LAZZO had hardly settled down on entry to the watering hole when he was inundated with reports of yet another suicide in the hood almost a month after another man was pushed by missus and he fell against the wall.

The man was in a comma for almost a week before he was pronounced dead at the local medical facility.

It was the talk of the hood because the latest was about self-annihilation over something that was not clear.

Lazzo was trying to find out whether he had come in contact with the deceased one time or the other.

“You knew this man very well and he had avid liking for hard drink and lived near the ‘Taonga Guava’ man.

He scratched his head trying to figure out what this meant and he was told that since there were several Taongas in the hood, each had to be identified by a peculiarity.

Lazzo learnt that this particular Taonga earned his name from the misfortune of another person who had climbed up a guava tree in front of his house and unfortunately fell off the trunk with a branch of the fruit-laded stem which spluttered to the ground!

Now that he had identified the local inhabitant, he had to turn right from the main road and count five houses, then he would get where it was all happening!

Lazzo began to understand that the surest map in the hood was to associate them with some public building or preoccupation of the person a stranger was looking for.

This system evidently formed the beacons of the hood and over decades it had worked successfully for strangers.

“But what could have happened to that man because he did not show any signs of tension or depression,” asked one patron as he downed a bottle of lager.

“May be he had a rent problem and he decided to terminate his life in frustration so that he is no longer exposed to it,” said another alert imbiber at the far end of the crammed up watering hole.

“As for the man who fell after being pushed, my female cousin picked up an idea at the communal tap that in fact, he was pushed after a drunken brawl in the house,” he disclosed to a receptive patronage.

He further explained that the couple hardly missed one another at the watering hole and if one of them came first, the other would show up later…

It was like a cat and mouse relationship until one day this man suddenly remembered someone talking to his missus at the watering hole and he started an inquisition.

The riled missus simply pushed him not anticipating a fall but he did back head first and that was the beginning of an unconsciousness spell.

Even after his demise, a version surfaced that in fact, he fell on his own and no one pushed him!

But Lazzo further enquired and he was told that no one was willing to tell the truth because the missus hailed from a vicious family in the hood.

“But you just can’t gloss over the truth all because you want to be safe!” protested Lazzo.

“Well, it is up to you if you want to play the human rights role, you can pursue the matter to your own peril,” warned the inebriated patron.

“We will never get the truth because the society was full of cowards and have something to do with what happened in history,” said the slant forehead man.

He explained that it was important to note that the country was a converging point for groups that were running away from tribal wars!

“Imagine that we are surrounded by eight countries and this is a meeting point and there is no conquerer but all are visitors,” quipped the man who always wore the face of a half-asleep man.

It got worse when he was overly inebriated because he put on a drooping face and his speech slurred.

However, Lazzo was still digesting the theory of migration as he joined the rest in the imbibing sequel recalling the old adage that when in Rome one was compelled to do as the Romans did!

Hailing from the central hinterland, Lazzo found was beginning to analyse the utterings of the migration theorist.

He realised that several tribes formed a string of dialects each and hence the intelligent decision to only reduce the mammoth 73 tribal groups to seven for purposes of official communication on radio and television.

“Yes, it was going to take several hours to finish reading the news in about 15 languages!,” exclaimed a patron at the far end of the counter.

“Who ever advised the establishment on this must have been a very intelligent man!” said another getting interested.

“We are in a very unique situation because even if one considered the issue well, one could see that there are very small differences in the way many tribes spoke showing that long before this, they belonged to some larger grouping,” said the retired bespectacled man.

His intervention brought some pause in the discourse as Lazzo began to think about ‘phonetics’ ‘dialect’ and tribe.

He had read somewhere that phone was a Greek word for ‘voice’ and that a tribe was a group of people who speak one language.

Lazzo also discovered that one word was used by several tribes but the only factor that changed was intonation a study of tribal phonetics showed astounding similarities!

Lazzo was getting amused at the avalanche of ideas flowing in the precincts and like any other day, an alert mind grasped something at the watering hole.

He now understood why the bespectacled man scoffed at anyone grossly abusing alcohol because it was ‘a mere tool for social interaction’, he would often declare when a confrontation was apparent at the gathering.

But in his mind, Lazzo had to be wary of the impeding load shedding which had also proved to be a disciplinarian factor in the hood because all miscellaneous behaviour was halted at the stroke of a switch!