Of all the things she will remember about Sabina, Kadogo will cherish her laughter most. How it started in the belly and slowly worked its way up her throat before bursting out of her full lips like a rejuvenated river, spilling and squaring and filling the dry river valleys of other people’s lonely hearts. Her laughter and what they were back then—girls without a care in the world except the Musingu High School boys who courted them, the price of Fair & Lovely cream tubes that promised pimple-free faces, and running games. Running games that left their huge calves burning as if someone had rubbed and rubbed fresh sambakhalu leaves on the tender flesh.
_____
Now, Kadogo sits up and stretches her legs. She spreads them a little so the clump of grass is between her cuffed pedal pusher that is a size too small. She imagines the clump of grass is her hair, and her spread-out thighs are Ma’s. Ma usually makes her lie between them before braiding her hair. But first she usually sections Kadogo’s thick hair with a wooden comb, then braids it into tight mlazo cornrows that stay for weeks and weeks without coming loose. Kadogo smiles at this memory, curls her fingers around the clump of Kegondi grass. She sections it into three strands, interlaces them like a rope, the first strand going into the second going into the third. She tightens the braid, unravels a loose string from the torn edge of her woollen sweater, and uses it to tie the braid’s frilly end.
Across the wire-netting fence, a short, balding man with a tweed jacket and walking cane raises his eyebrows and shouts in Isukha, “Why is a girl sitting idly at Muliro Gardens when other girls are home cooking?” Kadogo ignores him. Other people cast her filthy looks, shake their heads in disapproval. One hawker who knows her mother well says, “Kadogo, haki don’t tell me you are waiting for that Kikuyu girl you call a friend. Those people aren’t loyal, no need to waste friendship on them.” Kadogo ignores him. Sits. Waits for Sabina. She wishes she could dismiss these people with a casual shauri yako wave of the hand the way Sabina always does. Wishes too that she could, like Sabina, confidently walk into a video showroom full of boys and sit on the front bench, then reply to their dirty looks with a seemingly unpremeditated “Ai but it is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie surely,” with a finality that renders any more questions silly.
Kadogo raises her mud-colored face and scans the road again. Sabina is still nowhere in sight. To calm her disquiet, she lies on the ground facing up, hands laced behind her head. In the distance, a transistor radio calls out Orchestra Super Mazembe’s “Shauri Yako.” The strings of the guitar tingle, the chords twist. The sounds get closer and Kadogo imagines the radio cassette vendor entering Muliro Gardens Park through the Ambwere Complex gate.
Nilikuelezea oh mama / Fatou wangu mama / How do I explain this to you, Fatou?
Mapenzi ya kwetu eeh / haita tawi hata mama / This love of ours / will not survive for long, my lady.
She closes her eyes, lets the frenzied tunes envelope her. She does not know it yet, but in less than two months, this song will come back to mock her, to bring tears to her eyes. The irony of it will come to her slowly, like a period cramp, then strike her like a fist. But now, she just lies here, letting the strident tunes rip through her sun-warmed ears.
Her mind goes back to the first day she met Sabina. Kadogo had accompanied Ma to the market to help sell bales of fresh mitumba clothes that reeked of mothballs and formaldehyde. They had just finished sorting the clothes and were hanging them on nails driven into the kiosk walls when Ma said, “Kadogo, take this money to Afandi, the rice seller.” Afandi’s daughter Sabina had on seeing her, simply hooked her arm around Kadogo and said, “You, I know you. I also know that this market is full of adventures, and I want us to be friends so we can search for them together.”
After that, they had spent many afternoons playing kati and banta and bladder at Muliro Gardens. They also played the scramble and partition game and divided the market into papaya yellow and soursop green (for Sabina, who said she had prickles and thorns so nobody-would-mess-with-me) and tamarillo red and jamun purple (for Kadogo, who loved the jamun fruit oh-so-much). Sabina, plotter of adventures, fearless conceiver of outlandish tales and Indian Ocean djinn stories, had an endless itinerary of things they could do. Things that Kadogo didn’t mind doing.
Through the tail of her eye, Kadogo can see Sabina crossing the ankle-high grass. She smiles, excited to see her friend for the first time since they both completed their final primary school national exam, KCPE. She knows Sabina well enough to know that she will creep up and try to scare her.
