Nuruddin Farah - Hiding in Plain Sight

Then in they come, Valerie and Salif. Valerie embraces Bella, and after exchanging cursory greetings, asks, “Where is my daughter?”

“She is showering and changing,” says Bella.

“Was she late in waking up as usual?”

Bella says protectively, “She was up early.”

“And we all had breakfast together,” adds Salif.

Bella washes her hands and dries them and offers to make coffee or tea. Padmini opts for coffee and Valerie for tea with milk and sugar.

Salif, in the meantime, goes upstairs and discovers that his sister has decided not to bother with showering. She is in her bedroom wearing a pair of many-pocketed safari pants, but she has decided she isn’t happy with how they look or feel. She takes them off and puts on a pair of jeans, but they are too tight. She complains that it is all the eating they’ve been doing lately that has made her gain so much weight. Salif, still standing in the doorway, looks from the clothes on the bed to Dahaba and back. He urges her to get on with it. “We’re going on an outing, not on a photo shoot.”

But this only throws her into more of a muddle. She takes off the jeans and puts the safari pants back on. But now she can’t undo the knots in the laces of her tennis shoes. Salif also observes that she has on socks mismatched in both color and size.

“I’ll go ahead if you don’t mind,” he says.

“Give me another minute.”

Salif cannot figure out why she is so nervous, nor why she is fussing about what to wear, especially in a country where outdoor clothing is an all-year affair. He importunes her to get moving when he hears their mother shouting from downstairs. “Where are my darlings?”

Bella says, “What has become of you two?”

He goes downstairs to find everyone waiting. “Dahaba will be here pronto,” he says. But when she does ultimately join them, Dahaba is back in the jeans and has on a pair of sneakers different from the pair whose laces she must have failed to untangle. Salif fights back a fledgling grin forming around his lips at the memory of the many occasions when Dahaba couldn’t decide what to wear, what to eat, or whether she was a friend or foe to this or that person.

Valerie says, “Are we all set?”

Dahaba nods her head. “Yes, Mummy.”

“Auntie Padmini, who I understand has motion sickness, will sit in the front,” says Bella. “And I will drive.”

“And where is Mum going to sit?” asks Dahaba.

“In the back, between you and Salif.”

Valerie wraps herself around Dahaba, and the two of them walk ahead in the direction of Aar’s car. Salif hangs back to set the house alarm then locks up and hurries to join them. When they are all seated, Valerie, sandwiched between her son and daughter, whispers, “Are you okay?” to Dahaba. Dahaba says that she has an upset stomach. But when Valerie asks if she is well enough to come on the outing, Dahaba waves her away.

Salif attributes Dahaba’s discomfort to nerves and her lack of control over the seating arrangements, which have deprived her of the front seat. Well, if she wanted to be present when that matter was being decided, Salif thinks, then she should have made up her mind which pair of pants she wished to wear a little sooner.

Dahaba wants to know if the restaurant where they will have their lunch has been decided on.

“I prepared all kinds of finger food yesterday when you were with your friends,” Bella says. “We have drumsticks, salad, pita bread, and a couple of baguettes from that French bakery opposite the Nakumatt supermarket. Plus we have all manner of soft drinks and bottled water. I was thinking we’d have a picnic near Lake Naivasha.”

Dahaba says nothing, even though it is obvious from the expression on her face that she doesn’t like this either. Salif leans forward, as though he might reprimand her, but just then Bella turns on the engine, and he sits back. She adjusts her seat and programs the GPS, then voilà, bad-mannered Cawrala awakens, her voice gruff and impatient. “Out the gate, make a right.” No please and no sweet words from today’s grumpy guide.

At the exit, the guard opens the gate for them, smiling broadly, and then they are off on the eighty-seven-kilometer drive to Naivasha, much of it uphill.

“What would we do without GPS?” says Bella.

To everyone’s delighted surprise, Dahaba is soon her usual feisty self. “We’d rely more on maps, no problem. Years ago we read maps. There was even a time when maps didn’t exist, not the way they do in this day and age. Every generation finds its own answer to the questions life and its sidekicks pose. Now there is GPS. In a decade, there will be something else in its place.”

“And before city maps existed, what did people do to help them go places?” asks Bella, looking into the rearview mirror, her eyes meeting Dahaba’s.

“People traveled less,” says Dahaba. “They were less adventurous and stayed within confined areas that they were familiar with.”

Salif, presently finding his tongue, says, “Dad told me that Somalis are hardly the ideal tourists. You don’t find them exploring the flora and fauna of a new place and few of them set foot in a museum. They visit their relatives or friends, that’s all. If you have a Somali visiting you and you go to work in the morning, it is possible you will find him still sitting there in front of the TV when you return, waiting for you. It doesn’t occur to many of them to venture out on their own, to buy a metro ticket, and to experience life in the city to which they’ve come until you are there to be their guide and mentor.”

“You’re aware he was generalizing?” says Dahaba.

“Of course he was,” concedes Salif. And in the silence that follows, he points out the Muthaiga Country Club, Muthaiga Road, and Limuru Road, which will take them up the steep hill toward their destination. Everyone seems relaxed because the stop-and-go traffic they were anticipating has not materialized.

Only Salif seems unsurprised. “It’s a public holiday,” he informs them.

Bella asks, “In commemoration of what?”

“I forget which one, there are so many of them.”

Dahaba gives her two cents’ worth of theory. “One can’t remember what the holidays are for when one is not entirely in sync with the national psyche.”

“I don’t follow your meaning,” says Padmini.

Salif picks up where Dahaba has left off. “Somalis, even those who are to all intents and purposes Kenyans, do not feel part of this country. I saw a moving documentary on Al Jazeera the other evening, an original documentary put together and narrated by a Kenyan Somali, a well-respected journalist. He says that as a minority Kenyan Somalis feel politically disenfranchised, alienated from the country’s body politic.”

Padmini says, “Maybe it is Jomo Kenyatta Day.”

Valerie asks, “Must we talk politics?”

“This is not politics, Mum,” says Dahaba.

“If it is not politics, what is it?”

“It is the history of this country.”

“Reminds me of the conversation I’ve often heard whenever two Somalis meet and, like the Irish, can’t avoid talking politics — the Troubles, the massacre of year so-and-so, the IRA and who was in it and who wasn’t.”

“Know why the English talk less about politics?” asks Dahaba, speaking too loudly for everybody’s liking because she feels she has a valid point to contribute to the conversation.

Valerie turns to Dahaba, “Why, my darling?”

“Because you don’t need to talk much about politics when you have so much power you don’t know what to do with it.”

Although Bella is not displeased so far with the way the conversation has gone, she is also relieved that there have been no tantrums, no lost tempers. So far everybody has been making his or her point civilly. But like Valerie, Bella has had enough of this type of conversation. It’s one reason she does not always like socializing with Somalis; they talk politics incessantly, cutthroat clan politics. They live and breathe it, and they never agree on anything.