Kenya, Will You Marry Me?

5. Stories- our bricks for a home

37 5 Stories- our bricks for a home U moja, Pamoja and Nyanjiru know so much. Kenyalin tells them to insist that I tell my story completely. She wants to know how I came to know freedom. The sound of the rain is a happy one. When the rain rolls down on the tin roof we are rich enough to have, they say, we sing. Sheets of water fall off the end and into the funnel. I see it pour fast into our huge container. It is full of water that I can see through. So clean, I drink some. I smell strength in it. At home, stories come like sudden rain, and make me feel warm in the cold. I am born in a story and brought up with stories. Some of them are wonderful. Some of them sad. Some of them are really frightening. I have no choice. My elder brother Pita shows me the map of Kenya at the bottom of our old green tin cup. The cup is chipped black on the edges. Older than me by six years, he is stronger. “Look!” He shouted as he came running once towards me. I ran out from the corner in the outside of our mud and bamboo house where I sat on the ground in a shade that felt clammy and cold. I pulled my hand out of his. He grabbed it back and held it. We both ran and looked right into our tin basin in which he had poured a jug of water which covered the bottom part. The basin was of an oval shape, a karai, as it was popularly called. This one tilted a little on the uneven ground. Now it was still. “Look in there!” he shouted. I did. I had often been surprised by how well a little water on the ground could reflect the sky. I looked keenly. Inside there, I saw the sky. I saw the sun and the moon meeting. He said it was an eclipse of the sun. We watched it for long time excitedly. It was a hot day before and after the rain, now it felt like early morning. He told me sternly never to look at the sky at such a time with my naked eye. I obeyed then but I looked at the sun the 38 Kenya, will you marry me? next day; I looked at it directly. I looked around me and saw black moving spots all over. I was promptly told I had become blind; but I knew I could still see. Pita used to tell me a story of what would happen if the sun moved an inch towards us on earth. To explain it, he would get a piece of magnifying glass that he always hid. It reflected the sun rays and moving it to a paper it burned it up. “That is how all of us would burn up!” he would say, “like paper!” I did not ask anyone if that was true. I just saw the world burn. There was no way to check if this was possible. I told Mami that Pita should look for better stories to tell. I told him I wanted to think for myself about the world. On public holidays Baba told us stories as he wore the mask of soap around his beard, shaving. I always opened my eyes wide and looked at Pita sitting on the edge of our single brown plastic sofa chair which was very slippery. It was only the sewn in cord at the edge that kept us from falling off especially when our legs were wet after a quick wash. And they often were. Towels were for other races. They were expensive. It was impractical to have towels. They gathered dust and were hard to wash and depending on the season, also to dry. Baba was there, his face beaming. His story would be told over and over again in our family. He told the story of how Pita was the first one to run and hug a Baba he did not know since he was born when Baba was in detention. They say Pita saw him on a village path and flew towards him. I was born after Pita, so they did not see me. They said I was unborn. I tried to say that I too was coming to earth soon and so I knew something about freedom too. They told me I was...