After the Rains
by Dennis Mugaa
I’m here now, my love, where we first met fifteen years ago. The large, antique railway station clock says it’s six in the morning—the second and minute hands perfectly align; I am two hours ahead of schedule. Do you see? There is something of you that has remained in me despite the time we’ve been kept apart. Remember those mornings when you would wake me for a trip, saying, “My love, we’ll be late. You’re not awake yet?” How your voice cracked in despair when an hour later I’d be in the shower? You’d knock on the door asking if I was done, trying to suppress the anger in your tone, trying to be kind and soft to me. And when we eventually arrived on time at our destination, you’d ask with a playful grin—as if you’d won a secret game, “What would you do without me?”
I’m seated on the bench where you were seated years ago, recording the sounds of the train station. After all this time, the wooden back of the bench is still engraved with the poorly drawn arrow piercing through a heart. You told me the engraving was made by university students who had long fallen out of love, but I never asked how you knew that. On my lap is the leather briefcase you gave me. I filled it with photographs of the times we spent together, cassettes of your favourite songs, the sweet thoughtful notes you wrote me before you left for work, your letters from prison, the grey shirt of yours I liked and, most importantly, your original formula of memory written in the pages of your Moleskine notebook. I hid the formula, my love, the day they came to arrest you. I kept it safe when they started destroying your work, burning your books and closing down your lab. It’s here with me: evidence of the formula, evidence of your intelligence, evidence that you were here on earth, that there is nothing they can do to erase you. A week from now they will put you in front of a firing squad. They will ask you if you want your face covered or not. I know you’ll choose not to have it covered so that you can look your executioners in the eyes. You’ll ask for water, whether it will be a hot or cold day, and you’ll ask not to be tied to a pole because you will not run. I know too, that you will ask for me. “Where is my wife? Where is she?” You’ll ask for me because you don’t want to die alone, without someone you love there to see you. I will not be there. Yes, I feel guilty about my decision to leave you, but how can I watch the person I love be executed? The commander will give the order, “Fire!” My love, my dear Leshan, wherever I’ll be, I will know that it has happened. I’m sure they will not mark your grave; how can they, when you almost inspired a revolution? In the streets of Nairobi, there will be graffiti portraits of you, hundreds of people recreating you as if to keep you living. They’ll say: Here is the scientist who gave us our memories back after we lost them in the Rains of Mem- ory Erosion. The scientist who knew the secret language of memories.
***
Fifteen years ago, on a morning heavy with the finality of fate like this one, I was on a train to Nairobi, running from my past. I left my father’s house in Lamu in a hurry and in secret because he planned to wed me to a wealthy old man, a friend of his, against my will. He had a debt to pay, and our marriage would settle it. I wanted to be a theatre actress, I didn’t want to be married, and he didn’t want what I wanted for myself. Only my grandmother felt that I should listen to my heart. Remember I told you she helped me escape? “I give you my blessings, my child. May Allah protect you,” she said, placing her hands on my head as she saw me off. The small valise she had given me was filled with a few clothes and a necklace made from an old East African coin of the 1920s. She told me the coin was special, that it brought good luck and it would protect me from harm. Sailors told her of its magic when she used to clean the inside of steamships that docked at the port during the Second World War. The coin was placed in the navigation bridge of the SS Khedive Ismail. One day she took the coin for herself so that the birth of her first child—my father—would go well. While the birth was successful, she heard, days later, that the ship was sunk by a Japanese submarine.
My love, I didn’t know where I was going the morning we met, even when I heard: You have arrived at your destination. Was I ready? I knew that Nairobi contained my dreams in a way that Lamu never could, but I was so scared, and the cold air which burst in when the doors slid open made me shiver. I was afraid of what would happen to me in this big city where I knew no one. I was twenty-two and had never been outside of Lamu. Yet, when I breathed in the fresh air, I felt liberated, it was a beautiful exhilarating feeling: to finally hold my life in my hands for the first time. I squeezed onto my valise and stepped out of the train following the procession of people. I looked up at the station’s dome and thought it resembled a large mosque. The conductor walked out in his nice black uniform and the stewards followed him, laughing and sharing stories with a certainty of their place in the world. How I envied them! Once I passed the turnstile, I stood in the waiting area, afraid to walk out of the station. I stared at the boards with scheduled departure and arrival times, then at the food vendors in the station, screaming out orders to cooks in the kitchen, and suddenly I felt so lost. This was not my world; I belonged to Lamu, to the slowness of life in a coastal town, I belonged to the sea. I considered buying another ticket back home; perhaps my father would forgive me if I begged, if I told him I had gone nowhere, that I was loyal to him, and ready to obey his wishes, that two days away meant nothing.
