That night, when I saw the first man, a figure half-hidden by shrubs and night, a chill ran up and down the rungs of my spine. I was a girl alone in the night.
I— I— even after all these years, I hesitate to talk about it. But I still remember the frogs and crickets and the distant owl—the crocking, the chirping, and the hooting. I had been walking in step to the rhythm of that night-time orchestra, my footfalls in sync. The further I got along the path, the louder the owl’s hooting grew. I was an intruder to the dark. A disturbance to their communion, for the frogs, quieted, as if I had suddenly found them backbiting me. They would continue after I had passed. I bore no part in that nightly ritual. Mine would soon occur.
I— I remember . . . I— When I turned the other way and saw two more men, I— For the rest of the night I didn’t hear the frogs again, and the crickets, and the owl didn’t hoot. It wailed like a bereaved mother.
I was told the harder you prayed—the longer you spent on your knees—the more God would listen, and the more abundantly He would reward you. I had knees then, and the voice fit for screams. I don’t pray anymore, and when I scream, it’s to accompany my nightly terror.
No one is ever fully healed, I know that now. Memory ensures it. All you can do is sit at a table across from the past; let silence thrum between you or the cacophony of regret and blame and guilt; note its power, recognise your own; throw punches like some do, and come to a consensus on how to coexist. The coexistence may help you forget—whose healing only lasts until you remember. And remembrance bares the pattern of a cracked mirror—you see yourself in irregular pieces, held by interlinked lines.
I am always going back to the past—to random days, events, conversations, to the little things and the big. Never linearly. The past is a hungry inquiline, eating at me.
***
I woke up in the Bariadi District hospital to an incessant hum in my head and a dry throat. There was a distant ache somewhere in my body. I felt drowsy. While I turned my head and groaned in an attempt to call out for someone, I felt a straw slide through my parted lips. I sucked and the sweet relief of water exploded in my mouth.
“Polepole,” someone said. Slowly.
I opened my eyes. Light like shattered glass in them. Fr. Mizengo smiled at me. The way he did when receiving offertory at Church.
“We thank the lord you’ve woken,” he said in English, his smile unbroken, and continued in Swahili, ‘Don’t strain yourself. You are not fully healed.’
I noticed tufts of grey in his dark hair and a tint of pink in his spectacled eyes. When I finished drinking, he took the cup and straw and turned away. That’s when I noticed Mama.
Her shoulders were slumped, eyes focused on the rosary in her hand, lips moving ever so slightly.
“She has sat there and prayed ever since you were brought here,” Fr. Mizengo said.
“Mama,” I called to her, gravel in my throat. She stayed as she were.
It would be a week before Mama said anything to me. During that time, Fr. Mizengo told me how one of our neighbours had noticed some men behaving suspiciously around the house and told her husband. They were the ones who caught them in the act and scared them off before they could finish what they did to me. “People came when she went shouting and screaming in the neighbourhood.” My tattered clothing and limp body were gathered by one man from the crowd who brought me to the hospital on his motorcycle. They thought I was dead. “And that is what they told your mother.” But Mama having lost one daughter already, couldn’t accept it. She caused a scene at the hospital. “If it wasn’t for her insistence, the doctor wouldn’t have noticed your eyes fluttering.”
When Mama finally spoke, she started slow and built up gradually. However, she avoided eye contact and called me binti wangu before every sentence. The attack had elevated me from “thing of the night” to her daughter. Mama, always firm in everything she did or said, now seemed unsure whether to hold the plate of food for me or let Fr. Mizengo do it. Her statements which had been commands and sometimes provocative or confrontational—even after Baba shouted her down—now sounded like questions. As if she required my permission. ‘My daughter please eat something?’ ‘My daughter I will change the sheets?’ ‘My daughter, I can help you sit up?’
Sometimes, she would stop midsentence and stare into space. She was sorry—for the open window, for the closed window; the cold, the heat; bright sunlight, dim hospital lights; noisy crickets outside, her own silence.
