Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa'Thiong'o Read Free Book Online Page A

happy to be leaving for home, but I felt sad for those I was leaving behind.
    We went to the bus stop. Bus service was very poor and unpredictable in those days. But eventually a bus arrived and we got in and took our seats. This time I could look through the window and see the scenes on each side of the road. It was amazing. It looked to me as if the trees and the grass were moving backward as the bus moved forward. The faster it ran forward, the faster the scenery moved backward. We drove for quite a distance. Then the conductor came to collect the fare. My mother gave him all the money she had and told him that we were going to get off at the last stop in Limuru. He looked at us strangely and then said: Mother, you are going in the wrong direction, toward Ngong, not Limuru. At the next stop, he told us to get off and wait on the other side of the road for the bus going back.
    Fortunately, at that moment, a bus moving in the opposite direction came. He hailed it and spoke to the driver and the conductor. He gave my mother the money he had taken from her. The new conductor in the new bus took us back through the city and eventually dropped us at a stop, again without charging us, and we took the next bus to Limuru and home.
    I was excited that I had been to the big city. I had never seen many stone buildings together. Were these the same buildings that my father had seen as a youth in flight fromMũrang’a? Or the same that had housed half brother Kabae, the king’s man? Could any of these buildings be the place where the truck that hit our house had come from? Or maybe they were all different Nairobis. It did not really matter: I was simply glad that now I could see and I would not have to endure razor blade incisions on my eyelids or have people call me Gacici. But I was even more amazed that my mother, who had never been to Nairobi without a helping companion, had guided me through it all. Surely my mother could do anything to which she set her mind.

Eyes healed, I was able to go back to the games of my childhood with greater freedom and enjoyment. One of the games my bad eyes would not have allowed me to play involved sliding down a hillside seated on a board along a slippery path smoothed with water the boys had drawn from the Manguo marshes. The slippery path ended just above a dirt road used by motor vehicles. The idea was to go down as fast as one could and then suddenly veer to the left or right just before the road. The whole thing needed good eyes to avoid possible collision with a passing motorcar. Now I was able to play the sport. It was dangerous but exhilarating, and at the end of the day I would be covered with mud. My mother promptly forbade it, reprimanding me for teaching my younger brother bad habits.
    We also played a kind of pool; the ground was the table, and in place of four holes there was only one. Two competitors, each with six bottle tops in hand, would stand at an agreed-upon distance and throw the lot into the hole by turns, the idea being to get as many as possible into the hole with the first throw. As for the ones that missed the hole, each player, with a striker, a bottle top packed with mudto make it heavy, would try to hit them into the hole. The winner collected bottle tops from the defeated. The player with the highest score was the champion awaiting challengers with their own six bottle tops. There were boys who remained unconquered champions for days and in time attracted challengers from other villagers. I was never good at this because it involved good eye-hand coordination. This particular game, when in season, was addictive and often made some boys neglect their household chores in the pursuit of fame through the accumulation of bottle tops. Sometimes the most skilled played for money. My mother was very firm against our playing it.
    My mother disliked any games that involved crowds of boys away from home. She wanted us to confine ourselves to those that could be played in our