I didn’t do that. Instead, I walked to buy a bottle of water. On the way, I tripped and dropped my valise. It fell and was kicked by a passerby, dragging it to this bench. Seated on it that day, in the middle of the station’s chaos, was you—as calm as the sea at low tide. Your large spectacles did not suit you because of how small they made your eyes seem. Your old grey suit had elbow patches.
“Are you okay?” you asked as I bent to pick my valise.
“Yes,” I replied, sitting at the end farthest from you. I did so because I was embarrassed to continue my walk to the shop, and your face appeared kind, like that of boat captains who gave me free rides in their dhows. I watched the world move and heard announcements about people going to different places around the country.
“I’m sorry, but have we met before?” you asked, turning to me. I didn’t answer because it was the sort of thing men used to try to speak to me, and I thought that all men were the same, even here in the city. I felt strangely comfortable that it was something familiar I’d recognized: I’d learnt something quickly, and I was proud of myself. Years later, on our second anniversary in the lovely wooden cabin near Mt Kenya, as I lay on your chest in the outdoor jacuzzi with hot water and bubbles covering our bodies, you told me how you had this theory that people would one day be able to access memories of their future. I looked out to the mountain. The morning mist was clearing to reveal its snow- capped peak. You said, “I think that time happens at once, past, present and future.” You kissed me on the lips and added, “I asked if we’d met before when I first saw you because I’ve always known you. I’ve always known you’d be important in my life. And here you are. My memory of you then is of the time and love we share now and forever.”
You left your seat that day we met, and I thought it was the last time I’d ever see you. In this city, it certainly felt like when you came across some- one once, it was the only time you’d ever see them. A few minutes later, you came back with a bottle of water and asked, “Would you like some?” “Yes,” I answered even though my grandmother told me not to accept anything from strangers in Nairobi. I took deep gulps from the bottle, and feeling nourished, I warmed towards you.
“My name is Leshan,” you said with a gorgeous smile, stretching your hand to shake mine. I saw you were young, but didn’t understand why you dressed like a much older man.
“What’s yours?”
When I told you my name, you said it out loud to yourself as if you didn’t believe me.
“Where is your train going to?” I asked you.
“I’m not going anywhere.” You showed me the tape recorder in your left hand, and said you were recording the sounds of the city to make an aural graph mapping how different places made memories react.
“I’m a scientist,” you said, when I raised a brow. “A scientist studying memory.”
“I’m an actress,” I replied.
“Perhaps that is why you look familiar. Is there a film you’re in I can watch?”
“No. I’m a theatre actress.”
“Okay, a play you’ll be in I can come to?”
“I’m hoping to be in one soon. I’m new to Nairobi.”
You asked if you could buy me a meal as a welcome gift, and while I thought you’d take me to the restaurant at the station, you walked me out and into the city. On the sidewalk, you walked closer to the road and I felt safe and protected. We went to Java House, the sweet smell of coffee engulfing our arrival. I remember the chef came out to greet you, his arms spread open in excitement as if he held genuine affection for you.
“Leshan, this is incredible. I’ve never seen you here with a girl before.” You introduced us and he smiled warmly at me. I told him you and I had just met.
“So, my dear, what has Leshan said to impress you? Has he told you that he discovered the memory drug two years ago? He’s the reason we have all our memories back in this country.”
I stepped back and looked at you properly. It was me who should have said that you looked familiar. I’d seen you on television two years ago, announcing that you’d discovered the memory drug which could help anyone who wanted to remember things from the year of the memory erosion rains.
“Ah, you’re Leshan, the scientist,” I said as we sat down and you smiled.
The chef personally delivered our meal, even though it was just two cups of masala tea, sausages and samosas. “Specially made for you two!” He winked at you.
“Tell me how you did it, Leshan,” I said, fascinated by you.
“I studied a lot. It was all I could think of for years. When I was try- ing to discover the drug, some countries already had some version of the memory drug. Mostly European countries. But they didn’t want to share their technology, and if they did, they charged very expensively. I discovered the formula by accident when I was trying to remember something my mother told me. With our own formula, we don’t need anyone else to help us,” you said. “I didn’t ask for money from anyone who wanted the drug, but the government asked what I wanted and I requested to be the director of the natural sciences research institute which I got.”
“I’m curious, how do people take the memory drug?”
