Stillness.
Ajany stammers, “The time! Must go.” She drags out two hundred shillings from her wallet and, at the same time, tries to shake hands, air-kisses, picks up her shopping, and nods to the chorus of Let’s do this again — do come visit — good to see you again.
Agalo retrieves a bleached business card from the depths of her handbag. As she enfolds Ajany in a one-handed squeeze, she whispers, “Tell Odidi to phone me.”
Ajany takes the card and hurries away. Odidi, she thinks as she reads the card. Regional Director, it says, beneath a logo that belongs to a global conglomerate — and, written quickly, Agalo’s expecting your call.
Breathing easy in her room, Ajany lays out her purchases. She then lies on the bed and cleans out her mind. She pulls out Agalo’s card and rips it into small pieces, which she tosses into the wastebasket.
Later, she pastes seven images and likenesses on her wall. She surveys her work, stretching out on the floor. Images of Odidi look down at her. She crawls across the room, takes a ballpoint pen from the table, and returns to tear open the art paper. She will draw tales she has heard. Her drawing hand shakes on the page.
Past the city center, the jumble of anonymous sky-scratching steel-glass-stone edifices, toward the railway station. Architectural devolution — squat, steady, older, defiant frameworks. Agrovet centers, rubble and tattered clothes, Gospel enterprises, Mutigwo Iganjo Hotel, street vendors selling tomatoes, shoes, Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph clocks, and windshield wipers. A school sports field. Smog-stained grevillea trees, flame trees, survivors of a day when that landscape had been lovely. Art Deco rooftops, a proliferation of buildings — blocks shooting up, a story a day; satellite devices like a thousand giant insect feelers probing exotic realms for truths. Single-pump petrol stations that were always three shillings below the city center’s pump prices. Air and water for sale.
Views from a square window.
Ajany is in a matatu, heading out into the city’s inner worlds. Servicing a new addiction, that of collecting her brother’s shadows.
Some people listen to her questions.
She has posters to support her query: “My brother, Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda, is lost. Have you seen him?” Some people tell her others have also been lost in the post-election violence. Others say they, too, will print and distribute images of their lost. Many take her aside and tell her to leave these things in the hands of God.
Ajany crosses the railway tracks and walks, reaching a culvert opposite a plastic-and-wood hair salon, with braids drying on outdoor poles, called Gloria’s God Gives Hair Design. A loud, stocky woman whose breasts spread way out there shouts to someone upstairs and reaches with her hands to disentangle used braids. Their eyes meet. Her red braids fall over the black ink-stain mark covering the left half of her face.
The woman shouts, “Babi!”
Translation: daughter of Babylon.
Ajany thinks: Whore.
This city.
Outside of a used-shoe booth where stylish right-foot shoes dangle, a sublime cologne flits past. Ajany breathes. The dirt and flowing sewage superimpose their odor on the moment. And then it is dusk, and Ajany is one of many complacent souls who have been stuffed into a matatu while Franklin Boukaka harangues a lumberjack in song: … Aye Africa, Eh Africa, O Dipanda …
The piercing blare of a distant, late-arriving train, dust-on-shoe solitudes, questions that were prayers, the past’s interference: it would come as memory, and she would have to kneel where she was until midriff-splitting sorrow passed. Some days would be better than others.
Good evening, Ms. Oganda?
Good evening, Jos.
Jos is at the reception desk most evenings.
Ajany rushes for the shower, strips off her clothes, and washes the day off her. She hobbles as if her body were a borrowed, oversized dress. Shapeless mists brood; there are welts in her heart. Overnight, acne has appeared on her face and covered the sides of her neck, too. She falls into bed and sleeps at once.
Morning. Incursions into Nairobi’s dark-light worlds, treading the banks of the putrid soup that is the Nairobi River. From Ngong to Komarock, asking existences-in-squalor if they have ever seen her brother, Moses Odidi Oganda. She has pictures to show and share. No one acts as if her questions are strange. A few think it is funny to send her looking where there is nothing.
Traders: information in exchange for cash or phone credit, or a fuck. She says, “Bring me my brother first, I’ll do anything.”
And she would.
The desperate and mad believe in magic.
So she throws bones, as she is told.
Carries tainted feathers and the claw of a crow.
Wears a blessed medallion of Saint Gerard.
Kills a white cockerel to appease an unknown, malignant ancestor. She is praying for more shadows, and her patron saint, Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda. Some warn her of the times in which they live: “Others, too, are lost,” they say.
She listens.
“Many are dying.”
She listens.
“Nothing special about you.”
“He’s my brother,” she says.
“Others have brothers, too.”
“This one’s mine.”
Good evening, Ms. Oganda?
Good evening, Jos.
One day, in Baba Dogo, Ajany becomes a face in a mob staring down at a man shot in the head by policemen for impersonating a policeman. A man in a blue-and-red shirt laughs and points at the bleeding corpse. No one to affirm dignity in the bleeding out of a former man.
She starts to sob aloud.
She runs away.
Stumbles across the railway lines into a now familiar space. There is Gloria’s God Gives’s buxom owner.
“Babi!” She screams at Ajany.
Ajany, wiping her face, thinks, Shitty city.
Good evening, Ms. Oganda?
Good evening, Jos.
Next day, she peers into and out of misshapen shelters that are cafés, restaurants, temporary morgues, clinics with discredited doctors, medicine men, exorcists from Lubumbashi, Lagos, and Mombasa. Pornographic video dens, brothels, churches, bars — spaces of encounter and paradox.
Reads the name of a nearby butcher shop: Soma Lebo.
Chapped lips, bitten through. Bad habit.
A story-less day.
Good evening, Jos.
Jos is gesticulating madly, nose wrinkling, eyes rolling, pointing at a bespectacled, well-aged man with straight eyebrows and a squarish head, whose large hands are leafing through a women’s magazine.
The man sees Ajany, smiles, flips a couple of pages before tossing down the journal. Soft-voiced. Luo-tinged English, a husky but clear articulation of words, a downward-shifting cadence with sibilant sounds enphasized. “Apparently, green is the new black.” He rises and stretches out his hand. “Assistant Commissioner of Police Petrus Keah, and I’m ahead of my time.” He lifts his trouser leg to reveal lime-green socks.
Ajany looks up at the big, very tall man, in his oversized dark-blue designer suit. Arms like giant boat oars, a large face, hard bloodshot eyes behind metal-framed spectacles.
Contrived insouciance.
Petrus says, “How’s your father, my brother Wuod Oganda?”
Ajany, head tilted, asks, “What’re you to him?”