Her voice went down many decibels and reminded me of how contrite I sounded every time I went to the confessional. She had always seemed big but now she looked small and old. Furrows never left her brow and the hair that had always looked silky now appeared wiry. The Mama before my attack, whose eyes grazed over me to find Johari wherever she was in the room, whose greetings were leftovers after my sister and Holy Mary had received theirs, became Mama whose eyes lingered on me while I lay there, whose greetings were the first thing I heard every morning. When I asked her why she didn’t call me by my name anymore, Mama had just helped me sit up in the hospital bed and now sat in a plastic chair beside me and held a plate of rice and beans, a forkful to my lips. She put the plate on her thighs and deflated into the chair. I thought she wouldn’t speak.
“I am sorry,” she said, more to herself than me. She spoke only Swahili.
I remember the last time I saw Mama. She had her best kitenge dress on—she’d bought it for the occasion. Through weekly church collections and contributions from an NGO, my hospital bills were paid. The NGO would pay my school fees and university tuition too. I was leaving for secondary school and Fr. Mizengo had put up a small farewell party.
While I watched her coffin descend into the grave, all I heard were those last words. Everything. Did she know about Baba too?
When I was sixteen, my nipples sharp peaks on firm breasts, my voice sinuous and my buttocks ever trembling with slight motion, Mama signed me up for catechism with Fr. Mizengo. For her, I wasn’t prayerful enough.
It was during one of those afternoons, after listening to Fr. Mizengo drone on and on, that I met Erevu who would tell me all sorts of lies about my breasts and buttocks and me. I had seen him lurking around the chapel some days before and doing small jobs around the village. Erevu was two years older, taller, of dark complexion, muscular and had calloused hands. He was primarily a builder but could do anything around the village for the right pay.
From that day onwards, he would wait around to walk me, as close as he could, home. I learned from him that my eyes danced side to side and never stilled. ‘A sign that you have a restless soul.’ A soul bursting with life. I learned that I had hair like fire; that from afar, I shimmied like pure gold. These entreaties spoken in Swahili always made me laugh.
Looking back now, I should’ve seen through them.
Days always felt hot in the long-sleeved shirts and ankle-length skirts I wore, and it felt worse without them. Erevu and I would walk back from the chapel, which was a fair distance from the village, with me shielding my eyes from the sun, squinting, and he telling me all sorts of improbable things. He spoke with his whole body. His arms shot this way and that; his hands created complex patterns in the space in front of him; his shoulders shook when he laughed; he walked ahead of me and demonstrated something using any object he could find to show me what he meant. He spoke endlessly and I enjoyed his voice. He spoke of so and so’s son courting such and such a girl; this market woman had done such and such a thing with so and so’s husband.
Erevu and I met three days a week when I had confirmation classes. One day, he revealed a black wide-brimmed hat he was hiding behind him. ‘So you can hold my hand,’ he said, giving it to me, and I tucked my head into it.
We didn’t hold hands then. I counted the days until we did. Eleven days during which my hands felt idle hanging at my sides when we met. Now that I had the hat to shield my eyes from the sun, I tried to find things to do. I folded my arms below my breasts but walking that way was uncomfortable. I interlocked my fingers and let my arms fall, hitting my thighs with every step. I folded them behind my back but I thought it made me look old and serious like Fr. Mizengo. I rolled the hem of my blouse around an index finger and stopped, Erevu will think I’m childish. I listened, exclaimed here and there, gasped at the right moments, all the while conscious of my idle hands, thinking of the next distraction for them.
On the twelfth day, a late Tuesday afternoon, when we finally did, his palms were sweaty. We held hands as long as we saw no one else on the path from the chapel. He let go, took a step away as soon as he saw someone, and reached out when the intruder disappeared down the road.
Maybe it was because home had become a warzone for my parents that I went to Chapel more often, even on days there were no classes, so I could be with Erevu. He was the first boy to pay me any attention—in fact, the only boy. Others, especially at school, wondered aloud, in my vicinity, whether I was a mind-reader, a ghost that disappears and reappears at will or whether Mama drank a lot of milk before to conceive me. They would compare my skin with paper from their books when they thought I wasn’t looking.
Maybe it was because Erevu was a needed distraction that I chose to ignore how his hand or arm or elbow brushed lightly on my breast often. How his company ended more and more late. Or maybe it was because I enjoyed those little accidents that I got angry when Mama took Johari and me to visit our grandmother after a big argument with Baba.
