Dream Chasers

Claudette Oduor

Description

Four months to the disputed December 2007 general elections in Kenya, Lulu is living with a divorced, jobless mother prone to periodic lunacy. The radio and television are filled with campaigns, which Lulu pays little attention to. She doesn't think the elections have a bearing in her life.Lulu is in love with her best friend, Muchai, but they can neither admit it to themselves nor do something about it because Lulu is from the Luo tribe, and Muchai is Kikuyu. Muchai is marrying his girlfriend not because he loves her but because she is Kikuyu like him. His family would rather he be unhappy with a Kikuyu than happy with a Luo girl.Muchai's girlfriend breaks off the engagement, but elections take place and a wave of ethnic cleansing threatens to rob Lulu of her chance to finally be with Muchai.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Master Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789966158956
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Dream Chasers
Claudette Oduor




The nomad’s true home lies in the changing of the seasons. I dedicate this to hearts like mine—nomads perching in the shelter of a new sentence, dusting feet off on paragraphs, making love to characters. This is for you who are both terrified and thrilled by the onset of a full stop because it means the end of one journey and the beginning of another.



[One]
A WEEK BEFORE MAMA THREW the butcher knife at me, she and I sat at the veranda, sorting pishori rice that she was to cook while I was at church. We picked the shiny little stones that hid within the rice, pushed them to one side of the tray, and slid the clean rice to the other side of the tray. When the clean rice became a mound, Mama poured it into a basin.
We worked silently: four hands, four eyes, tightly drawn lips, beads of sweat building up on two protruding foreheads, and a dozen threads of thought spinning in two minds. A few feet from us, the fresh laundry hanging on the lines surged this way and that, throwing spray on the concrete slabs on the ground. Chickens roamed freely in the yard, pecking at worms and baby lizards, dismembering them, and swallowing them. A mother hen broke crumbs for its chicks. A turkey tore apart a banana peel and ate it. Two geese walked up and down the laundry area.
If the clothes hung low enough, the geese would latch their orange beak onto them and suck their water out, muddying them with their dirty bills. But the clothes were too high up now, so they patrolled up and down, waiting for the moisture to go drip-drop on the concrete slabs below. They ran and caught the droplets before they hit the ground. The geese weren’t thirsty; they just liked to play.
Mama was like the mothers illustrated in the Hadithi Njoo children’s storybooks; they always wore a simple gingham dress that erased all the curves from the body and drew straight lines in their place. When I was younger, I had wondered what would happen if she wore something attractive. Would Baba have loved her more or would she have been so startlingly different that I wouldn’t have recognised her?
Mama’s voice interrupted the dribbling of the laundry water, the clucking of the mother hen, and the swoosh of rice falling from the tray to the basin.
“Chinika,” she said, her eyes trailing over the veranda, over the little silver spears at the top of the perimeter fence, over the pine tips to the twirling cappuccino clouds in the sky.
“Mama,” I replied, and touched her hand, the hand dusted with rice powder. She pulled her hand away, upsetting the tray. Rice scampered across the floor, across the ridges of our toes, and across her flip-flops. Mounds of stone and rice debris fell into the basin of clean sorted rice. “Mama?”
She stood up, shoving the empty tray into my hands. Rice grains ensconced in the pleats of her dress jumped to their death on the floor. “It’s the hunger,” she said, wiping her brow, spreading rice dust across her forehead. “It’s making me disoriented. Let’s go have breakfast.”
We ate boiled maize and bread with tea.
Mama was wrong. The hunger did not disorient her; it was her episodes. They were back. I didn’t see them coming, although I should have. They crept on the balls of their feet and threw acorns on the windows of Mama’s mind, waiting as she flung those windows open to let them in. Mama forgot to shut the windows after that; she let the draft in as well. The draft hurled her wits about like linen on the clothesline.
Mama reached over for a slice of bread, holding a butter knife over it. She didn’t cut it; her mind hovered over the knife. She caressed it, her fingers delicately running over the edge of the shiny silver.
“Mama?” I pleaded.
She dropped the knife on the table. It fell down with a gentle thud. Pub ! It made my teacup shake, making little waves in my tea.
“Go, Lulu,” Mama said. “Go to church.”
Muchai, a childhood friend, waited for me at the matatu stage. We took one of the public-utility vans to town, got off at Times Tower, and then walked to the basilica. Mass had already begun. The church was filled, so we stood at the back among other shamefaced late faithful who didn’t look each other in the eye, even when offering each other a limp, reluctant sign of peace.
The sermon was about Lazarus the poor man who begged outside the rich man’s house. Lazarus languished. Languished and languished. “Languish” was a beautiful word. It should never be used to describe suffering.