“Guess who.”
Kadogo laughs, pushes Sabina’s hands from her face and sits up.
“Kwani why are you so late, we agreed to meet at two sharp.”
“Take a good look at me and guess where I was.”
Kadogo’s eyes take Sabina in, the outline of her thin, Kikuyu nose, maji ya kunde skin, laughing eyes and mlazo cornrows slick with fresh Tropikal Coconut Oil.
“Nice cornrows. Wait until Kamau sees your hair.” Kadogo tugs at a braid extension on Sabina’s hair.
“Oh, which Kamau?” Sabina teases, sprawls next to Kadogo on the brown carpet of dried leaves and grass.
“Pretenders are worse than murderers—you know who I’m talking about.”
“Nope, I don’t.”
Above their heads, beetles buzz. Dandelion seeds dance in the breeze. Kadogo imagines the breeze covering Sabina’s banana-shaped foot tracks on the path from the salon.
Kadogo knows they can’t play kati, because it’s already afternoon and the shadows have started to lengthen. She squints to read a new election poster showing the smiling face of the president.
“Ha. That Ramadhani is always opening his business late. How can he start selling at this time on a market day, surely?”
Kadogo’s eyes follow Sabina’s, then rest on the roots of a huge jacaranda tree filled with election posters of the incumbent president with two flaming torch symbols. Other posters, blue ones, bear the smiling face of the opposition leader everyone called Baba. He is wearing a blue suit; Kadogo frowns, because his eyes seem to stare right into her. Her gaze then falls on Ramadhani, who is in the shade of the jacaranda tree, arranging stalks of mangos on a sack spread on the ground.
Kadogo doesn’t say let’s go, she just stands and begins to walk and Sabina follows. They cross to the other side of the park, where Ramadhani is crouched, still arranging mangos on the sack. He stops and turns down the volume of his portable radio.
“Sabi girrl . . .”
Sabina sucks her teeth. Sets her face to an icy stare.
“C’mon. You know I like your tight mlazo lines.”
Sabina rolls her eyes.
“Leave her alone, you duck-billed platypus,” Kadogo says.
Sabina digs into the pocket of her pink pinafore, fishes out an old five-shilling copper coin, then tosses it across to Ramadhani.
“Maembe ya five bob.”
Ramadhani removes a half-chewed mugombero stick from his mouth. His cheeks are still swollen with the mugombero juice. He spits and the girls sneer at the squirting liquid sound.
“Yuck.”
He laughs and nods at them, but Sabina is already scanning the mangos. She picks a juicy one, cuts it into pieces, and slathers it with red masala powder. The mango is then stuffed into the left pocket of her pinafore. Ramadhani, who has been following her actions with his eyes, mutters something about ungrateful ruffians and turns up the volume of his radio. Mbaraka Mwinshehe’s “Enyi vijana, wa Africa” fills the air.
The girls lace their hands and skip back to their spot.
Kadogo lies face up under the shade of a bottlebrush tree and kicks off her shoes. Sabina follows suit; the leaves of the bottlebrush droop so low they graze the shoulder pads of her pink pinafore. They lie so close their bodies almost touch, and Kadogo can smell the chalky scent of Biba deodorant on Sabina’s body. These days, the girls no longer lie on their stomachs, because at thirteen going on fourteen, their once flat chests have fisted into angry sore marbles.
Sabina rubs her nipple absent-mindedly.
“I want them to be jugs so that every time I run, they dance in joy.”
“I don’t care if mine remain flat as a football field.”
“But boys like papaws and melons, nobody likes guavas.”
“Who cares what boys like? If they like breasts so much, they should grow their own.”
“Or get the river insects to bite their nipples and enlarge them.”
The girls gasp and hold unlaughed laughter in their palms.
_____
Some Novembers after that, when the air gets thick and syrupy with the tangy smell of ripening mangos, the smell will set off memories of this afternoon. Kadogo will remember, Kadogo will try to forget it all: how she paused mid-sentence and turned sideways to search Sabina’s face for boarding school tales of harsh matrons and hurriedly buttoned blouses on school assembly mornings. She will remember too how silly laughter would pass between them, easily, like a paper ball during a game of rounders. How the leaves of the bottlebrush tree drooped low and grazed the shoulder-pads of Sabina’s dress. How the people in the park threw them filthy how-dare-you-girls-sit-idle-in-the-park looks.