“It’s supposed to be a pill taken twice a day until the day a patient is able to completely remember what they forgot. After the first dose, patients remember immediately, then they forget after some hours. For the memories to be embedded eternally, it takes some patients a week. For most patients, it’s a month-long dosage. However, for some patients, it takes months for the memories to be embedded eternally. That is where risk lies: the risk of them becoming addicted to the drug. We are doing more research at the institute so that it doesn’t happen.”
“Incredible!”
“Do you know the best part? Although most of our patients are from the rains, we’ve been getting patients who experience memory loss due to other factors coming to us and so far, the memory drug has worked on them too!”
You spoke so passionately about science, and even though I didn’t understand most of what you were saying, I could tell you were the sort of person who, when you loved something, became entirely consumed by it.
You looked bright that day and you were so sweet to me. I pressed tightly on my grandmother’s necklace thanking it for its good fortune that had led me to you, a good man.
The PA sounds, breaking me away from my memories. Calling on all passengers to Lamu.
I walk towards my train. Everything around me feels normal, yet my heart is in turmoil. I wonder what you’re thinking as you wait on the day of your death. Will you hate me for running away when you need me most? Was I a good wife if I gave you the love you desired and needed when we were together?
***
I was ten years old when the Rains of Memory Erosion fell. I was walk- ing home from the fish market with my grandmother. “Nilijua uta- nichelewesha,” she said to me impatiently. I’d insisted on wearing a dera that was much larger than my small body and she was berating me for falling behind while dark clouds gathered. She said a quick greeting to the boat builders along our way home. One of the builders was wrapping a tarpaulin over a boat he was repairing and I waved. We were lucky to be inside the house when the rains started. I lay on the bed in the room my grandmother and I shared, listening. The rain fell with a quiet charm in the early evening until it switched to an incessant murmur that wouldn’t go away.
We thought the rainfall would abate after a few hours, as it usually did, but even after we slept and woke, the rain was still falling. “Mvua leo itaharibu biashara,” my father complained as my mother served him tea and mahamri. He was a tailor in the old part of town, and his shop was on the main street where most of the tourists passed. He tailored kikoi and ensured that his garments fit loosely so that he could give his customers the feeling of being in a carefree place. He said the idea made his shop successful because tourists would always want to buy from a shop they associated with relaxation. He went to work in the downpour, but neither my siblings nor I went to school because it was the August holidays.
The rain went on for days and then one week passed, then two. In the news, they said it was raining all around the world. At the same time. It was incredible. Leshan, my idea of the world then didn’t include many places—perhaps the little I’d heard from fishermen, and the farthest they had been in the monsoon months was to Zanzibar in Tanzania and Pemba in Mozambique. There was also an old family legend that we traced our lineage to Persia. Therefore, when the television showed places in Europe, America, and Asia raining, they seemed so far removed from me.
There was an environmental scientist on television speaking about the melting of glaciers in the North Pole and how climate change was adversely affecting the world. He was unfortunately placed in a panel of experts with a Christian religious leader who said that it was the rains of Noah which had returned.
Three weeks into the rains, I heard something more devastating in the news: most people unlucky enough to get rained on reported that they were suffering from memory loss. The memory losses were varied. Some people forgot if they had children, some forgot their place of work, and others forgot trivial things like where they had left the car keys. There were more serious cases, like those who forgot the history of their countries. The most fatal of these were those people who forgot who they were, their names, where they had come from and where they were going; they were sometimes found seated on the road, their faces touching their knees, crying, asking the person who found them, “ Who am I? Who am I?” Only a few, those whom the media said had a natural immunity to memory loss, didn’t forget a single thing no matter how much they got rained on.
The government asked people to stay at home and urged those who couldn’t to use umbrellas and raincoats that covered their entire bodies. Parents wouldn’t allow their children to go out. Not many heeded the caution. I wasn’t any different: I sneaked out to search for my friends so we could play in the rain. We liked to play a game on the pier where boats from other parts of the archipelago were moored. We would stand on the part of the pier which was closest, but high enough above the water, then jump until our clothes soaked in sea and rainwater. I liked this game because some boys did somersaults, cartwheels and acrobatic dives into the water. When I jumped, I swam deep into the ocean and held my breath for a long time. I felt connected to the water, swimming despite the torrid rain. I heard my friends at the pier calling out in search of me, concern in their voices, “Uko wapi?” and one of the boys said, “This is why we should never come here with a girl.” I stayed in longer, to increase their concern, and when they got exasperated, I emerged laughing, “Niko hapa.”
