How Beautiful We Were(65)

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WE KNEW THE DAY WAS bound to come when our bonds as age-mates would start to fray, and we’d depend less on each other for friendship. We’d seen it happen to age-mates born before us. We’d noticed our older siblings’ circles of age-mates dwindle when the girls’ bodies started showing signs of womanhood, leading them to prefer the company of young men capable of giving them things their boy age-mates didn’t yet have. By the time most children in Kosawa got to eleven or twelve, they’d decided that a shared birth year need not be the paramount basis for mutual closeness, leading to a rise in friendships with older adolescents. That is what happened to us when the boys continued going to school while the girls stayed home. The girls began spending more time with older girls and women: going to the farm, doing laundry, going to the market, taking care of babies, gossiping in kitchens. The boys went to school and spent their evenings hunting or playing football. Thus, it so happened that even before the end of our second year of taking the bus to Lokunja, we were no longer a pack of boy and girl age-mates traversing life together—just seven boys who got together often to do homework, and Thula.



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By fifteen, three of our girl age-mates, all of them Thula’s good friends, had found husbands. The girls who hadn’t yet done so were attending every wedding they could in every village, hair braided and faces painted, hoping to meet a man in search of a wife, marriage celebrations being better than any other place in stirring within the unattached a longing to be lonesome no more. One of our age-mates became the woman of a soldier in Lokunja and moved into his house, which hurt and betrayed us, but the girl hadn’t been blessed with sense to begin with. We tried not to speak ill of her, because we all needed to find love and move on to the next phase in life, hardships aside. Fate hadn’t given us numerous chances to be children, but we’d grabbed every occasion we could; though now, as we went further into maturity, few traces of our childish ways remained. Still, no matter how far behind the past was, we saw its face with clarity even when we weren’t looking for it. We couldn’t speak of the future without segueing into a lament for the bygone days of our ancestors, those simpler days the likes of which we feared we might never see.

One of our age-mates had died in the massacre, when a bullet turned her years of daydreaming about a wedding day into a vile joke. Two of our age-mates died a few years later—one from the years of the poison that had accumulated in his belly, causing it to swell so high he looked like a pregnant woman on the brink of birthing, and the other in an accident, when the bus he had taken from Gardens swerved off its path and shattered against a tree. Though three laborers had also died in that accident, we had cursed Pexton as we dug our friend’s grave—how could we separate anything happening to us from what they were doing to us?



Several of our age-mates left Kosawa in our mid-adolescent years, forced to bid their friends and cousins farewell by parents who had once sworn that they would never surrender to the gas flares and oil spills. One of our age-mates needed to leave the village because of a condition that caused her monthly bleeding to last for weeks, accompanied by blood clots and backaches and severe cramps. This friend had followed all the directions the womb doctor gave her and drunk the prescribed herbs, but relief never came. In the absence of Jakani and Sakani, she had no choice but to leave Kosawa in search of a cure. Other friends of ours had to move to new villages because a father had died and a mother deemed it best to live among her people, or a mother had buried more than one child and knew that the burial of another would be more than she could endure.

In their new villages, our friends crammed into the huts of relatives, sleeping on their floors, or in back rooms that had been vacated by married sons who had decided that it would be better to build new huts and keep their wives and mothers in different corners of the village. Our friends lived like vagrants until one relative or another gave them a piece of land on the village’s periphery. There, they built huts that they worried would never be filled with the warmth of the ones they’d left behind in Kosawa.

Whenever they visited Kosawa, our escaped friends looked around wistfully at all that was once theirs. But when one of us talked about how the smoke blowing from Gardens seemed blacker than ever the other day, or when we sighed about how the amount of bottled water Pexton was sending for the babies was not enough, and how some babies still drank boiled well water, we saw our age-mates’ yearning for home dissipate like dew. Sometimes they took some of the empty plastic water bottles with them, to serve as fuel for their fire—something we also did—or to bring their own drinking water upon subsequent visits.

Their gratitude for the hills between us was evident, the separation of our suffering from their new serenity. But nothing Pexton did could compel the parents of the rest of us to leave Kosawa. Most huts in Kosawa remained full and boisterous, and young women from other villages continued marrying Kosawa men and moving here to add to our numbers. Now that we were getting closer to manhood, we could have left of our own accord, we could have fled for a poison-free life, but we were determined never to give up our land, not then or ever, and the Restoration Movement and Sonni reminded us of this, that it was our land, come rainy season or dry season, it would always be ours.



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