_____
Now, they lie silently, watching white cotton clouds play a pencil-rubber game, drawing and erasing patterns in the sky. Sabina sits up abruptly, retrieves the mango from her pocket, and pulls out a fleshy piece slathered with red masala. She places the piece in the palm of her hand, then stretches it to Kadogo, who takes it, wipes the masala off with the back of her left hand, then bites in.
From the narrow path that goes through the park, Muhonja’s Innocence Rasasi perfume wafts to their noses. Both girls turn to watch her balancing a huge kiondo filled with ripe oranges and avocadoes on her head.
Kadogo nudges Sabina, even though Sabina is already looking.
“Evil eye is passing. Better cross your fingers to avoid bad luck.”
“NKT . . . don’t be a shameless spreader of lies.” Sabina picks up the head of a melastome, tosses it across at Kadogo, who catches it, then jams it into her hair.
“Kadogo, me I don’t believe those witchcraft stories. In fact, I want to be exactly like Muhonja when I grow up. No children to tie me down, no husband to bring me the disease. Freedom to sleep in hotels with the record player going the whole night. Freedom to hop onto a bus and travel until I reach Mombasa raha and Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar Island.”
Kadogo frowns, stares at Sabina.
“Are you telling me that you don’t want guests dancing Isukuti and singing ‘Mwanawamberi’ at your wedding?”
“One God.” Sabina licks her index finger then points it to the sky.
“So you just want to remain unmarried? That is such a waste.”
Sabina sucks her teeth. “A waste of what?”
Kadogo shrugs. “I don’t know, beauty, I guess.”
“I didn’t know husbands eat beauty.”
They follow Muhonja’s frock with their eyes as her wide hips move from left to right in a mia-hamsini-mia-hamsini manner. Kadogo tries to bury this thought, but it claws its way past her mind and comes out of her mouth.
“Mia hamsini mia hamsini . . .”
They chuckle.
“Sabina, let me ask you something. So, what exactly do you plan to do about the thing? Will you be stealing people’s husbands, ama you will become a priest and lie on the ground so Bishop Sulumeti can pray that your thing dies to the desires of this world?”
“Don’t fool yourself, Kadogo. Desires don’t die. A girl in my class goes with a seminarian from St. Ignatius.” Sabina smiles and Kadogo can see the gap in her front teeth. She imagines fitting a maize kernel in.
“And Kadogo?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t stir the pot when it’s not your business to cook dinner.”
Sabina wags a finger, clasps Kadogo’s hands, and wrestles her to the ground. Kadogo wrestles back. They roll on the grass, laughing and laughing and gathering tumbleweed and fallen bougainvillea and dead grasshoppers and leaves in their hair.
In the distance, a banana vendor balances a shimwero on her head. She lifts it off, poises it precariously on her cupped right knee, then places it on the dry grass. It tilts on the hillocky grass, as though in contemplation as to which side would best hold its weight, then tips to the left. The well-arranged, ripe yellow bananas lump to one side. Their black ends pop out, swollen nipples of a hundred breastfeeding mothers.
At the park’s live fence, an old man in a bright municipal jacket rakes purple bougainvillea and geraniums and frangipani flowers. A bird nest falls to the ground and Kadogo imagines tiny blue eggs cracking open. A dog stares at her with mucus-yellow eyes. A gentle breeze blows. The girls watch it blow bloody newspapers from Amalemba Butchery into the air. Silver toffee wrappers blow about ankles. An old, rusty swing rocks back and forth like an empty cradle.
The breeze carries in its breath the smell of fish from Mama Fatso, whose gigantic arm swings as she guts fresh tilapia, then drops them in sizzling oil. When it turns the park corner, the wind heaves, bending low. It peeps at the hem of Muhonja’s frock like a naughty schoolboy and lifts it up to reveal the lacy border of a polyester made-in-China petticoat. The writing on Muhonja’s khanga says: Kama chuki ni dawa, maliza dozi utapona.
Kadogo lowers her voice to a conspiratorial tone.