The rains ended a month after they began, but they left us with their destruction.
My father forgot how to tailor clothes, and this frustrated him immensely. The only thing he’d learnt to do better than anyone else had chosen to desert him. Even when he relearned, his creativity never came back, so the clothes he made after the rains were unfashionable, too tight, and no longer popular with the tourists. Business slowed and he took on a young apprentice to mask his lack of creativity. It didn’t bring more clients. He became quiet, quick to anger, and his previous warm nature towards us slowly disappeared until he was someone I hardly recognized.
My mother constantly forgot my father’s name and was too afraid to ask anyone else except me. For years, she would turn to me and ask in an embarrassed whisper, “What is your father’s name?” My grandmother forgot nothing at all. I can’t remember what my two elder brothers or my sister, Aisha, forgot. I forgot my way home, and for a long time, I couldn’t quite remember where we lived. I always had to ask someone to escort me home.
***
I arrive in Lamu in the evening. I collect my belongings and follow the procession out of the station. A father and his three daughters walk ahead of me. One of them, the youngest, tries to grab a bottle of water on a table near the exit door and spills its contents. The father looks at the stewardess in embarrassment, but the stewardess smiles in understanding. “We’ll clean up, don’t worry,” she says. The humid air envelops me as I walk to get a boat to the old town. My love, Lamu has not changed at all. It feels like it was kept in a time capsule and forgotten about. The dhows are out in the ocean, no doubt taking tourists around for a sunset cruise. Children are playing at the same pier from our games, diving in and out of the water while watching out for the boats coming in. Two- speed boats far out in the distance are racing to Shela Island.
Except for my sister and my late grandmother, I have not spoken to anyone else since I left. I wonder if I will run into any of my family members along the way, if I’ll see any of my former friends, if anyone will recognize me. Fifteen years is a long time to be away and I have changed so much. I no longer wear a hijab; I let my hair down and sometimes hold it up with the black hairbands you got me. How different I’ve become! I’m wearing jeans and a shirt and I look like a tourist in this sea of kanzus and buibuis. Even as I pass the donkey shelter where I used to beg the owner to let me go on free rides on his donkeys, no one turns to look at me. I feel like a stranger in my own home. I used to know most people here and they would call my name in greeting as I walked down the street with my grandmother, like a true child of the sea. I moved on without them the day I left and now I realize they moved on without me too. Only when I pass the mosque does a woman in a niqab look at me and maintain eye contact as she walks. Her eyes, the only thing I can see, pierce into me. Her eyes say, “I know who you are, but you’ll never know who I am.”
These narrow streets make me think of the prison walls I walked between to see you; they smell as foul as the nauseating corridors that held you. They always made you sit looking away from your visitor. Yet, whenever I placed my hand on your shoulder, you would hold on for some time without turning and you’d call my name sweetly, asking, “Is it you? Is it you?” When they allowed you to face me, we resumed our love in those brief moments that they gave us. It broke my heart seeing you in those striped prison clothes, noticing how much weight you’d lost, and how hollow your eyes looked when I asked, “Have you eaten?” “What did the lawyer say?” you asked the first time I came to see you. “He said charges of treason are difficult to get bail. But he’s trying, he went to school with one of the judges on the bench. Hold on my love, something good will happen. I can feel it.” When I said that, you reached your hand across the table and held mine. Your touch was warm and affectionate, and my heart broke again.
I find Lamu House, the hotel I’ll be staying at, easily. My room is lovely. It has a bed with a mosquito net, an unusually large dresser and a shower whose water comes out in a large splurge, like a waterfall. I clean up and lie on the bed, my memories of you racing, each happy one a foretelling of the pain I’ll suffer when you leave me. I am so certain that if the rains of memory erosion came today, I would go into them
to be erased of the memory of you, to be erased of the pain of losing you. Wouldn’t it be easier not to remember something which hurts you?
***
“Wouldn’t it be easier not to remember something which hurt you?” It was the question I’d asked your father the second time I met him. That day, I’d received a letter from my sister Aisha, informing me about the death of my grandmother some weeks after I’d left home. She said that in the shock of my departure and the ensuing grief of my grand- mother’s death, my parents and my elder brothers had disowned me, that they never wanted to see me again and that if I were alive, I should never go near them. I was feeling a numbing sadness. Memories of my family, and the manner in which I left them, flooded me. I thought of my grandmother’s love, how gentle she was with me and how I’d never experience that love again.
