Have you ever gone to bed hungry?”

The urchin was addressing me, I realised with a start. My window was half open and I almost wound it up. I knew his type. Their aim is to make you feel guilty about your snug, comfortable life so that you give in to their begging. It was a simple enough question but it made me angry. What right had he to ask me that? I turned to look at him. He didn’t look hungry, but he was scrawny. His skin was a dark brown.

“Twice,” I said and turned my gaze to the traffic ahead.

I wasn’t about to be bullied by a street kid who thought he could blackmail his way into my wallet. I was determined not to entertain his crap.

“Was it cold concrete?”

My temple was throbbing, my palms sweaty. Why couldn’t he move on to the next car? Couldn’t he see I wasn’t bothered? I rubbed my hand on the seat and watched the traffic. The timer was at 67. Dear Lord.

“What?” I faced him again.

“Your bed, was it hard, cold concrete, on the street?”

My throbbing increased. I wound up my window, closed my eyes and counted furiously, oblivious to his tapping, until the cars behind me started honking. I drove off.

When I got home after sitting in traffic for two hours, I was still a little angry. I poured myself a glass of whisky to calm my nerves and went to the balcony, my favourite cooling off place after a long day at work.

Carol had set the table before she left as was her custom but I didn’t feel like eating. I tried to think about work but the image of the urchin kept creeping into my head.

It depressed me that such a peripheral matter was still nagging me, hours after it had happened. I was not a strong Christian. I gave offering and tithe because the Bible strongly suggested it. And if I had a way of avoiding tax, I would have gladly taken it.

I was not particularly keen on what morals or values society encouraged, and I certainly wasn’t worried about where a street boy ate or slept.

I slept little that night, and the nights that followed. I lost most of my appetite, tolerating just breakfast, and only because I could not stand the ache.

The doctor said my ulcers had flared up and I needed to eat regularly. If Carol noticed that her suppers, which I had always relished, were barely eaten, she did not say anything. I was glad of it.

I could barely concentrate at work and had become irritable. Judith, a colleague, came to my office one afternoon, a few minutes to lunch. She was carrying a brown paper bag.

“Do you always carry your shopping with you?” I asked by way of greeting.

“I came to take you to lunch,” she said, sitting down.

“That’s new,” I said. She laughed. “Not today, I want to do some catch-up.”

“I thought you might say that,” she said, taking out two packed lunches from her package. “You have aged since last week.” She was eyeing me keenly. “It is not like we haven’t noticed, you know. We are just too polite to say it. Come on, out with it.”

We talked while we ate. I didn’t tell her I had insomnia; just the bit about the encounter with the urchin and what it had done to my conscience. I told her I couldn’t stop thinking about him and that the idea of food made me feel guilty about refusing to help him. She didn’t say a word until I was done.

“Why don’t you come with me after work,” she said when I had finished. “I volunteer twice or thrice a week at a children’s home outside town. I help in the kitchen by cooking and sometimes reading to the very young ones. You don’t have to do anything but it will make you feel better.”

I had never been to a children’s home and was a little scared but quickly agreed. For a moment I entertained the thought that I might see the urchin there but quickly dismissed it. He couldn’t have been begging if he lived in a home.

The caretaker was an elderly lady called Fatma. She was chopping carrots when we arrived at around 6pm. There were about four other people in the kitchen, a man and three women. Fatma positively lit up when she saw Judith, who immediately put on an apron and asked what she could do. The older woman pointed at a basketful of fruit which she needed sorted and washed.

“This is my friend, Obed,” she said to the group. They looked up briefly, smiled and went on with what they were doing.

Not wanting to feel out of place, I rolled up my shirt and joined Judith. We washed and dried in turns until the lot was finished. When they had finished serving the around 200 children, it was well past 8pm, then they served us plates of steaming green maize and slices of mangoes afterwards. I had never enjoyed a meal more than I did that night.

But the image of the urchin continued to plague my thoughts.

I learnt from Judith in the subsequent days that Fatma hired a bus once a month to collect street children for a treat at the home. It was the only proper meal that most of them had, and the numbers had been growing. Sometimes they did it twice every month, on alternate weekends, if they had money left over after their monthly budget.

The following week, I took an afternoon off and wandered around town, hoping to bump into the urchin. I would take him to a restaurant and buy him whatever he wanted to eat, and buy him some new clothes, I swore to myself. Judith nodded gravely when I revealed my plan. However, I didn’t find him, of course.

“It is the guilt eating away at you, but you can’t let it weigh you down,” she had said. “It will go away. A little of what you did last week does help.”

Ours was a communications company where revenue margins were every employee’s concern. We worked overtime, undercut our colleagues and chased clients, the goal being the anticipated bonus at the end of the year. Like me, most were unmarried. And like most, until a few weeks ago, I had been unconcerned about charity.

On Thursday, I walked to Judith’s office to ask her if we could hire buses that weekend.

“More than one bus?” She asked, raising an eyebrow. “We would need to buy food for all of them, and I don’t think that is possible right now.”

“I think I can manage that,” I said, making an effort not to sound pious. “I could ask a few of my friends to help,” I lied. I didn’t know of any friends who would give me money for what I wanted to do. She called Fatma that evening for an estimate about how much it would cost, and texted me her response that night. She offered to find volunteers for the event.

Men, women and children crammed themselves into the buses Fatma never announced the events but somehow word travelled fast. Despite the tumult, I tried to locate the urchin when they arrived at the home and when I didn’t see him, got busy serving, making small talk and trying not to look out of place. Judith found me resting under a tree when they had finished distributing oranges.

“It is a beautiful sight, isn’t it?” She asked, sitting down beside me. I nodded. Then, like one reading my thoughts, she added, “Don’t beat yourself up. It cannot be like this every day, but today is taken care of. That is something to them.”

I gave the crowd one last sweep and hoped he was among the hundreds of little faces munching on oranges.

I slept like a baby that night.