In the Kalacha heat, within a partly dug grave, gasping for air, for the first time Nyipir wonders where the pass holders went after the compromises had been made and the names they had listed had been made dead. If I should speak, may the oath kill me.
Sipping air.
Some silences cut off breath.
Even under oath.
20
THE CITY’S SUN IS SOFT AND WHISPERY. BEAUTIFUL NAIROBI people dodge the newspaperman burdened with four versions of the previous day’s news. At the Book Centre, Ajany has filled a supermarket trolley with watercolors, pastels, paper, brushes, molding clay, anything and everything arty. She had already made photocopies of a zoomed-in portion of a photograph. She pursed her lips at the one hundred copies of Odidi.
On her way out of the mall, she slips into the ladies’ toilet. Shifting feet. A cubicle becomes vacant. Out steps a buxom, fluffy-haired, expertly painted, open-mouthed woman in a too-tight white sweater dress. Agalo? Ajany dives into the stall. She has no energy to summon school-day memories. The sound of an air freshener being sprayed. Ten minutes. The woman should have gone. Ajany opens the door, makes for the faucets. Blueberry liquid soap. Rubs her hands.
The outside door squeaks open.
The woman pounces. “Araaaabel!” A squeal.
Face in the mirror.
Ajany blinks at it. “Agalo?” She suppresses a flicker of terror when she confirms the presence of one of a clique of popular girls she had spent her school years avoiding.
The woman lurches toward Ajany, and they squeeze each other in an insincere hug.
Agalo, who still speaks with exclamation marks, yells, “You! Came back! Must tell Alfred! Remember Alf! Where’s Odidi! What do you do! I’ve three sons! You?!”
A breeze of mint-scented spirits.
It is not yet noon.
Ajany considers the window. They are on the third floor. It would be a long way down.
“Are my eyes red?” Agalo spins toward the mirror, sniffs. “Nairobi flu.”
Ajany edges toward the door.
Agalo grabs her arms. “A quick coffee? Dormans?”
Ajany pulls away. “I–I w-was …” Ajany points in a vague direction.
“Oh, one cup.” Agalo rushes Ajany down escalators, talking all the time. They come to a stop where three other women lounge. One of them, with red talons — there is no other way to describe what she has done to her nails — is in the middle of an argument. Agalo interrupts. “Look who I found! Arabel. Remember Shifta the Winger? His sister!”
“Ohhhhh!”
They look past Ajany into recollections of respective teen crushes on Odidi. “Where’s Shifta now?” drawls a woman whom Ajany cannot remember.
“Traveling,” Ajany says. She plunks down her bags of art materials and inhales.
Agalo trills, “What’ll you have, hon?”
“Masala tea.” Ajany slumps into the chair, planning her escape, just as she used to when this same gang of girls stopped her at school under one pretext or another, usually to do with access to Odidi as his star ascended. She scrunches her nose. Exhales at the unrepaired past. Notes the paraphernalia of their present lives: small technology idols — phones, beeping, purring, bleeping objects that expect to be fondled mid-conversation, pieces of a shape-changing land with grand fiberoptic tentacles plugging into old histories that refuse to rest in peace. Ajany listens. One woman’s words are fringed with New Age positivity as she debates an activist. “If we breathed more and grounded our being, connecting to the womb of the earth, and looked upon each other with kind eyes, we would feel that we are already one.”
“Are you ‘one’ with me?” the thick-dreadlocked activist chortles as she drops an effervescent tablet into her concoction. She lifts the blend to her mouth. “Yeah, so visualize shit as gold, gaze at the red bums of baboon politicians and imagine them as dung beetles!” She gulps down her mixture in one long swallow and burps.
The Nairobi New Ager says, “Eat more greens, you’ll be less angry … and … raw.” She pulls out a tiny leleshwa-and-jasmine scent bottle and sprays the blended essence on her wrists, inhaling the pungent goodness. It wafts over everyone.
The activist sneezes and continues as if with the quotation marks of irony. “Sister,” she says, her arms curving into the shape of an Ankole cow’s horn, “even when a cockerel wears a turban it’ll never be a Sikh!” An exclamation mark’s triumph. “Greens! Kenya’s choking, and you, with your ati—‘lavender essence’—she makes two air-scratching movements—“and hordohordo English … you … blood-drinker, as if we don’t know about your secret oath-gobbling covens. Eat greens, you tell the rest of us?” She glares at everybody around the table, mouth working as if she were a gasping fish. She drops her head and plows into her salad with endless fingers that dangle on too-thin wrists.
Perfect tears hover in the perfumed aura-reader’s eyes.
Agalo pats her head.
Ajany watches and senses the scratching of unrepudiated ghosts here. An image of her father huddled over a radio. She winces. Tilts her head to search for other intimate signs on skin, within eyes. Truth signals. Like those shadow marks on Akai-ma’s wrists. Scars — resistance against suffering.
The activist was humming. Sounded like hiccupping. Ajany glances at her. She had once read that the activist had been arrested by irritated law enforcers. That she had worn sackcloth and ashes over one cause, been treated for allergic reactions to tear gas in another demonstration, and already been charged in court six times under different public-nuisance statutes. There was a photograph of her walking down Uhuru Highway wearing a large elephant mask, and yet another of her returning on the same route wearing a brown rhino-horn costume complete with a tragic white horn. She had once stood in the back of a van with a loudspeaker, simulating wails for Kenya’s dying forests, and stolen pastoralist lands. There was no cause she did not champion, no protest she did not join. She was also seeking her “Unique African Voice” for “Global Climate Change Conversations.”
Agalo breathed in the leleshwa-and-jasmine perfume, sneezed, and beamed upon all, a blinkered look on her face. She was used to such confrontations among her friends. She encouraged the whingeing. It was how they dressed up the rancid issues that agitated their otherwise ordered Nairobi lives.
Securing their universe.
Ajany watched.
Here they were, the “better future” their parents, teachers, and leaders talked about, drinking Kenyan coffee (with milk), tree-tomato and minty pineapple juice, and one Masala tea. Post — Kenyan independence, older women, lines beneath eyes, enmeshed by national subtexts, still hiding from anonymous bogeymen, still trying to plaster, with easy words, the fetid moral swamps engorged by the sludge of what a nation does, or does not do, with its freedom.
Ajany watched. Overloud laughter and performed rage on the outside, but inside, labyrinthine crevices dense with debris from personal, surreptitious, and very quiet wars.
Agalo leans toward Ajany. “What do you see?”
Ajany’s eyes dart away. She says nothing.
Agalo takes Ajany’s hand. “Did you vote?”
Shake of head.
“Good for you! Oh! No ring? Unattached?”
Ajany shrugs.
Agalo gives a sympathetic eye roll. “Life happens.”
They had exhausted the boundary of permitted rediscoveries.
Across the room, a man leans into his phone. Whoever is on the other side convulses him with sultry laughter. Its soft heat blends with the leleshwa-and-jasmine fragrance drifting around the women’s table.