“Don’t just see Muhonja like this. It is said that her khangas carry heavy messages. If you wrong her, she’ll wear a khanga to admonish you. But why would she wear a message about hatred today? Sabina, do you really think that hatred is medicine and taking the prescribed dosage will make one get better?”
Sabina laughs. Touches Kadogo’s cheek tenderly.
“Let me just tell you, Kadogo. Hatred is more poison than medicine. Look at all these people hating each other because of politicians. Do you think they’ll ever stop?”
A flying crow swings in rings, then swoops low and yanks a chunk of juicy nyama choma from a picnicker’s hand. Kadogo opens her mouth, but the wind blows grit and dust into it.
“Shit.”
“Serves you right. Enough mouthing, let’s play a game. Here, give me your hands.”
Kadogo puts her hands in Sabina’s and is about to sing by-show-I-love-you-baby when Sabina starts,
I’m Shirley Temple / the girl with curly hair
I’ve got two dimples / to match my underwear
I’m Shirley Temple / the girl with curly hair
I’ve got two dimples / and curls right down to there
They sing. Hands meeting hands. Palm-palm-back-back-up-up-down-down-clap-clap. Their voices dip and bow. A hawker passes by with a transistor radio and leaves in his wake a deep bass belonging to Jacob Luseno. Boda boda riders wearing green reflector jackets with bold campaign messages block Canon Awori Street with their bikes. They are hooting and chanting Baba’s name.
Kadogo squints to read the message on a billboard screen. She wants to assure Sabina that she will protect her if things get out of hand during the elections. She wants to tell Sabina that her mother, Alice, is a good woman, even though she joins those secret nightly estate meetings to discuss the “Kikuyu problem.” She wants to tell Sabina that her mother won’t mind hiding Sabina’s family in their house if things turn ugly. She wants to say it aloud so that it can become true. Instead, she turns to her and says, “Oe, we must always be here for each other, no matter what happens during these stupid elections.”
Sabina searches her eyes, but Kadogo looks down, gives her a crooked pinkie instead.
Pinkie promise,
Whoever lies,
Will be made to swallow a thousand Mirembe seeds.
_____
Long after she stops perusing the Daily Nation for news of Sabina, Kadogo will keep searching for her in old familiar sounds; in ordinary things of childhood; bandy legs of children running after sugarcane lorries on Mumias Road; smudgy-waxy colorings of Skoolpoint crayons that spread out like painted fingernails, trembly voices of Kakamega Township pupils singing marobo tandarobo at recess; and even the taste of fermented, sugared tsimbare. Much, much later, as a volunteer at the Ingo branch of the Kenya National Library after her graduation from the University of Nairobi, Kadogo will stand at the long French windows and stare and stare at the crisscrossing elbows and legs on the dusty playground of Kakamega Primary School across the live fence.
Now, Sabina wipes the seat of her dress with her palms, turns to Kadogo.
“Oh! By the way, Miriam, my friend from boarding school, promised to throw me a henna party. Let’s go get painted.”
“Heh! Who? Me I don’t want. Henna is for devos. Our pastor once prayed for a woman whom seven demons had entered through painted nails.”
“That was Cutex, pumpkin head! That’s the one made in Nairobi factories from people’s blood. That’s why it is sticky red and smells of bananas. Me I can never apply Cutex even if you pay me! But henna is just roots. Let’s go.”
“Still, a child of Alice with painted nails? My Ma will kill me dead,” Kadogo complains, annoyed at her mother’s strictness.
The girls start off hand in hand. The park’s floral odds and ends tremble at the finality of their exit. Noses in the air, they pick their way past St. Joseph Cathedral, where Kadogo imagines somber-faced widows in blue frocks kneeling at the adoration chapel, twirling rosaries and muttering “Hail Mary Full of Grace.”
Past bruised tomato pyramids on wheelbarrows and sweaty salesboys ringing bells and shouting, “Tatu ishirini.”
Past tailors seated at shop fronts, whirring on their treadle Singer sewing machines.
Past Shieywe Guesthouse, where they peep in and see pool tables laced with brown Tusker bottles, spilled liquor, and Nyongesa wa Muganda’s poster.
Past Arab boys who spend their mornings driving lorries with strange names like Waheguru and Sahajanand, and their afternoons on shop fronts playing drafts, eating miraa with Big G, and dancing to “Mombasa siendi tena, kuna ndogo ndogo nyingi.”
