Cover Story | Page 53

The call that was to turn their lives upside down came at precisely three seventeen on the Sunday morning before the Easter break . Dorothy Masika [ name changed ] knows this because she had glanced at her bedside clock when the call startled her from deep sleep .

There is always a sense of foreboding that comes with a late-night call and Dorothy was already fighting a sudden surge of panic as she instinctively knew that something was horribly wrong as the incoherent voice on the other end was her son ’ s .

Her son , who was twenty-seven was shouting , crying and rambling that she needed to come immediately as he was about to do something terrible because nobody loved him and that she was to blame for messing up his life .

He was is such a hysterical state that she was unable to calm him down enough to establish where he wanted her to go to and the ensuing fifteen minutes of a babbling monologue suddenly stopped and there was an eerie silence .

The phone was still on and Dorothy could hear some background noise but could not establish where he might have been and her pleas to him to talk to her were unanswered and after about ten minutes the phone went off .

Her attempts to call him back were unsuccessful as he didn ’ t pick the phone and anyway by then she was in total panic unable to think of what she should do . She realized that she was crying as the enormity of the situation had overwhelmed her .

Dorothy lived alone as she had separated from her husband of twenty-two years , Alfred , six years earlier after she found out that he had been living a double life and had another family with two grownup children and another older child living in the States .

Her son apparently had all along known about his other siblings as her husband had introduced them to him and they had this weird man-pact to keep the information to themselves and had not shared it with her .

Her son worked as a software engineer and from all outward looks seemed a balanced and a focused individual and this is what made that phone call so jarring as the man on that phone that morning was not the son she knew .

She contemplated about calling the police but couldn ’ t figure what she going to tell them , although he had said he was going to do something terrible , she did not know if he had done anything and anyway , she didn ’ t even know where he was calling from .

Fully awake and unable to think logically , she dressed up and although she knew that the background noises she had heard on the phone meant he wasn ’ t at his flat , she decided to head there just in case he had gone home .

The askari at the gate to the block of flats where he lived told her that he hadn ’ t seen him since the previous Friday when he had driven off at his usual morning timings and he told her it was not unusual for him to be away on a weekend .

At her wits end and a rising sense of dread , she finally capitulated and decided to call her husband and appraise him on the developments . It was five in the morning . He asked her to go home and he would take up the matter of locating him .

Relieved but not calmed , she attempted to call her son ’ s line again and realized that it had been switched off . The whole situation was turning into a nightmare like a scene from a horror movie and she felt sick to the core .

By the next day , Monday , Dorothy learnt that her son had not reported to duty for the previous week after a tiff he had had with the boss . The boss was not particularly empathetic in trying to figure out the whereabouts of her son and was quite impersonal .

Apparently , the altercation came about because the boss had reversed a standing practice , in place since the pandemic outbreak , that allowed staff to work remotely , the boss insisted that all staff henceforth must physically be present in office .

What was however more telling was the fact that his office colleagues did not seem to have a clue of her son ’ s routine or who he associated with and therefore were of no particular use in the effort to trace him and appeared unperturbed by his oneweek absence .

The next one week was a living hell for Dorothy who was now suddenly aware that practically everyday there was a story in the media of a lady who had been murdered by a boyfriend or a man or woman who had committed suicide for various reasons .

She lived on tenterhooks during the week expecting the phone to ring and be asked by some random person or the police to go to an Airbnb or to a mortuary to identify her son . He seemed to have just vanished into thin air .

After the required forty-eight hours , her husband had filed a missing person report with the police but it soon occurred to them that such reports were so common place that the police did not seem to have any sense of urgency on their particular case .

It was during the many interviews with the DCI personnel that it occurred to Dorothy that Kenya had become a huge but fragile house of cards which just needed a strong gust of wind for it to come tumbling down .

She learnt that even within the ranks of the DCI they were also grappling with a generation that seemed to lack emotional maturity and were essentially children in adult bodies who she could only think of as a pampered generation .

This is how we end up with a CEO who is so focused on his bottom-line deliverables and is so engrossed on self and individual achievements which he feels are solely due to his personal genius and lacks an iota of empathy .

The concept of teamwork is foreign to him and when reminded he is quick to approve a team-building retreat which he does not attend because in his mind those childish games belong to rank and file as he negotiates the golf course with corporate titans .

There is an arrogance and entitlement that seems to have invaded the C-suites and corporates no longer embrace the ‘ this is our company ’ mantra but rather a ‘ this is my company ’ ethos a la Elon Musk .

The management style espoused by the global hyper-rich has an element of dehumanization that uses workers simply as cogs in the corporate behemoths and treatment of staff as exemplified by X is now the norm rather than the exception .

We seem to be in the cusp of a mental health crisis in the country and the