Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika Read Free Book Online Page B

terror, climbing trees to get away. People ought to have been safe up in the mango trees behind the thick canopy of green leaves where we used to hide as children. But no, according to this Jocelyn, these mad people had chased them even there, before smoking them out – some burning, as they fell from the branches. The date was 11 September 2001.
    I started sending money back home, to the orphans, even though I couldn’t always be sure whether the money would reach those most affected. It felt better to be doing something rather than nothing. For how was it possible that this had happened in my home city – the place where I’d grown up and that I’d once described as the warmest, most generous place on earth, where parents routinely took it upon themselves to look after everyone else’s children or discipline them if need be; the place where one always cooked for more than the number of people in one’s household in case others dropped by; the placewhere old people were never relegated to stuffy barracks to sit for hours waiting for death; the place where vegetable sellers routinely gave their loyal customers a dash of several guavas or a small calabash of tomatoes for the evening stew, something small for free; the place where people said ‘sorry’ whenever someone tripped or fell or grazed themselves because that was the linguistic mirror of a culture based on empathy, having nothing to do with who was at fault; the place where Muslims celebrated Christmas and Christians broke the fast during Ramadan with their Muslim brothers and sisters; the place where grown men held hands and grown women walked arm in arm; the place where the term ‘cousin’ was never used because all cousins were brothers or sisters; the place where Sundays were spent visiting friends and relatives; the place where weddings and funerals and naming ceremonies and baptisms and graduations and independence celebrations and governor’s parties were lavish and celebratory; the place where everyone knew your family; the place where the type of atrocities you read about in history class concerning the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Nicaraguans, the Boers and all those foreign people, was never supposed to happen to you, or to your loved ones. Ever. Until one day it did. And worse.
    And because Joslyn no longer seemed fictitious, because the good life I’d dreamt of for Jocelyn and her children now felt so tenuous, I put the manuscript away on the highest shelf where I prayed that my character would be hidden, far from danger. I returned to the company of old literary friends and the characters that I had taught to so many students over the years. I went first to Blindness and July’s People, because if anyone could survive it would be the doctor’s wife and Maureen. And then I found myself sketching new chapters in my journal and changing the endings of stories so that some of those female characters not allowed to make it in their original version did in mine. Mrs Manstey didn’t die in a fire, Firdaus wasn’t executed, and Magda never went mad. Ophelia didn’t go mad. Diouna didn’t go mad. Tess didn’t go mad. Nor did Jane Eyre or Antoinette Cosway. And once I’d breathed new life into a story I was satisfied, until my next visit – at which point I might add a chapter or lift a character and take her to another book. It frustrated me though not to have finished Joslyn’s story. What I needed was a generous soul, a character that could transform things, really transform things. So now, lying in bed with nothing better to do, I find myself casting around for additional characters. I think of how I’d like to revisit those that I hadn’t read for some time. What if Magda had been able to pass her baby, safely, into the hands of a kind German woman? Thrust the baby into a stranger’s arms who would then raise the young girl with love as someone might have done for any of Joslyn’s children. Thinking of this