As far back as I can remember, my parents always quarrelled. Anything would set them off. A chipped ceramic cup, a squeaky door, Johari’s complaint of hunger, mama’s noisy recitations of the rosary, anything. That day it was Baba’s mysterious wad of cash and the bite and scratch marks.
Even now, I can’t say exactly what Baba did for a living. We lived close to a small town in Shinyanga in a two bedroomed house which wasn’t self-contained but had a water tap in the compound. I shared a room with my sister, Johari, but she always slept with Mama when Baba was away—which was always. The floors were tiled and rooms had all the necessary furniture. Our house was bigger, brighter and looked sturdier than any others I’d seen around. Baba didn’t own a car but was always dropped off by a sedan with tinted windows. I never saw the driver who would leave immediately Baba stepped out.
I remember that late afternoon. The sky was a vast blue canvas with orange smudges, violet hues in the distance. The sun’s heat had pressed down upon the day like a hand. I knelt before a small pile of potatoes, peeling and dropping them into the water-filled saucepan beside me one at a time. Mama sat at the veranda with Johari. Mama described her work as her fingers twisted a tuft of hair this way and that to create an intricate type of cornrows on Johari’s head. Johari fidgeted.
“Finished,” she told Johari in Swahili, lifting her by the armpits. “Let me carry you, my daughter.”
Johari wriggled free.
“You used to let me carry you as a baby.”
Johari merely looked at her and walked into the house. She rarely spoke when Baba was away. Mama looked down the path leading to our house. I saw the car.
Johari ran out of the house, crushed into Baba’s waiting embrace and clang to him like a heart, his arms a cage around her. The two became embracing mannequins until Baba started complaining about how so strong Johari had become as to suffocate him. Johari loosened her embrace.
“What have you been eating?” Baba asked. “Are these big muscles I feel in your arms?”
“Ugali, beans, potatoes, sukuma wiki, cassava—”
“No chicken?” Baba interrupted. “No beef? No fish?”
Johari shook her head.
“What do you want to eat?”
“Chicken!”
He presented Johari a Barbie from his safari bag. Johari leaped into his arms, screaming in delight and then ran into the house with her new gift.
I waited, peeled one, two, three, five potatoes.
The leaves’ shaking in the gentle breeze sounded like the cheer of a crowd afar. I had my hat on at home for the first time. Baba didn’t notice. He stood, looking in the direction Johari had taken, his back to me.
“Kitu cha usiku,” Baba called me. Thing of the night.
“Yes, Baba,” I said. Can I leap on you too? I wondered if I could tell him about all the eyes that turned my direction wherever I went or the conversations that stopped around me and resumed after I left. I met a boy who thinks my breasts are mountains, I said in my mind, and we both laughed. I stared at the potatoes, imagined how it felt to wait, wonder, and then be surprised with a present.
When I looked up, Baba was watching me. He had a creased brow, narrowed eyes and ground his teeth.
He looked away and said, “We will eat chicken.”
“Mama—”
He looked down at me, his stare a hammer that crushed any words I intended to say.
“We. Will. Eat. Chicken.”
Baba never said anything to me whose answer wasn’t yes, no or thank you. When I deviated from the script, he would lead me back to my lines with a grunt, a narrowing of eyes, furrowing of the brow, silence or a hard stare.
“Where is this chicken you bought? Hmm?” Mama spoke from the veranda, arms folded beneath her breasts. Baba walked to her, got out a wad of cash. Mama’s eyes widened and her jaws dropped. “Where did you get that? I won’t touch it until you tell me how you got it.”
Baba dropped the notes at her feet and gestured for her to let him pass. Mama grabbed his arm and looked at it. Baba pulled away immediately. “What is your problem?”
“Where did you get that?” Mama said, pointing to his forearm. “And that on your cheek?”
Baba had a bite mark on his right forearm and scratch marks on his left cheek.
“None of your business,” Baba said.
“Enh? What?”
Already they were at daggers drawn.
“You leave your children to go get bitten and scratched—”
Mama stopped short as Baba pushed past her into the house. She followed.
