Hiding in Plain Sight (32 page)

Bella thinks of the Somali wisdom that holds that what your parents don't teach, you will be compelled to learn the hard way from an unfeeling society. She is glad that Valerie is showing some signs of coming to her senses about her life and her priorities. But true to her word, Valerie neither thanks Bella nor apologizes, and she makes it clear that she does not wish to hug or to be kissed on the cheek. As she heads for the door, Bella takes Padmini in a tight embrace.

“Go gently, my friend,” says Bella.

And then Padmini goes to join her partner in the waiting
cab.

This is a work of fiction, whose germs developed in the soil of my imagination, even though the background of the events narrated here comes from other brains and other earths. However, I must make very clear that any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

A number of authors and their works, in ways both obvious and not so obvious, have played an essential role in the writing of this book, and I am grateful to them. Prominent among these are: Roland Barthes's
Camera Lucida
(translated by Richard Howard); Susan Sontag's
On Photography
; Barry Monk's
The Freelance Photography Handbook
; Sylvia Tamale's
African Sexualities: A Reader
; and
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Stephen Mitchell). The line
“La joie venait toujours après la peine,”
from Guillaume Apollinaire's poem “Le Pont Mirabeau,” is translated by James Kirkup as “Joy always follows sorrow.” The line “After the first death, there is no other” is from Dylan Thomas's “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.”

A draft of this novel was, largely, written before the death of my
favorite sister, Basra Farah Hassan, killed by Taliban terrorists in a Kabul restaurant bombing on January 17, 2014. Basra, in whose name friends of mine and I have founded the Basra Farah Funds for Women and Children, worked tirelessly for UNICEF and devoted much of her working life to improving the lives of those she met, wherever she was posted, in Ethiopia, in Darfur, in refugee camps in Pakistan, southern Africa, and Afghanistan. Everyone who knew her would agree that she strived hard to leave the world into which she was born a better place than how she found it. May her soul rest in peace.

Finally, I am grateful to many people who have hosted me, looked after me during my research travels:
Mahadsanidin!
My special thanks must also go to Faisal Roble, Fowsia Abdulkader, and Monique Lortie, who have volunteered to help set up the Basra Farah Funds for Women and Children: to all of you, I say
Mahadsanidin
too.