Read Online Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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yellow-green paint with a coat of arms. It read Nairobi City Mortuary .
What endures?
Surprise.
It is also a question mark.
Now, in the wide-spaced rooms of home, Ajany lunges from spot to spot, tugging at filaments she can feel, urging Odidi in. See .
The room she wanders through has wood shutters that do not close and is infused with the smell of dung, salt, milk, smoke, herbs, and ghee. Ajany stumbles over a fourteen-holed Ajua board on the floor, moves it aside with her feet. On the mantelpiece, two black-and-white photographs, one showing a man on horseback carrying a crooked Kenyan flag—her father, Nyipir Oganda—the other, in a Sellotaped frame, featuring a broad-faced man, the late minister for economic planning, planner of a pre-independence mass airlift, designer of the national flag, the murdered Mr. Tom Mboya. Near these, a fading color studio-portrait of a well-dressed Oganda family, including Galgalu, arranged as if facing a firing squad.
Beside the photographs, a large seashell with orange lips. Ajany lifts it up, remembering its weight, the magic of listening to beckoning oceans. Raises it to her ear. Hears Odidi: ’Jany, you can hear the sound of Far Away . She returns the shell to its grimy place. A creak. Ajany looks over her shoulder. Memory echoes of family feet on stained acacia wood, white-stoned floors of flaking varnish and gnarled planks. Another framed picture. Ajany touches the toothless grinning face of Odidi-Eight-Years-Old. She leans forward and rests her face against the glass. Tightening of chest as she chokes in all the undone yesterdays. This shade of longing has a venomous sting: it poisons breath, stretches out time.
Work hard. Study .
Ajany turns to look into the hearth. Work hard. Study . Nyipir always tried to be home so that when his children returned from school for the holidays they would find him there. Sometimes he would meet their erratic bus and they would all ride back to Wuoth Ogik in the then-green family Land Rover.
His questions were immediate: What did you learn? Odidi told him about rock art, Mozart, Aztecs, and the industrial revolution.
Did you learn about Burma? Nyipir asked every time
Odidi would say, “Not yet.”
Odidi. Always one of the top five in his class.
Work hard. Study .
Ajany languished at the bottom, changing places between number twenty-one and number twenty-three in a class of twenty-four.
Until one Christmas holiday when Ajany was eleven and a bit, and had found a new way of speaking what clamored inside her. She drew shapes, forms, and creatures from the space around which the image would be born. Canvas, paper, earth. A yield of unsought rewards: applause from a school she hated, the first prize in the national art show, number seventeen in the class of twenty-four, and the sense that what she felt was what it was like to be born at last.
Her large eyes shone all the way to Wuoth Ogik that December.
She talked and talked all the way to Kalacha.
At the house, she unwrapped her three winning canvases for her parents to see and praise.
Akai-ma and Nyipir saw panels of techno-caricatures of ghosts, the black leopard, and fire makers. They saw the stories as they would see secret nightmares. In the faces and patterns their daughter had conjured, her parents recognized their enemies and some of the devils that haunted them.
At first, there was silence. Then Nyipir had reared back, hands fisted, and he roared, “What’s this?” Bulging eyes filled with terror that in Akai-ma’s eyes showed itself as sad emptiness. They had glowered at Ajany, as if accusing her of something.
Akai-ma had turned to Odidi. “Go find Galgalu. Take This One with you.”
Odidi had rushed Ajany out of the room, leaving her work behind them.
They had run and run. They had made for the rocks where they could look down at the world passing by, where they could sit silent and unseen. Ajany squeezed Odidi’s right hand, cutting off its blood supply. She
What endures?
Surprise.
It is also a question mark.
Now, in the wide-spaced rooms of home, Ajany lunges from spot to spot, tugging at filaments she can feel, urging Odidi in. See .
The room she wanders through has wood shutters that do not close and is infused with the smell of dung, salt, milk, smoke, herbs, and ghee. Ajany stumbles over a fourteen-holed Ajua board on the floor, moves it aside with her feet. On the mantelpiece, two black-and-white photographs, one showing a man on horseback carrying a crooked Kenyan flag—her father, Nyipir Oganda—the other, in a Sellotaped frame, featuring a broad-faced man, the late minister for economic planning, planner of a pre-independence mass airlift, designer of the national flag, the murdered Mr. Tom Mboya. Near these, a fading color studio-portrait of a well-dressed Oganda family, including Galgalu, arranged as if facing a firing squad.
Beside the photographs, a large seashell with orange lips. Ajany lifts it up, remembering its weight, the magic of listening to beckoning oceans. Raises it to her ear. Hears Odidi: ’Jany, you can hear the sound of Far Away . She returns the shell to its grimy place. A creak. Ajany looks over her shoulder. Memory echoes of family feet on stained acacia wood, white-stoned floors of flaking varnish and gnarled planks. Another framed picture. Ajany touches the toothless grinning face of Odidi-Eight-Years-Old. She leans forward and rests her face against the glass. Tightening of chest as she chokes in all the undone yesterdays. This shade of longing has a venomous sting: it poisons breath, stretches out time.
Work hard. Study .
Ajany turns to look into the hearth. Work hard. Study . Nyipir always tried to be home so that when his children returned from school for the holidays they would find him there. Sometimes he would meet their erratic bus and they would all ride back to Wuoth Ogik in the then-green family Land Rover.
His questions were immediate: What did you learn? Odidi told him about rock art, Mozart, Aztecs, and the industrial revolution.
Did you learn about Burma? Nyipir asked every time
Odidi would say, “Not yet.”
Odidi. Always one of the top five in his class.
Work hard. Study .
Ajany languished at the bottom, changing places between number twenty-one and number twenty-three in a class of twenty-four.
Until one Christmas holiday when Ajany was eleven and a bit, and had found a new way of speaking what clamored inside her. She drew shapes, forms, and creatures from the space around which the image would be born. Canvas, paper, earth. A yield of unsought rewards: applause from a school she hated, the first prize in the national art show, number seventeen in the class of twenty-four, and the sense that what she felt was what it was like to be born at last.
Her large eyes shone all the way to Wuoth Ogik that December.
She talked and talked all the way to Kalacha.
At the house, she unwrapped her three winning canvases for her parents to see and praise.
Akai-ma and Nyipir saw panels of techno-caricatures of ghosts, the black leopard, and fire makers. They saw the stories as they would see secret nightmares. In the faces and patterns their daughter had conjured, her parents recognized their enemies and some of the devils that haunted them.
At first, there was silence. Then Nyipir had reared back, hands fisted, and he roared, “What’s this?” Bulging eyes filled with terror that in Akai-ma’s eyes showed itself as sad emptiness. They had glowered at Ajany, as if accusing her of something.
Akai-ma had turned to Odidi. “Go find Galgalu. Take This One with you.”
Odidi had rushed Ajany out of the room, leaving her work behind them.
They had run and run. They had made for the rocks where they could look down at the world passing by, where they could sit silent and unseen. Ajany squeezed Odidi’s right hand, cutting off its blood supply. She
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