Measuring Time: An excerpt from the novel

They Left Home on a rainy morning in September. The dawn was as dark as midnight; they could hear the rain and wind twisting and uprooting the cornstalks in the yard outside their window. Their room was in semidarkness, illuminated by a single candle, which flickered and almost died out whenever LaMamo opened the window louvers to peer out into the darkness.

"It won't stop," he kept muttering. "This is the kind of rain that goes on for days. I told you we should have left earlier. . . ."

"Hey," Mamo said, rising from the bed and putting his ear against the door, "listen."

Footsteps, then the sound of the front door opening. Their father was awake already, most likely on his way to the toilet in the backyard.

Saying goodbye to their father was not a part of their plan.

By now the distance between the twins and their father was at its farthest, and because of that, they realized, there was really nothing they could do to hurt him. He only spent about a week at home every month, and whenever he came back he'd look at them with astonishment, as if remembering suddenly that he had two sons. He always struggled to remember their names, and when he did remember, he invariably mixed them up, even though they were not identical. The only person they would have said goodbye to was Auntie Marina, but they knew that if they did, her tears, like chains, would tie them to the earth, and they wouldn't be able to fly. They left her a note.

It was almost five a.m.; they had planned to be out by four a.m. to catch the bus that stopped twice daily at the village, at six-fifteen a.m. and again at six-fifteen p.m., on its way to the state capital. The bus stop was on the other side of the river, about a thirty minutes' walk—maybe forty minutes in the rain.

"We wait," Mamo said, going back to the bed and flopping into it. Beside him was a canvas bag containing all their travel gear: clothes, a change of shoes, a pouch full of his medicines, a few tattered books, and their school and birth certificates. In Mamo's pocket was their entire savings, three hundred naira, secreted from money given to them by relations, their father's business friends, and occasionally by their father himself when he was in one of his expansive moods.

El Anatsui, Remnant of Grandma's Cloth. 1995. Wood relief, akparata, oke-ofo, and tempera, 80 x 92 x 2.5 cm. Courtesy of October Gallery, London.

"We will surely miss the bus," LaMamo said. He went and threw open the window. Mamo shielded the candle flame with his palm. Behind the low compound wall was the mango grove—it was invisible, covered in foliage and shadows and the solid sound of rain on leaves and earth.

"Then we leave in the evening."

"No, we leave now. We can still make it."

LaMamo picked up the bag and was out the door in a second. Mamo hung back a little longer, looking around the small room, at LaMamo's paintings and sketches stuck on the off-white walls with long strips of cellophane tape, the few novels on the table against the wall, the two identical wooden boxes under the beds with their clothes in them, a carton in a corner filled with old books and other odds and ends. A twinge of panic gripped him, but it passed and he joined his brother in the hallway. Outside, it was tar black, and they had to feel their way down the veranda steps and into the rain and mud. Though they couldn't see, they knew when they passed the mud kitchen to next to it, and when they got to the gate their their right, and the hut next to it, and when they got to the gate their hands unerringly found the handle. Outside the compound the wind...