fertilizer. Here they were working with nature, not against it. The forest was a school to which they often came to hear what it had to tell them: You take, you give, for if you only take without giving back, you will leave the giver exhausted unto death. The gardens were nurseries for healing plants with seeds that could be planted on farms elsewhere; the healing of the land had to start somewhere.
They took him to a cave on the other side of the falls, perhaps even one he had once shown Nyawlra. It had been turned into a living space. Three men and two women, guns slung on their shoulders, received them. We do a few drills here, Nyawlra explained, as if reading Kamltl’s mind. One of the men there took up the narrative.
The so-called national army is a colonial institution. It was trained to hate its own people. The soldiers hate even themselves, shorn as they are of national pride. Those trained-to-kill nationalists fighting for freedom, how can they feel for the nation whose emergence they fought? They pass these attitudes to new recruits, the young. In time, these traditions of self-hate rooted in colonial times become the everyday. Our motto, a girl said, is simple: a New Army for a New Aburlria, not with the gun guiding politics but a politics of unity guiding the gun, to protect laws for social justice. These weapons are to protect our right to political struggle and not a substitute for political struggle.
Another man took up the thread: You see, despite our insurgency so far, we have not been able to hold the agents of the regime accountable for murdering our people. Nyawlra added: There will surely come a day when we shall make it impossible for these armed ogres to go about their work of terror without suffering consequences. We shall then fight on our terrain, which is the people who must know and believe that we aim only to defend them and protect their right to a better life.
They took him through underground passages to yet another cave, a large room full of books. The Ruler and now the Emperor hated books and ideas that came from within, they explained.
“We believe that all knowledge is our inheritance, but we also have a duty to add to the common store. The right to receive, the duty to give.”
Yes, words that he and Nyawlra had used, but now confronting him with all the power of their estrangement. Maybe knowledge was nothing more than the art of looking at what we already know with different eyes, and asking different questions. Knowledge is the discovery of the magic of the ordinary. Like words put into song. He was so absorbed in these thoughts about what was being said that he did not realize that he had been led to another spacious complex: a hospital, a replica of the shrine.
“We transported everything to this place,” Nyawlra said, reading his mind again. “This is where we first brought you on the night they shot you. This is where you were operated on and the bullet extracted. We want you to take charge of the facilities and develop it as a nursery of health and clean living in accordance with the Seven Herbs of Grace. We are trying to imagine a different future for Aburlria after people united take power from these ogres… Dr. Patel who did the surgery is not here today but…”
“What? Some Aburo-Asians?”
“Yes, for it does not mean that all the Asians in Aburfria support the current program of ogres. Like black Aburlrians, some work with the forces of repression, while others toil on the side of the people. This was also true in our anticolonial struggles, but the regime tries to suppress this knowledge. Anything pointing to people being able to unite across race and ethnic lines is suppressed so that people may not realize the sources of their strength and power.”
They took him to another room. He felt tears press against his eyelids. All his carvings of African deities were here.
“We brought them here long before you came back from America. For us they stand for a dream. We were hoping that you can complete them and even add the gods of all the other black and related peoples.”
A global conversation of the deities, he said to himself, remembering his thoughts as a bird in the sky.
14
They walked the streets of Eldares one afternoon as crowds pushed past them in all directions.
“Every day, the same story,” commented Nyawlra. “People continue to pour into the capital for jobs they know are hard to come by.”
“It reminds me of those days when I walked these streets expecting that my academic degrees would land me a job,” said Kamltl. “Then conditions looked really bad, and I could not see how much worse they could become. But they are so now, and I find myself with the same thought: can conditions become worse than this?”
“What is to prevent them from worsening? When the farmer and the manufacturer grow and make things within, the neoimperial class imports en masse the cheapest from abroad and undermines the efforts within. We live in a corporate globe under imperial corporoni-alism, as proudly claimed by the new ogres.”
The streets they passed told the same old story. The potholes had multiplied; there was garbage everywhere for want of collection.
“The bright side of people in the streets is that we are hiding among them,” Kamltl observed.
“Why don’t we go for coffee somewhere and enjoy this bright side while seated?” Nyawlra suggested. She was trying to find a place where she could address a tension that seemed to have grown between her and Kamltl. “Let’s try the Mars Cafe?”
“Gautama, the owner, might he not recognize us?”
“No, not Gautama, his mind is always on Mars or some other planet,” Nyawlra said trying a light touch. “Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto? Which of those do you think he would like to make a home?”
“Actually it is not only Gautama,” said Kamltl, not picking up the lighthearted tone. “There is also Kaniuru.”
“Don’t you remember the statement from his wife, Jane Kanyori, that he has disappeared? SID?”
“And the new Emperor? He still has his business. Modern construction. Your old workplace?”
It became a walk down memory lane, back to the bad and the good that had happened to them in Santamaria. Nyawlra winced as she recalled the day she narrowly escaped arrest with the inadvertent help from A.G., thanks to his belief that she was the other manifestation of the Wizard of the Crow. They sat down almost at the same roadside spot where they sat on the day they first met.
“Whatever drew me to you on that day was blessed.”
“And who would have thought that the place where you took the test would later become the starting point of the queuing mania? Or Tajirika’s imperial journey?”
“Well, let’s say that even then he was an emperor of wood and construction. I wonder if they restored the original board with NO VACANCY…” Kamltl started.
Their laughter and this reunion with their beginnings considerably reduced the tensions that lingered between them.
“Okay let’s go and get our coffee before it gets cold,” Kamltl said.
“Did you make an order through an invisible phone?”
They rejoined the human traffic, but after a few blocks they realized that they had gone past the place and so they turned and went back the way they came. Again they missed the place a second time and they went back, looking at each and every building carefully.
“No, it is not that we are going past it,” said Nyawlra. “Look.”
The building that used to house the Mars Cafe had been demolished. The site was fenced off with a wall of corrugated iron sheets. By the side was a big billboard: UNDER CONSTRUCTION: GLOBE INSURANCE CORPORATION: THE TALLEST BUILDING IN AFRICA; A REAL MARCHING TO HEAVEN.
“What happened to Gautama, I wonder,” Kamltl said. “Did he go to one of the planets you just recited?”
“Most likely he moved his business elsewhere in the city” said Nyawlra. “Let’s leave Gautama and his Mars Cafe alone and look for another place.”
“What about Chou’s Chinese Gourmet?” Kamltl suggested.
“It is a restaurant, not a coffeehouse,” Nyawlra said.
At the Santamaria market they bought the day’s issue of the
