Edwin's Corner

Part Two: The Price of Peace   Karmali had survived a steel rod to the head, discovered that his accident was probably attempted murder, and acquired the extraordinary ability to hear what people were thinking. You would imagine this was enough excitement for one lifetime. Apparently, life disagreed. His wife had betrayed him. His colleagues wanted him dead. His doctors were keeping secrets that could fill a police station. And now he had to rebuild his life. But here was the problem nobody had anticipated. When you can hear everyone’s thoughts, you eventually discover that some people are idiots. And quite a number of them are thinking about you. The question was no longer whether Karmali could survive knowing the truth. It was whether he could learn to live without needing to know everything. Karmali left the hospital through the service entrance, between a delivery of vegetables and a man arguing about an invoice. It was not the triumphant exit he had imagined. But the alternati...

Part One: The Man Who Knew Too Much.   Karmali was a university graduate working on a construction site, married to a woman who appeared to love his wages considerably more than she loved him. Then somebody dropped a steel rod on his head. Ordinarily, this would be considered a bad day. But Karmali woke up with the extraordinary ability to hear what people were thinking. His doctors had secrets. His wife had secrets. Even the people who came to wish him a speedy recovery were privately calculating whether he would survive long enough to spend his compensation. And then he discovered something rather disturbing. Perhaps the steel rod hadn’t fallen by accident. By the time a steel rod entered Karmali’s head, life had already been trying to get through to him for several years. It had tried unemployment, poverty, marriage and the cost of cooking oil. None of them had worked. That morning, it escalated. Karmali was a university graduate working on a construction site in a foreign count...

Two affairs. Two children. One marriage. And a spectacular shortage of innocent people.   A story on love, betrayal, forgiveness, and the uncomfortable distance between who we believe we are and how we actually behave. John was driving through the leafy suburbs of Nairobi, rehearsing how he would tell his wife that he had fathered a child with another woman. He had prepared several versions of his confession. None sounded particularly convincing. What he didn’t know was that his wife had been preparing a confession of her own. Hers had taken seven years to rehearse. And by the time dinner was over, both would discover just how difficult it is to remain morally superior when everyone knows the truth.  —  There is always a thought that drives us to avoid particular conversations. Sometimes it is the fear of what we might lose. Sometimes it is the shame of what we have done. And sometimes, quite remarkably, it is the conviction that we are good people, and that whatever we have done m...