Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Author:Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor [Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Sagas, Cultural Heritage, Literary
ISBN: 9780307961204
Google: _bM7AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00EBRTD6K
Barnesnoble: B00EBRTD6K
Goodreads: 18283097
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Past the city center, the jumble of anonymous sky-scratching steel-glass-stone edifices, toward the railway station. Architectural devolution—squat, steady, older, defiant frameworks. Agrovet centers, rubble and tattered clothes, Gospel enterprises, Mutigwo Iganjo Hotel, street vendors selling tomatoes, shoes, Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph clocks, and windshield wipers. A school sports field. Smog-stained grevillea trees, flame trees, survivors of a day when that landscape had been lovely. Art Deco rooftops, a proliferation of buildings—blocks shooting up, a story a day; satellite devices like a thousand giant insect feelers probing exotic realms for truths. Single-pump petrol stations that were always three shillings below the city center’s pump prices. Air and water for sale.

Views from a square window.

Ajany is in a matatu, heading out into the city’s inner worlds. Servicing a new addiction, that of collecting her brother’s shadows.

Some people listen to her questions.

She has posters to support her query: “My brother, Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda, is lost. Have you seen him?” Some people tell her others have also been lost in the post-election violence. Others say they, too, will print and distribute images of their lost. Many take her aside and tell her to leave these things in the hands of God.

Ajany crosses the railway tracks and walks, reaching a culvert opposite a plastic-and-wood hair salon, with braids drying on outdoor poles, called Gloria’s God Gives Hair Design. A loud, stocky woman whose breasts spread way out there shouts to someone upstairs and reaches with her hands to disentangle used braids. Their eyes meet. Her red braids fall over the black ink-stain mark covering the left half of her face.

The woman shouts, “Babi!”

Translation: daughter of Babylon.

Ajany thinks: Whore.

This city.

Outside of a used-shoe booth where stylish right-foot shoes dangle, a sublime cologne flits past. Ajany breathes. The dirt and flowing sewage superimpose their odor on the moment. And then it is dusk, and Ajany is one of many complacent souls who have been stuffed into a matatu while Franklin Boukaka harangues a lumberjack in song: … Aye Africa, Eh Africa, O Dipanda …

The piercing blare of a distant, late-arriving train, dust-on-shoe solitudes, questions that were prayers, the past’s interference: it would come as memory, and she would have to kneel where she was until midriff-splitting sorrow passed. Some days would be better than others.

Good evening, Ms. Oganda?

Good evening, Jos.

Jos is at the reception desk most evenings.

Ajany rushes for the shower, strips off her clothes, and washes the day off her. She hobbles as if her body were a borrowed, oversized dress. Shapeless mists brood; there are welts in her heart. Overnight, acne has appeared on her face and covered the sides of her neck, too. She falls into bed and sleeps at once.

Morning. Incursions into Nairobi’s dark-light worlds, treading the banks of the putrid soup that is the Nairobi River. From Ngong to Komarock, asking existences-in-squalor if they have ever seen her brother, Moses Odidi Oganda. She has pictures to show and share. No one acts as if her questions are strange. A few think it is funny to send her looking where there is nothing.

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