course of the evening, I watched him give her one beer. Then two. Then three. Then four.
I sat with my injera and my beer and I watched this and I felt the discomfort begin — slowly at first, the way these things do, as a question rather than a conclusion. Then more insistently. Four beers, in a ten-year-old girl, in a village restaurant, at the hands of a man in his thirties who was paying her a great deal of careful attention.
I was an outsider. I did not speak Amharic. I did not know the social codes of this village, or this relationship, or what was normal here and what was not. I told myself these things. I ordered another beer. I watched. I did nothing. Then my meal came – huge helping of food with injira. I had just started my food when a young man came and sat opposite me. He started helping himself from the big steel plate. I looked at him in suprise and then I realized how hungry he was. He had his head down – totally focused on the food. It was fine. This had never happened to me before or since. It was a strange town.
They left before I did.
I slept badly. In the morning I went to the front desk of the hotel and asked whether the man and the girl were still in the village. The man at the desk said they were not.
That was the end of it. Except that it was not.
Some questions are never asked. They do not go away for that.
I have thought about that evening many times in the years since. I have thought about what I should have done — whether I should have said something, to the man, to someone in the restaurant, to the hotel. I have thought about what I was afraid of: being wrong, being the foreigner who misread a situation, causing a scene in a place where I had no standing. I have thought about whether any of those reasons hold up.
They do not, entirely. That is the honest answer.
I travelled all over Ethiopia and I loved every part of it — the landscape, the food, the people, the particular texture of arriving alone in a place that has no reason to know you and finding yourself welcomed anyway. I have many stories from those years and almost all of them are stories I tell with pleasure.
This is not one of those stories. This is the other kind — the kind where you were present and did nothing and the question stays with you because you never answered it and now you cannot.
I got in the 4Runner in the morning and drove on. The grass was still high on both sides of the road. The sun was coming up over the highlands. Ethiopia was as beautiful as it always was.
Some questions are never answered. The thought remains.
— Parminder Brar
Ethiopia, World Bank field posting, 2011–2015. This story is published as it happened, without resolution, because there was none.