After Mass, Muchai went off to meet his girlfriend Nyaera, and I returned home.
Mama and I ate rice and kidney beans cooked in coconut milk. We sat in the kitchen, listening to the drip of water in the sink. The tap was constantly leaking into the drain. A drop of water hung from its spout. It jumped down, cracking its head against the basin. Another drop peeked through the mouth, looking for the first one. It forgot to hold tight, lost its balance, and fell like the first drop. A search party of droplets came out, but each one disintegrated like the others.
“You should fix that thing, Mama,” I said.
“Give me a job, Lulu, and I will make enough money to fix the entire plumbing.”
Mama went to lie down. I sat on the steps at the back door, watching her geese pacing up and down the yard, patrolling the turkey and the chicken. The wind shook leaves off the mukinduri tree, littering the yard. I stood up and ran after the leaves scattered in the air. Muchai and I had chased leaves when we were younger. He had said that if we caught one, we could make a wish. I caught four and made one wish four times.
Spreading a mat under the mukinduri , I took out a handheld radio and fell asleep listening to an analysis of Raila Odinga’s campaign techniques juxtaposed with incumbent President Mwai Kibaki’s. When I awoke, the shadows had crept in already. There was a blackout, and it was raining. I ate in the darkness—boiled rice with mchicha plucked from the garden. Mama said it was taboo to do this; one might swallow devils down with their food. We were out of candles; I had no choice but to eat in the gloom. Maybe if I swallowed demons down with my food, they would possess my stomach and leave my mind alone.
The blackness at my house was heavy—the kind which held sticks and stones, and prodded at you from all directions, poking fun at your smallness. It made you nervous and wish for some light to measure your physical existence against, to remind you that you were alive and that you were you.
There was a knock on the door. I pulled it open. Muchai stood on the veranda, in a place where the rain couldn’t stretch its arms to reach him. I stepped out into the dark, closed the door, and stood against it for a few seconds. I watched the mukinduri seize as the wind coursed through its branches, and the sky spat saliva all over the garden.
“Do you remember the story of why Mr Hyena limps?” Muchai asked. “What was it?”
“I do. Mr Hyena heard there was a party. He followed the directions and came across a fork in the road. He couldn’t decide which of the two paths to choose, so he widened his forelegs and hind legs, and walked both paths for as long as his body could allow. In the end, he ripped right through his middle.”
“I feel like that hyena.”
“Is there a party down the road?”
“No. Today, I asked Nyaera to marry me.”
“You went down on your knee and asked her?”
“No, I didn’t go down on my knee. I just asked her.”
“You said, ‘Nyaera will you marry me?’”
“No, I said, ‘Nyaera, maybe we should … you know … settle down.’”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Maybe we should.’” Muchai stared at me with his small slanted eyes, trying to read the expression on my face. “You think I’m making a mistake?” He tried to pry more words out of my eyes, but I looked away, refusing to let him.
“Have you told your family?”
“I came to you first.”
“They’ll be happy for you.”
“Aren’t you?”
“You aren’t even happy for yourself. We won’t be friends much longer, will we?”
Muchai took a step towards me. “Look at me, Lulu.” He lifted my chin until I had to look, until my nose rubbed on his, and his warm breath became mine on my lips. His eyes were a plethora of colours and thoughts and old memories.
The old memories smelt like the prim leather interior of his father’s old Volvo, like antiseptic after a knee bruise and the hibiscus-seed juice his mother had made us drink; like dried spit from secret handshakes, the sulphur oil in his sister’s hair, and his brother’s curdled breath after taking antibiotics thrice that day instead of twice as instructed by the doctor. I remembered a picture of four stick people drawn with a burgundy crayon whose caption, in a child’s wriggly hand, read: Friends forever and ever and ever. And ever. Says Muchai.
“Take that back,” Muchai pleaded.
Defiance was in my face. “No.” Tears stung my eyes. They weighed down on my eyelids; some of them spilled on to my tongue. They were as bitter as the aloe juice Mama made me take for colds. Muchai watched me as I did the same to him through my tears. His eyes felt like warm fizzy black currants on my face. Finally, he turned away, focusing on a point amid the rows of maize stalks in a neighbour’s garden.
“I’m happy for you,” I said. “It’s just that … Mama has relapsed into her episodes.”



[Two]
“MAMA, DID YOU PAY the electricity bill?” I asked. “It has been forty-eight hours; this is no ordinary blackout.”
Mama ignored me. She continued to claw through the maize cob in her hand, dropping the grains into a sufuria .
“You should talk to Baba. He will give you money.”
“You know what they say, Lulu? Rain beats a leopard’s skin but does not wash out its spots.”
“Mama, those who can’t swallow their pride swallow stones for supper.”
Mama threw the empty cob into a basin