happened.
‘Where do you go to school?’ O asked her.
She went to Loreto Convent, Msongari.
‘Isn’t that a boarding school?’
‘I am on bursary,’ she answered.
It turned out that Janet’s mother had died in the Rwandan genocide, and she lived with her father in Mathare – she walked home every day as her scholarship didn’t cover her boarding fees.
O went out and returned moments later with a dress and slippers – ‘From one of the nurses,’ he explained. Then, together, we left the hospital and went to a nearby café. We were starving, and in spite of our various traumas we ate like we hadn’t seen a meal in a week. Afterwards, we took Janet to her school, where O explained what had happened to a stern-looking black sister in a habit and wimple. Janet had two more years to go and was a bright girl, she told us. She would see to it that she was allowed to board.
We drove back to Eastleigh Estate without much conversation. It was late in the evening, almost midnight by the time we arrived at O’s place and his wife had already goneto bed. He walked me to my room and stood in the doorway as I plopped onto the bed, feeling weightless and empty.
‘We traded five lives for one,’ I said to him, thinking of my conversation with Joshua.
I didn’t mean anything by it. The words just came out of my mouth. What choice did we have? I could not pretend that I couldn’t hear Janet’s screams. We couldn’t have let the thugs kill us either. But still, it was five lives for one. Once I decided to help Janet, I had set the wheels in motion – people were going to die.
‘Better the bad guys than the good guys, I suppose,’ I added.
‘Ishmael, me and you, we are not good people. We have done some good and some bad … But Janet is a good person and she survived. That cannot be a bad thing,’ O said as he pulled the door shut.
A few minutes later I heard the shower start running, and, exhausted, I drifted off to sleep.
I was a bird – flying, dipping in and out of clouds – then suddenly I became a huge plane carrying white tourists, then I was rushing into a kitchen because something was burning only to find a canister of tear gas in the oven. I looked away, to see if I could find my wife, and when I looked back the canister became a birthday cake, and my wife and I were each cutting a piece. But when I was just about to take a bite, I saw that instead of a cake, it was a human heart – still beating even with us holding pieces of it that looked like cake. I tried to warn my wife but she couldn’t hear me. I had lost my voice. She took a bite and the whole heart quivered …
I woke up at five am and decided to take a walk. Outside, the morning air was crisp and slightly stale. In the light of the sun, yellowish through the mist, Eastleigh looked peaceful and even the piles of garbage along the tarmacked streets looked somehow beautiful. A few blocks past O’s house, I saw little children in clean blue-and-white uniforms closing a metal gate behind them. They were yawning and I couldn’t help smiling. I said hello to them, but they looked at me suspiciously. I continued on.
Close to a shopping centre, I saw old Somali women putting up their makeshift stalls, bales of fresh mangoes, bananas and khat waiting to be displayed. At the bus station, bus and matatu drivers were readying their vehicles for a busy morning. Loud music – a confused mix of different rap songs – was playing above the roar of backfiring engines. I walked on.
At a kiosk, I bought some tea and a chapatti. I sat on a bench blowing the hot chai steam into the air to cool it down. Nobody paid me any attention – this early in the morning people were busy minding their own stories.
I thought back to how, once, in New Jersey investigating one thing or another, I was talking to this old man and it came out that he had never been to New York. New York, a thirty-minute train ride from Newark! ‘I have no reason to go to New
‘Where do you go to school?’ O asked her.
She went to Loreto Convent, Msongari.
‘Isn’t that a boarding school?’
‘I am on bursary,’ she answered.
It turned out that Janet’s mother had died in the Rwandan genocide, and she lived with her father in Mathare – she walked home every day as her scholarship didn’t cover her boarding fees.
O went out and returned moments later with a dress and slippers – ‘From one of the nurses,’ he explained. Then, together, we left the hospital and went to a nearby café. We were starving, and in spite of our various traumas we ate like we hadn’t seen a meal in a week. Afterwards, we took Janet to her school, where O explained what had happened to a stern-looking black sister in a habit and wimple. Janet had two more years to go and was a bright girl, she told us. She would see to it that she was allowed to board.
We drove back to Eastleigh Estate without much conversation. It was late in the evening, almost midnight by the time we arrived at O’s place and his wife had already goneto bed. He walked me to my room and stood in the doorway as I plopped onto the bed, feeling weightless and empty.
‘We traded five lives for one,’ I said to him, thinking of my conversation with Joshua.
I didn’t mean anything by it. The words just came out of my mouth. What choice did we have? I could not pretend that I couldn’t hear Janet’s screams. We couldn’t have let the thugs kill us either. But still, it was five lives for one. Once I decided to help Janet, I had set the wheels in motion – people were going to die.
‘Better the bad guys than the good guys, I suppose,’ I added.
‘Ishmael, me and you, we are not good people. We have done some good and some bad … But Janet is a good person and she survived. That cannot be a bad thing,’ O said as he pulled the door shut.
A few minutes later I heard the shower start running, and, exhausted, I drifted off to sleep.
I was a bird – flying, dipping in and out of clouds – then suddenly I became a huge plane carrying white tourists, then I was rushing into a kitchen because something was burning only to find a canister of tear gas in the oven. I looked away, to see if I could find my wife, and when I looked back the canister became a birthday cake, and my wife and I were each cutting a piece. But when I was just about to take a bite, I saw that instead of a cake, it was a human heart – still beating even with us holding pieces of it that looked like cake. I tried to warn my wife but she couldn’t hear me. I had lost my voice. She took a bite and the whole heart quivered …
I woke up at five am and decided to take a walk. Outside, the morning air was crisp and slightly stale. In the light of the sun, yellowish through the mist, Eastleigh looked peaceful and even the piles of garbage along the tarmacked streets looked somehow beautiful. A few blocks past O’s house, I saw little children in clean blue-and-white uniforms closing a metal gate behind them. They were yawning and I couldn’t help smiling. I said hello to them, but they looked at me suspiciously. I continued on.
Close to a shopping centre, I saw old Somali women putting up their makeshift stalls, bales of fresh mangoes, bananas and khat waiting to be displayed. At the bus station, bus and matatu drivers were readying their vehicles for a busy morning. Loud music – a confused mix of different rap songs – was playing above the roar of backfiring engines. I walked on.
At a kiosk, I bought some tea and a chapatti. I sat on a bench blowing the hot chai steam into the air to cool it down. Nobody paid me any attention – this early in the morning people were busy minding their own stories.
I thought back to how, once, in New Jersey investigating one thing or another, I was talking to this old man and it came out that he had never been to New York. New York, a thirty-minute train ride from Newark! ‘I have no reason to go to New
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