Following my escapades on Eidd day, I have gotten into more trouble. As I told you, these veiled birds are risky.

What started as a usual bird hunting expedition has now ended up being more complicated than I had imagined.

I knew I was treading risky grounds, yes, but never did I at any one time imagine that it would come to the extent of placing a fatwa on my head. What did I do to deserve this?

All I did was to get interested in a veiled bird and mislead her old man that I was ready to keep a long beard like his.  Oh yes, I also feasted on his delicious pilau before vanishing but that is not enough for an innocent bird hunter.

Well, I had some funny intentions on Hajji Suleiman’s daughter but I swear I had not executed any of them.
So, ladies and gentlemen, as I write this, I am officially in hiding from the Islamic law.

I have been on the run ever since I received a text message from none other than the veiled bird herself informing me that her old man was very furious and was swearing in all the Arabic that he knows that he will deal with me.

She told me that the Hajji was mostly made furious by the fact that I had the audacity to mislead not him but his daughter. The bird told me that the fact that it’s her who introduced me to him made things even worse.

Actually she says that the old man is also implicating her in the whole racket. He (rightly) suspects that something ‘birdy’ (not fishy, hell no!!) was going on. But since he is so fond of his daughter he has decided to vent all his anger on me.

I have been told that the fatwa arrest warrant has three charges.

First, approaching a decent Muslim bird with the intention to mislead her, second, attending a holy Islamic function using false pretence, thirdly, deceiving a panel of sheikhs and running from conversion.

These charges may look absurd to any lawyer but the old Hajj has vowed to see ‘justice’ executed. He has even deployed plain clothed ‘policemen’ to track me down and drag me to ‘court’ dead or alive.

It has now become quite difficult for me to walk freely on the street because I have to be on the alert all the time looking out to anyone with a long beard or wearing Islamic attire.

Yesterday I was walking up from the city round about hot in pursuit of a bird I had spotted but I had to duck and hide in the Belvedere buses when I saw two bearded fellas walking down the Akagera motors building. After the two had passed I could not trace the bird.I cursed loudly.

Now the problem is that I have no idea what the duration of the warrant may be neither do I know what the old man might give me as the sentence for the ‘crimes’ I committed if I decided to surrender myself to him.

But since he is acting out of rage and not necessarily reason, I will not surrender myself to him or to anybody for that matter.  I will stay in hiding until the old man cools down and forgets about the whole thing.

But if things don’t work out my way and the old man fails to lift the fatwa, I will have no alternative left but to surrender myself to him.

But this time I will not be surrendering as a criminal giving himself up. I will just show up and knock at his door sometime after his noon prayers (I am told that these bearded old men have good moods around that time) and  give him my story which will of course be a pack of lies.

I will tell him that when I left the house to talk to my brother, the phone was answered by his wife who told me that he had been involved in a serious accident and I had to rush to hospital.

I will tell him that since I did not have his daughter’s number (I am sure this will be music to the old Hajj, but definitely a big lie) there is no way of informing them about what had caused my hurried departure.

I would then tell him that I was now presenting myself for conversion to the most bomb-astic and ballistic religion.

Since he will be alone at that time and not with a whole battalion of potentially explosive sheikhs, I am sure he will ask me to go and come back some other time. As long as the fatwa will have been lifted, I will have no other worry in the world. What’s more, I will be able to now hunt the birds with impunity- until the set date for conversion arrives.

I will even ask the old man to let his daughter be my teacher before I get converted. I am sure he will not object. Well, I can see another fatwa – even a more serious one, but then who cares for what’s ahead?

I will worry for the present and the future will take care of itself.

Ends