Hiding in Plain Sight by Nuruddin Farah

Author:Nuruddin Farah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

12.

Bella is exhausted when she returns home. She has an atrocious pain in the lower reaches of her pelvis, which, for want of a better explanation, she ascribes to her terrible posture as she drove back to Aar’s house from Gigiri, pitched forward as if that would somehow make her go faster. She parks the car and, stepping out, places one hand on her back, pressing it hard, and the other on her midriff, squeezing it. It doesn’t help. This, she guesses, is the price she pays for not taking good care of herself and not adequately resting for the past few days. She also ascribes some of it to the overwhelming grief over her loss, and the worry, and the exhaustion from all this travel, and the dislocation, and the determination not to display any signs of the stress to Valerie and Padmini. Finally, she blames all the driving around she has had to do looking for a camera store and then negotiating the price down, which in the end was not worth all the bother.

There is no denying too that her unceasing thoughts about the children and their continued presence in her mind and life have contributed to her general anxiety. Good as they have been with her, she senses a chasm in her knowledge about them. They have not yet truly tried her patience, but in time, she knows, they will. The gap between what she knows about them and the things she has yet to know reminds her of something Aar said to her about Somalis and their relationship to their language. Somali remained an oral language for a long time, acquiring a written form using Roman script only toward the end of 1972. Aar argued that those who had known the language only in its spoken form felt a great disconnect between the tongue they spoke and the one they were beginning to learn to write. Bella perceives such a lack in what she knows about the children, but she can’t quite identify what she is missing. She also has few close friends here to provide her and the children with additional support and someone to fall back on. It would be a different story in Rome, where she has a host of old friends. Still, meeting Gunilla, whom she not only likes but also finds impressively competent, has cheered her. The woman knows her way around Nairobi, knows how things work here. She is sure to cultivate Gunilla’s friendship, in whom she sees a link with Aar, someone both of them loved.

Bella brings in the bags of groceries she has bought but leaves the carryall containing Aar’s personal effects in the trunk of the car when she parks. Before bringing them in, she wants to know what the state of affairs is here.

She remembers she has no key and rings the bell at the same time as she knocks hard with her knuckles on the solid wooden door. But there is no answer. A

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