Dreams in a Time of War (6 page)

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 from
Mũrang’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 mud
to 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 yard, like jumping rope and playing hopscotch, but my younger brother and I were no match for our half sisters and their friends. Jumping rope, they could do the most intricate tricks.

Like children elsewhere, I imagined airplanes. I would take a single dry blade of corn, an inch long and half an inch wide, and bore a hole in the middle through which I put a thin Y-shaped twig for steering. As I held the long end of the stick and ran against the wind the blade turned round and round, and the harder I ran the faster it spun. My brother made his own airplane the same way. We became pilots racing each other, making intricate aerial formations and maneuvers. This was fun. I did not have to squint in order to see.

We also made spinning tops, which we spun by hitting the
sides with a small strap made out of sisal strings. Here, the aim was to see who could keep his top spinning the longest, but sometimes it included racing the top over a particular distance to be the first to cross the finish line. More intricate maneuvers included trying to knock your opponent’s top with yours while yours kept spinning.

We progressed to more challenging designs and engineering: making toy bicycles, cars, trucks, buses with all the parts—the body, wheels, steering—driven by manpower instead of internal combustion engines. Some kids added toy cyclists, drivers, and passengers. We would assemble on country tracks and open places to display our works but also to note the best designs to incorporate some of the ideas into our own future creations.

But we also learned to make useful toys. Mother having no younger daughters, we did for her what the young daughters of our age did for their mothers: fetching and carrying firewood on our back with a strap hanging from our forehead. Men did not carry loads that way; they did it on their heads or shoulders. So this earned us the title of “mother’s girls.” It was meant to be praise but I did not like the expression. So we sought a manlier alternative that would not involve our backs, shoulders, or heads. A carriage! Since we could not afford a wheelbarrow like the ones we saw at the landlord’s and at the Indian shopping center, we decided to make one out of wood. We got a thick piece, chopped it, curved it all round with a machete, and then made a hole in the middle for the cog. We made the body entirely out of
wood. But we never succeeded in making our wheelbarrow serviceable, especially on loose soil when the wheel would dig into the earth, or in rainy weather when it would get stuck in the mud. We had to have a proper iron wheel. A boy named Gacĩgua offered to get us a real one, a secondhand wheel rescued from old wheelbarrows, for thirty cents. But even one cent was hard to come by.

I would have to try my hand at picking tea. I begged my older sisters to let me accompany them to a tea plantation owned by a white man nicknamed Gacurio because he wore trousers with suspenders over his belly. Tea seeds from India were first introduced in Limuru in 1903, but to me, looking at the vast endless greenery in front of me, it looked as if the tea bushes had been part of this landscape from the beginning of time. An African overseer assigned the rows to be picked to different workers. Limuru was chilly and often subject to thin sheets of rain. Sisal sacks hanging from our heads served as raincoats. This task proved too difficult for me; I could hardly reach the top of the tea bushes, and I could not pluck them the way the experienced hands were able to do. They could pluck the leaves and expertly throw them over their shoulders into a huge basket on their backs. I did not have a basket of my own, and I became more of a nuisance, always in the way, and my sisters did not take me with them again. Despite my need for thirty cents, I did not insist.

It was easier with pyrethrum flowers, and when the season came I went with the older brothers and sisters to harvest
at the landlord’s, and this time my younger brother also came along. Still, it was hard: It took the whole day for us to fill just a small sisal basket.

I don’t know how long it took, but eventually we managed to earn enough money to pay for the iron wheel. The owner raised the required fee. I was so anxious to get the wheel that I gave the money I had as down payment, but by the time I raised the rest the wheel was no longer available and it was he who now owed me money. He promised to get us another wheel. Disappointed, we resumed our engineering efforts and eventually came up with a better and smoother-functioning wheel. We then collected wood, nails, and wires from wherever we could and managed to make a semblance of a wheelbarrow. Equipped with our new vastly improved contraption, we would trek distances to collect firewood or fetch water in a tin container. Quite often the wheel would not move straight, especially on rough, uneven surfaces, and it needed the power of us two, one in front pulling with a rope and one behind pushing by the handles.