The boys catcall. Kadogo crosses her eyes and sticks her tongue out.
Sabina only swings her hips at them.
The girls float away, flowers tossed in a whirling pool. Past iron shanties at Koromatangi to Premier complex, where the town salonist, Anita, likes to jiggle her buttocks in a see-through dera. They stand on tiptoe and peep behind the soft yellow blinds, and sure enough, Anita is there, lathering Nice & Lovely shampoo into the hair of pretty, rich women who lean back their sweet, Hairglo smelling heads into the metallic sinks.
_____
In the weeks that follow, Kadogo will marvel at how the mood of that election changed so quickly. How, instead of the usual friendly teases, words curdled into sour accusations. It will occur to her then just how quickly politics fermented friendships. She’ll record it all in her heart: television clips and newspaper articles of streets choked with protesters waving fresh, green leaves; neighborhood watches across the country said to meet nightly to plan what they would do if “their” man lost the elections; Rift Valley politicians buying machetes from Nakumatt Eldoret and the radio stations that poured paraffin and lit the matches. The market too will change and overflow with stories of radio program callers accusing other ethnic groups of stealing and occupying their land. Kadogo will never forget one breakfast program during which a caller emphasized, to an animated presenter, the need to get rid of weeds in their hometown.
_____
The November sun shines full upon the girls’ faces as they enter Garrisa Ndogo boutique. They find Miriam on her mkeka, chin cupped in geometric patterned henna-painted hands.
“Alhamdulilah, Sabina, you have come? I’ve waited since morning Wallahi.”
Miriam smiles, but her kohl-painted eyes are already darting this way and that, looking for the wooden bench. She spots it, removes a pile of clothes atop it, and beckons for Kadogo and Sabina to sit. She then places the clothes in a huge carton, stands on tiptoe, then brings down from a dusty shelf little brown bottles with silver lids.
“Songea, come let me see those pretty nails.”
Sabina wriggles her toes out of the black Bata rubbers and stretches them. Miriam snaps open a henna bottle, stirs it with a twig, then scoops little brown heaps and slathers the henna on Sabina’s toenails starting with the big one, then the middle ones, then the small one.
“Let me tell you people a story. Once I went to Zanzibar, and those Stone Town Swahili women wouldn’t paint my arms, even though I begged them. They said that only married women with husbands to please paint whole arms.”
Kadogo smiles; she finds Miriam’s brazenness intriguing.
Sabina sucks her teeth.
Miriam laughs. “We will show them today, won’t we? I will paint both your arms just because I can.”
Outside, the voices of the boda boda riders and market women get closer. Their chants are in Kadogo’s language, and they are praising the political leader from their region. Kadogo stands by the window to watch. The air is suddenly filled with the smell of lemons, ripe lemons, even though it is bright green banana fronds that are flapping out in the streets like flags. Something warm and jelly-like climbs up Kadogo’s stomach, up her chest, up her throat. She can hear her own breathing getting louder.
Our votes are for the descendant of the great Chief,
Our votes are for he who is adorned with a leopard skin and a fly whisk.
The smell of henna fills the room. Kadogo can no longer sniff the fragrance of the Tropikal Coconut oil in Sabina’s hair. She lowers herself slowly to the bench, right next to her friend. She presses her knees together and adjusts the pedal pusher and together, they listen to Miriam’s voice rise and fall as she tells story after story about how coastal women extracted henna dye from roots and used it to make beautiful patterns for birth, naming, and marriage ceremonies. How only the “chosen” are decorated with henna.
“Oya! Help me choose a pattern from that magazine, I want to paint my whole arm so that I can look like those Mombasa brides.” Sabina stretches out her hand and puts her arms around Kadogo.
“Easy,” Kadogo points at an inverted teardrop pattern. She can hear the tremble in her voice. “Aren’t you the one who says that love only ends in premium tears?”
“Yes, love only ends in premium tears.”
“So you like my pick, or what?”
Sabina nods.
Kadogo says, “Walahi I’ll remember this day for the rest of my life.”
She is right.
Their eyes graze, and instead of the usual affection that passes whenever their eyes meet, Kadogo feels a deep, sickening pain climbing up her chest, as though someone has placed her heart in a charcoal burner with red, glowing embers.
