Where the heart is

The first time I came to Busia, the border post was old and run-down. Dusty and brown.

We had arrived by Kondele. A kondele was a Kisumu Matatu, an old Peugeot station wagon usually, frail and rattling but sturdy enough ,somehow, to carry a dozen people across the 200 kilometers from Kisumu to Busia,

On that day in January in 1988 I was one of those dozen. Myself, my mother, my two sisters and the few clothes, books and disappointments that were all Moi’s government had allowed us to pack when we were evicted from his republic bundled out of the creaking station wagon on the edge of Kenya. We stood waiting in the dusty sunlight for passports to be stamped and I looked across the brown gate for the first time at Uganda. Every memory of my childhood that I have up to that point is a happy one.

Things

In those days we made a lot of impulse purchases. In clothing stores and electronic goods shops. New things made us feel good... The idea, perhaps, was that bringing something fresh and shiny and perfect and clean into our lives would banish the gathering sense of its staleness. I could not be old with so many new things around me.

But like all addictions it eventually lost its efficacy. And we were just doing it even though it no longer worked. The new MP3 players kept playing the same old songs. The new shoes took us along the same old routes and then brought us back as tired as always. And no matter what sunglasses I wore, they saw the same thing.

So I became sceptical of spending. Long losing bouts with being broke galvanised this, but even when I had money again, I was reluctant to let it go. I was no longer ready to let it chase the vain hope of my reinvigoration. I wanted to horde it, keep it close, to save it and wait for that one perfect commodity to show up in the mall. Shiny, gleaming, plastic-wrapped, seductive and ready. I wanted to make sure I would have enough money to buy it.

But that was as vain as spending. Because no one was ever going to stock what I wanted. We all know money can’t buy it.

Look at this morose m**f** here. Looks like somebody done s** in his cereal

I know I should change. But I stay here instead, still waiting. The truth is I have become comfortable in this stasis, this sticky web that has coagulated around me, the messy room growing cumulatively messier. I sit here in the light of the silent TV and think, “I should change.” I want to be changed. But I am not so sure right now if I want to change.

I don’t know what happened to those days, the power that drove us, when we called it destiny, not even dreams, when we waited for something different. Girls with silver wings on their backs, so light and precious that they could only be seen when the moonlight caught them just right, men who all had sly private smiles and secrets that no one but they would ever understand, and when they spoke, if they spoke long enough, they would spill out words that would give the mysteries of life true names.

I don’t know where those days are. Lost in the past where things are forgotten and wasted, or still ahead of us, waiting for me to stop waiting?

Two Men

Once upon a time there wre two men. One was a rock. The other was a
wisp of smoke.
One would be here forever, because he was made of the same eternal substance as the earth upon which he stood; the other was at the mercy of the wind.
They were two men because I could not be both at the same time, and if I started the day as one, I was never sure I would not end it as the other. That is how we live: dark and light, right and wrong,
conviction and fear, rock and smoke.

Over the bridge

When I started this blog all I did was post passages from other writers. I am going to do that again now.

Ah, the Brooklyn Bridge. You seem to be hovering over a shimmering beauty. The lights dance off of the top of Manhattan’s skyscraper spires and sweep the water, strike and hold your eye prisoner. These are wickedly enchanting depths; you gasp and hold yourself still, leaning as far out over the bridge as you can, and spreading your arms out. 

From Princess here

So Long Since I've Seen The Ocean

Many years ago some tourists and I set out in a boat with a glass bottom and sailed, if that word is applicable in the case of a motorboat, outwards into the sea until land was no longer visible. We landed on a sand bank, that is a sort of dune on the ocean floor that rises until it is just beneath the water's surface. If you stand on a sandbank's summit, it's like standing in shallow water.
I leaned back and fell and floated my ears submerged, my body a weightless piece of flotsam, and I heard nothing but the ocean and saw nothing but the sky.
The ocean is many miles and many years away now, but I think of it still and I when I do I miss its constant power, its endless roar. I miss the smell of salt that filled the coastal city we had set out from. I miss the sense that infinity is palpable and I miss how unavoidable it made my own insignificance.
Floating still in the middle of the sea you realise that this world is far far greater than anything you are, and just like that, you stop worrying.

A Day In The Life II

I don't really wake up until I am out of the house, though. That languid semi-awareness of morning doesn't fully disperse until I am out of the house and walking up the narrow meters round the corner to the shop where I get my daily airtime and then to the taxi stage. 

If it is a bright morning, wakefulness will come in a blast of green: bush and grass and weeds and shambas. There will be some naked or half-naked kids whose only English is the word "ba-bye". Their mothers or guardians will grin at the glee with which the kids wave and will
greet me, too.

Morning will come with a pleasant surprise, with the sudden realisation of how vigorously life proceeds outside my dark, airless home.

And then the taxi. If we pass the good route, with the good road, at one point, roughly eight minutes of smooth cruising from home, we will pass under a hill that over a couple of years has transformed from wilderness and is now built up with new mansions. They are bright
white, gleaming and seducing you with the hope of how much is possible in Uganda.

Or if there is a traffic jam, we'll cut through the murrram, the rough, crooked, difficult murram path, over crumbpling, tightly-huddled hovels of mud, tin and plastic. On this route the taxi
is closer to the homes and you can even see sigiri steam emerging from behind the sheets of cotton that serve as doors in the daytime.

There are more naked kids. They say byebye as we roll past.