We took our home contraption everywhere, even to the pyrethrum fields, where it attracted the attention of other kids, particularly Njimi and Gĩtaũ, the young sons of the landlord, who often came to the fields, not to work, but for the company of age-mates, breaking the monotony of home confinement. They marveled at our contraption and they begged to push it. We were reluctant to let others touch it, so they brought us a real wheelbarrow to substitute for ours. What a difference between the real thing and our invention! But ours had the attraction of a homemade toy!

We used the demand for our toy to extract other privileges. The pyrethrum fields had not eaten up all the forest. It was still thick with bush. We would go there to climb trees, sometimes building bridges between them by connecting the branches of one tree with those of another, or using the branches to swing from tree to tree. What we most longed for was to hunt and capture a hare, or even an antelope. An antelope was once spotted in the pyrethrum fields and the entire workforce stopped what it was doing to chase the animal, shouting, Catch the antelope, but the animal was too fast for the screaming pursuers. We had often heard of boys who had managed to land one or the other, but it was clear from this experience that without a dog to help us, we would never manage to catch a hare, let alone an antelope. In exchange for the right to push our wheelbarrow, we persuaded Njimi and Gĩtaũ to bring their dogs to help us catch an animal and carry its carcass home on the wheelbarrow. We were lucky and spotted a hare and, led by the dogs, we immediately started chasing it. Soon the dogs and the hare left us behind, but the barking led us to a thick thorny bush. The dogs were barking at the bush, inside which a very frightened hare was ensconced, and no amount of stones thrown inside or shaking of the bush would persuade the hare to leave its lair. We never captured a hare, and after some time the novelty of the homemade wheelbarrow wore off for Njimi and Gĩtaũ, and the privilege of pushing it was worthless to us. My brother and I longed to have dogs that would be at our command anytime we wanted to hunt, or dogs that would follow us as we piloted our airplanes.

But the wheelbarrow had not yet lost its charm for those who saw it for the first time. An Indian boy became smitten by its toy power. The Indian community kept to itself, connected to Africans and whites only through its shops. In the front was the Indian merchant. Otherwise family life was in the backyard, each surrounded by high stone walls. Similarly high walls surrounded even the schoolyard. The only African people who had glimpses of the life of an Indian family were cleaners and sweepers, who said that Indians were of many nationalities, religions, and languages—Sikhs, Jains, Hindus, Gujaratis. They talked of conflicts between and within families, contradicting the image of seeming harmony. There was even less contact between Indian and African kids. Sometimes when a few of them ventured outside beyond the shops, African boys would throw stones at them for the joy of seeing them retreat to their barricaded backyards. From inside the barricades, they would also throw back stones. The most feared were the turbaned Sikhs because it was said they carried swords and when they ran back inside their yards we assumed it was to get their dangerous weapons. But children’s curiosity about one another sometimes overcame the barriers of stone walls and adult warnings. That was how our wobbly homemade wheelbarrow attracted the eyes of the Indian boy who begged to be allowed to push it. He smoothed the way by giving us two tiny multicolored marbles. Later it took the occasional gift of a candy to bridge the human divide. And finally some kind of friendship was sealed by the gift of two puppies whose mother had given birth to too large a litter.

At long last we had dogs we could call our own. We brought them home in triumph, but my mother hated dog shit so much that she put them in a basket and took them back to the Indian shopping center and set them loose. We told our Indian friend that the puppies had escaped and he gave us another one. We tried to bring up the puppy secretly by building a dog pen in the bush around the dump site. We fed it in secrecy, but our mother must have been on to us. One day we woke up to find the puppy gone. We never saw our generous Indian friend again, and we could not go knock at his door to ask for him. Besides, what could we tell him? That the puppy had run away again?

I would soon be cured of any love for dogs. I was going to the pyrethrum fields one day, crossing the path to the landlord’s house, when his dogs, the same dogs that had been our companions in hunting, came barking at me. I ran for dear life, but the dogs felled me and one of them dug its teeth into my leg just above the right ankle, a bite that left a scar and a lifelong fear of dogs.