I don’t remember what was said inside the house. I finished peeling the potatoes. At some point, Johari got out of the house and sat with her new doll at the veranda. I could hear shouting from inside—Mama getting louder and Baba matching her. This went on for some time.
“GO!” Baba thundered suddenly. It startled Johari into standing. Mama was quiet in the house. “YOU WILL COME BACK!”
Baba was right. Two days away was all it took for Mama to bring us back home from visiting my grandmother. No words of reconciliation were exchanged. Baba received an excited Johari into his arms and carried her to the shop to buy her biscuits. I carried the bag of clothes Mama had packed into the house while she stood outside, shocked that he ignored her. She watched Baba walk away.
The house was empty.
While I waited to see Erevu again, while I used more and more lotion on my skin, while I examined my reflection every chance I got, my ears shut away from everything else, and my eyes passed over things, never really seeing them. My thoughts always wandered. Where was he? How was he feeling? Had he eaten that morning? His favourite food—what was it? Had he forgotten me? When would I see him again?
Bibi had welcomed us with open arms. It was obvious that her memory was fading for it took her a long time to remember either of her granddaughters’ names. She made a game out of it with Johari but she apologised to me when my sister was out of earshot. When Mama told Bibi that we’d come for an Easter visit and would stay for a few days, she was overjoyed and exclaimed how time flies. Bibi believed it was Easter until later that night when she forgot and had to be reminded.
Johari gave Mama a hard time. She had been demanding to go back home since we left. Mama slapped her across the face and she settled.
“Like mother like daughter,” Bibi said. When I asked what she meant, she continued humming for a while.
Bibi was by the door weaving a mat. She beckoned me to sit closer and asked if I knew the song she was humming. I shook my head. It was the only song Mama would quiet down and fall asleep to as a baby, she explained. My grandfather sang it to Mama until she was four. They were inseparable—father and daughter as soon as Mama left the breast.
“She gets that from me,” she continued after a short while. “I was always with my father as a child.” Bibi continued weaving and humming. Her hands with skin like crinkled paper, moved smoothly, tucking and folding and pulling, adding to the intricate patterns of the mat.
“She sang it during her early pregnancies,” Bibi said. “Before you.”
At the hospital, when Mama started talking, she left out her miscarriages when she told me her side of the story. She didn’t tell me my grandfather forced Baba to marry her because she got pregnant. How he changed after that. Mama didn’t explain the reason for Baba’s anger. She only said, ‘A baby would’ve brought him back to me, but we got you.’
Bibi refused to speak any further about the matter.
We sat in silence for a while.
I asked Bibi stories about me as a baby. I learned that she took care of me in my first few months while Mama recovered. I was a year old when Mama, having recently become a churchwoman, started breastfeeding me.
Further inquiry only got me silence. So I asked Bibi why she wouldn’t answer me.
“Listen to the night and tell me what you hear.”
I mentioned frogs, crickets, dogs, and an owl maybe? She smiled at me and asked if I could hear a snake. I listened and shook my head. She asked if I could hear a bat. I listened and focused as much as I could and nodded. She laughed and called me a liar. There wasn’t any snake, she said. No bats. She shook with laughter. When I asked her why she tricked me, she said, “I am an old woman who cannot hear like you do.”
“You’re not old.”
She laughed and said, “It takes time to learn, but when you do, you’re always too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Sometimes you have to listen for what isn’t there.”
If I understood this at the time, I would’ve seen through Erevu’s lies.
All through secondary school and university and even working as a playwright, I saw what Bibi tried to tell me that night. There are silences that lurk at the edges of words, weaving themselves between adjacent others, and mingling with sentences to form a mosaic of meanings—those intuited at in the moment, realised upon reflection, or perceived on the surface. For people like me, skin is talkative, and people choose what to hear or not.
When I told Mama the house was empty, she ran after Baba, calling out for Johari. It was too late. I would never see Baba again. Mama paced haphazardly in the compound cursing Baba, cursing her own stupidity for delivering Johari into his waiting hands, cursing her own gullibility. Mama ran around the neighbourhood like a mad woman. She made phone calls to Baba but he didn’t answer. She called Fr. Mizengo and other churchwomen to elicit their help in finding her daughter.
They found Mama weeping and pacing in the compound.