_____
Later, Miriam will arrive at Kadogo’s doorstep, tear-stained and wrapped in a black khanga. She will sit on the red-ochre steps next to Kadogo, but Kadogo will ignore her. When the silence between them becomes too much, she will clear her throat and say, “Kadogo, you do know that something happened to Sabina, right?” Those words will be a cold knife that will cut Kadogo’s senses off so suddenly, she won’t hear anything else until the urge to slap Miriam passes. Miriam will say, “I only came here because someone has to tell you that Sabina’s house was burned down with everything, everything.” Miriam will not, however, tell Kadogo how scared the policeman her father hired to escort Sabina’s family to Police Line looked. They won’t discuss the other displaced families, but Kadogo will know everything. Everything, including how Sabina only managed to salvage her favorite book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, before the red flames opened their dragon mouth and devoured everything. Kadogo will think of how, of all her friends, Sabina was the only one who squeezed next to her on the sofa as they watched Sarafina over and over. Sabina, who grasped the edges of the old sofa tightly when the white policemen in the movie pumped bullets into the backs of black schoolchildren at the playground. Kadogo will think of how Sabina was the one with the laughter that was laughed all the way to the belly and then slowly worked its way back up her throat, before bursting out of her lips, and spilling all over, like river Isiukhu in the rainy season.
It will be Miriam, too, who will hold Kadogo as she presses her palms to her ears and asks, “Miriam, did I go deaf, how come, how come I haven’t heard from Sabina ever since her family left in that stupid convoy of fifteen matatus headed to Nakuru town?” It will be Miriam who, in the end, will save Kadogo from herself by refusing to discuss with her the television and radio news announcements about charred husks of fifteen matatus that were ambushed on their way to Nakuru town and burnt.
Kadogo will not tell Miriam how her own mother chased Sabina’s family away. She will keep mum about that warm December night when, desperate, Sabina’s mum had walked all the way from Maraba to Shirere, children in tow, and begged Alice, whom Kadogo stopped calling Ma that day, to let Sabina and the youngest baby boy stay at her house. Kadogo will not tell Miriam, because she won’t have the words to describe how Alice had pushed Sabina out and bolted the door. How resentment had crawled up her throat and choked her so much, she wanted to strangle Alice and pass on the pain. She will not tell Miriam, but Miriam will see it in the way light will leave Kadogo’s eyes. In the way Kadogo will no longer be able to follow simple directions on how to knead wheat flour, flatted, and slap it to remove air bubbles and ensure chapatis remain tender.
In the following years, years in which she will graduate with honors and take a teaching job in Mau Summit, a bus journey that will take her through the picturesque Great Rift Valley, filled with the ghosts of worshippers burnt inside a church, Kadogo will lean her head heavily against the bus window and stare at the shimmering blue in the clear Mau Summit sky. She will fog the window up with her breath and let her memory be prickled by roadside potato sellers who will swarm her window and speak to her in Kikuyu—Sabina’s language. The light inside her will weaken, whittle, waver, as the women’s voices wade through the murky waters of her heart, coaxing her, urging her, ordering her to buy their fresh rosette potatoes. Swollen with emotions, she will open the window and let the icy fingers of the mountain wind dig and bite and tear into her flesh.
_____
Now, Kadogo bends to scoop moons of dirt from under her fingernails with Miriam’s nail file. Miriam finishes sketching reddish-brown whorls on Sabina’s arms, reaches into her monkey bag for a kohl eyeliner, and darkens the mole on her cheek. She then examines her face in an oval wall mirror, pouts her lips, then turns up the volume of the radio. They all listen to a fifty-minute program called Taarab Na Chakacha Za Tanga. Miriam has a strong husky voice, she sings along to Siti binti Saad and Bi Kidude’s songs, record after record.
It is late. The yellow streetlamps on Canon Awori Street shine weakly and the girls lock the heavy metal doors and windows, flick on a bulb. The smoky burnt-wood scent of henna sits stubbornly on Kadogo’s nose, and she wants to go home. She doesn’t walk out, though, preferring instead to sit and wait. To wait for her friend’s henna patterns to dry so she can fill a pitcher with water from the outside tap, pour it into a lemon-green soak basin, and wash the henna clumps from the long, pretty arms with a rug.
