Yvonne Owuor - Dust

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.

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.