They knew where Johari was, one of the Churchwomen said. But before she revealed anything, Fr. Mizengo advised that Mama first calm down. The women gasped collectively when she shouted at the priest: “WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?”
“She is with Agnes,” Fr. Mizengo relented.
“I am going to kill her,” Mama said, pushing away the hands of the churchwomen trying to hold her back.
In the hospital, when Mama finally spoke, and I asked her whether Johari had been found, she stated factually instead that she was going to kill the widow, Agnes. Johari was still missing. She didn’t say anymore. What I didn’t know then was that everyone knew Agnes to be Baba’s mistress. Mama didn’t say anything about it. But I remember how Mama shoved her way to the Agnes’ house. I watched all of this from the veranda.
After the initial shock of the empty house and kidnapped little sister, I remember feeling unsurprised that Baba would leave. Many times during their quarrels with Mama, he would express how her life would crumble if he left. Mama would dare him to abandon her children. I remember feeling jealous of Johari.
A crowd had gathered around Agnes’ compound by the time I caught up with Mama. Agnes had drawn a line in the ground with a knife and was now addressing the crowd. Any creature that crossed that line would discover why a fish remained in the water where the lion could not reach it. Mama threatened to cross and shut her mouth. Agnes addressed the spectators, asking if they heard a mosquito whining somewhere. Didn’t it know it would be squashed?
Skirts and dresses were fastened in place, spit and insult thrown across the line to both sides, hands fell to waists and the two women stood akimbo, a foot tap-tapping the ground.
In the end, there was no fight. Despite Agnes’ threats, a few men from the crowd got into her house to search for Johari. Instead, they found some of Baba’s property.
I remember less and less of Johari. She was six years old when all of this happened. I don’t remember what she wore the last time I saw her. The image of her I have in my mind never changes. Her face is a version of Baba’s—whose face I want to forget. She is always in her school uniform—a green pinafore over a checked green shirt. Even in the memory of Mama plaiting her hair. All the times Mama went to church with her. Or when she leaped into Baba’s arms. I don’t remember her voice. She never speaks in my memory and yet somehow I know what she would say and how she would say it.
There are other things I remember: the sedan coming around more often, Baba getting in and then out after some time; Mama and Baba quarrelling in whispers in the night—Mama telling him to stop what he does when he went away and Baba saying he wouldn’t; me sitting with a pile of laundry and smelling the sweet smell of Baba’s clothes before washing them; Fr. Mizengo—the only one I ever heard speak English—teaching about Abraham and Isaac, how a father kills their child out of love.
The sun no longer hung in the sky. Deep blue hues spread over us and stars had started to appear where it was darkest. A few crickets had already started their chirping.
Erevu was uncharacteristically quiet and the silence discomforted me. I started to speak and ended up telling him everything. About what people said behind my back, the nicknames, what Baba called me, the never-ending fighting at home. Everything. It was well into the night when I finished and we had taken the long way home. Erevu hadn’t interrupted my outpouring. I ended with my jealousy for Johari being chosen.
He never let go of my hand.
Mama wasn’t back home. I wondered aloud if she even knew where I was.
“I would wonder,” Erevu said.
He insisted to walk me to the door. We ended up inside the empty house. He touched my breast and kissed my neck. I pushed him away weakly. I was merely playing hard to get. I didn’t want him to stop. Not much talking was done—only hurried fingers fumbling with buttons, pounding hearts, shaky breaths, gasps during the first few thrusts, and “Are you okay?” were the only words said. To which I hmm’d, nodded vigorously, closed my eyes and, with my fingers in his coiled dark hair, directed his head to my breasts.
While he caught his breath many moments later, I gathered my clothes and dressed up. I was too shy to look him in the eyes when I told him Mama could be back any moment and so I would see him tomorrow.
“Yes, tomorrow,” he said, leaning back against his elbows. “On the path and at the same time like today.”
I found out a few years ago from Fr. Mizengo, now retired, that Erevu died insane and with AIDS. He went around proclaiming he was cured even as he wasted away. At Buhangija temporary holding shelter, I would learn that I got the virus the easier way—many of the other girls had been raped.
Lying in that hospital bed, listening to Mama describe what happened after her confrontation with Agnes, I wondered if I should tell about my status. It had just been recently revealed to me.
“We took too long convincing the police to come that night,” Mama was saying, “but it was too late. She had packed everything and left.”
On the neighbouring bed behind Mama was a woman asleep, her right leg in a cast from toes to thigh. I looked around and I noticed other people missing a limb or two—some engaged in conversations, others staring blankly at the idle fan hanging above them, and the few who laughed at jokes with family members. I looked at a woman standing on one leg, her other ending in a stump midway the thigh, reach out for her clutches and tuck them into her armpits.
Now I knew why Mama got back hours after Erevu left. She found me seated on the mat Bibi had given us as an Easter gift. I had been worried that Mama would tell right away that I had done something. We didn’t speak. She sat on the far side of the mat, back to the wall. I locked up and went to sleep leaving her staring into space.
Erevu didn’t show when I went to meet him the next day. I want to believe it wasn’t planned but I know better.
There is never a night I go without seeing that girl surrounded by those men. Every time some new detail appears. Like the longer you listened to an orchestra, the more instruments you could tell apart. I see her in that long black skirt—she would hold the hem up to her knees when she ran—and the white long-sleeved second-hand blouse with thick red and blue stripes. She’d replaced some of the buttons after Erevu’s hands had gotten impatient to reach the breasts. When I sleep, I see—
—she is too distracted with the ribbit-ribbiting, chirping and her own footfalls to look ahead of her. If she does, she will notice humanoid shapes jump off the road into the bushes along the road. She will notice them leaning against trees, peeping ever so slightly as she passes them. These two humanoid shapes step out onto the road with all the gentleness they can muster. One of them misses a step and causes a rustle but Chausiku, who was born on a night as alive and dark as this, doesn’t hear.
She thinks about Erevu—what happened? Why didn’t he come? The sounds pause and then continue as the men stalk behind her. They hope she doesn’t turn around. And she doesn’t. In fact, they marvel at how aloof she is. Surely she could hear the frogs fall silent, couldn’t she?
One of them has been watching her for a while. All they had to do was lie in wait. They knew they would find her walking back.
The girl stops. The two men behind her stop just as abruptly. The girl has seen something. They have better vision; they always work in the dark, so they see their colleague. He steps out of the bush he had been hiding in. Chausiku turns around thinking there is salvation in turning the other way. She sees the two men in the road, pangas in their hands hanging beside their legs.
She springs into the bush, disappears behind a thick tree. The two men are at her heels within a few moments—they have chased prey faster than her. She is screaming at the top of her lungs, but screaming while running doesn’t make for a very loud cry for help. Not for one as young or as inexperienced as her. Nonetheless, it works best when she screams. This isn’t unusual—they will just work a bit faster.
Most people they have had to chase ran in a straight line, which made it easy to trap them. This girl runs in jerks and spurts, bolting behind this trunk or that, and when you think she’s going to turn here, she bolts there. And she is running in the direction of home. Yes, they will have to get it done fast.
Chausiku focuses on screaming and running. She begs God exhaustion doesn’t slow her down. The men are only three or four steps behind. Then a thought plunges into her being—what if they catch me? Like a big stone into a filled basin displaces water, fear fills all the space her conviction had occupied. That is the same moment a panga slashes her back.
The pain is immediate.
She falls and in the next second, the men are there.
—the gash in your back is like a line of fire searing deeper and deeper. You don’t hear the men stop. Your throat burns from all the screaming. Your world is an awareness of pain. A calloused hand grabs your wrist and pulls you up and you scratch the man’s face with your other fingernails. The second man grabs that wrist before you can strike again. You wriggle, kick, and scream, fight to get loose, but nothing works. They throw you onto your back and you feel the ground poke into your wound like a million steel nails at once. The third man presses his knee down hard and traps your thighs together. Your legs have limited movement. You wriggle your body this way and that with all the strength you have. Your arms are spread apart and knees crush onto them just below the shoulder. You started praying many minutes ago when the men were chasing after you. Now you pray more vigorously.
“Yes, scream,” one of the men, the one holding your legs apart, says. “Scream. The gods will hear.”
Hack, goes a panga to your arm. Hack-hack.
You hear before you feel it. Somewhere in your mind, you realise it’s your body they’re pruning like a tree. Your mouth hangs open taking in a deep breath in preparation for the loudest shriek of your life—and it only takes seconds for your blood to sprinkle from the falling panga into your mouth. You taste blood.
“Scream. Scream.”
Hack-crack-crack, the splintering of bone. Like chicken, you think, but your head is mere air now. Your sanity pales at the immensity of the pain. It feels like a crack of lighting in the marrow. If pain had a sound, it would be as loud as the ensuing thunderclap that shakes the firmament. This new pain makes the first gash in your back like a baby’s touch on its mother’s cheek.
One man pulls your forearm free and immediately the arm feels lighter by many degrees. Like a burden lifted, you think. Now, will the pain go away? The limb flails of its own accord. Where the rest of your arm was is nothing but empty space and blood spurting everywhere.
The hack-hacking continues at the knee.
You’re too weak to fight it now. What use is it to cling to life? What use is it to pray? What is God if not this impossible pain?—to be feared and revered. What use is it to breathe? You imagine how you look; lying there, limp, and then you see yourself. You’re standing over one of the men’s shoulders like a supervisor watching how he works.
Hack-hack-hack.
Hack-crack. Crack-crack.
Once. Twice. Thrice. Four times, you blink, each time taking you longer to open your eyes again. The hacking is a distant thing. Your eyelids weigh the whole world. Try as you may, they remain shut. And you feel yourself trickle away.
It’s as if you’re listening through a cushion. You hear the muffled wail of an owl, your only mourner. Coldness spreads through you like an expanding wave.
The last thought: such a sweet smell in the air—
—that lurks long after I’ve jerked awake, drenched in sweat, gasping, and holding my sheets in a tight fist—the only one I have left.
At Buhangija, Adimu, my bunkmate told me I screamed in my sleep and couldn’t wake no matter how hard she shook me. Many others had their own nightly torments too. We would sit up and talk through the night. By morning, the smell would be gone.
I remember one of those nights: while we laughed, a girl, she’d lost her right arm in an attack, called one of the security guards blue-blacks—‘he looks like under the bed at midnight’—and we burst into laughter. There was an awkward silence when the laughter ended. Then Adimu said, ‘We are not black and we are not white also.’
Silence ensued.
“We are just albino,” another girl said as if to herself.
For the first time, I felt I belonged, and at the same time, I felt more apart than before from everyone else who didn’t have my skin. But I hadn’t accepted that categorisation the way that girl had.
“Yes,” Adimu said, but I could tell she hadn’t accepted it either.
***
“Hello?” a voice eventually answered.
I hung up. It was my first instinct. The phone rang a few moments later.
“Hello? I can’t hear you,” the woman said. Mama’s voice.
“It’s Johari.”
Some part of me rejected the fact and wanted it to be a scam. I wanted what little life I had left to remain as it was.
“Hello? Are you there? Did you hear me?”
She spoke English with an accent I didn’t recognise.
“Yes.” The response stumbled out of its own accord, and I became aware of another yes waiting at the edge of my lips.
Where was she that the network was that bad? I wanted to ask. Where had she disappeared to all these years? Did she know Mama was dead? How has she been living? How did she find me?
“Baba needs help.”
I felt my fingers ache from holding the phone too tightly.
“Can you come see him?”
Here was a sister, family, one to bury me, to remember me—but at the same time, my mouth hung open. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to know where Baba went when he was away, what he did, where he got those wads of cash. Who was he really?
Everything around me vanished and I was suddenly there—one memory of Baba. He wears a maroon football jersey and black jeans. He’s leaning against the doorpost, arms folded across the chest, staring at me. He holds my eyes and I catch a fleeting tick of the corner of his lips. An almost smile. I had been gathering laundry to wash. No bell had announced him. His strong sweet smell filled the room and remained long after he had turned and left.
“Hello? Hello?” Johari said on the other side of the phone, and then to someone wherever she was, “I can’t hear her. Network maybe.” A voice I couldn’t quite make out responded to her. “Yes, yes. Let me do that.” She hung up.
Moments later, the phone rang. It was still at my ear.
It rings every day.