Your father was tending to the plants in his garden, a dying rose held between his thumb and index finger. He snapped it off. His white beard and hair gave him the appearance of someone wise beyond the ways of the world, as if he were a seer.
“Yes,” he answered. “Sometimes it’s better to forget.” He told me he used to work in the National Archives as an archivist in colonial times. He was just starting his career and he was so impressed by how large the archives were. It recorded everything the British had done in the country since the Berlin conference of 1884. Within five years, he had read every record in the archives and they embedded in him. I wondered how possible that could be, but you once told me that the most amazing thing about your father was how strong his memory was, how he remembered everything that you’d done since you were born, how well he remembered your mother long after she died. Even after being drenched by the rains of memory erosion, he hadn’t forgotten a single thing.
One day, he was assigned to assist with records pertaining to security and intelligence. It was there your father read about the torture in the concentration camps that the British had set up. In the last days of British rule, your father said, senior officials in the colonial government had a large incinerator built. In it, they burned the records of their torture and anything else they felt could be used to prosecute them. He told me that the fire was so large and continuous that it kept going for a month, burning every shred of their crimes. Still, he remembered what was in each of those files and books and he promised himself that he would reproduce them when independence was granted.
After independence, he was appointed the chief archivist. “I tried to rewrite what was in those records,” he said. “But the moment I sat at a typewriter I heard all those people’s suffering in my head and I couldn’t even complete one sentence. What happened to those people has accompanied me for years, like ghosts. I wish I could forget them because it would be better for me. Memory can be a kind of prison.”
I felt sorry for your father.
“But if I forget the records, it will mean that the truth about the torture to those poor people didn’t happen. So, you see, memory is both a blessing and a curse.”
“Do you think Leshan’s memory drug has helped people?”
“Leshan only sees the goodness of memory. He lost his mother at a young age when his memory wasn’t strong yet. Ever since, he’s been trying to go back to her. Now, he remembers her so well. For others, maybe they remember sad traumatic memories. For them, it is better to forget. Only history will judge Leshan.”
***
I wake in the middle of the night without meaning to and listen to the muezzin make the call to prayer. My thoughts are consumed by you and I feel as if each second that goes by is a second taken away from you. When morning light filters in, I go for breakfast.
Remember when we hiked in Ngare Ndare Forest? When I jumped from tree stump to tree stump, and you walked next to me on the grass? I felt so much freedom that day as if I were a child. We were seven years into our marriage and I couldn’t believe that I had loved anyone for that long. “One, two, three, four, five . . .” I counted. You appeared sulky, even though we’d taken the hike for you to clear your mind.
It was the week the government banned the memory drug. The news reported the controversies: several people who’d taken the drug remembered painful parts in their lives and could no longer function, while there were those who took the drug in more doses than recommended to remember their good memories and had become addicted. They now walked like zombies in the city, a slave to happier pasts.
Still, a political movement was formed to advocate for the ban to be overturned. It was named after the date you released the memory drug: The 6th of October Remembrance Movement. They accused the government of authoritarianism, of trying to control people by being the memory police. They wanted a clause to be added in the Constitution which guaranteed the right to memory for anyone who lost theirs. Their protests started small, and were now becoming well attended as they’d launched a weekly newspaper critical of government policy on memory.
“That movement isn’t wrong, you know,” you said of them. “There is nothing wrong with the drug. People just need some time to adjust to it.” And then you told me about Plato’s allegory of the cave. People who lost their memories in the rains were like prisoners facing a wall, and all they knew of the outside world were the shadows which passed on the wall. Therefore, they thought of the shadows as reality. However, with the memory drug, the prisoners were released, free to experience the real world with all their memories. You told me how the memory drug made you remember the face of your mother, and her voice when she sang to you, and how much those memories meant even though they were painful.
I made it to the other end of the tree stumps and jumped onto the grass. You seemed happier after I listened to you, and as we made our way through the canopy walk, you told me I was beautiful. At the top of the waterfall, we took off most of our clothes. “Hold my hand,” I said. You clasped your hand to mine and we plunged into the blue pool of water.
“I’m starting to forget my parents,” I said as we dried off. “Sometimes, I sit down and try to remember my childhood memories, when I was happy with them, but they’re so fuzzy.”
“Would you like to remember them?” Leshan leaned to me, his face pleading. “You could take the memory drug.”
“No, I don’t, it’s easier to remember them as the people who hurt me. It makes things less complicated.”
***
I walk towards the restaurant where my sister Aisha works. It’s sunny today and on the street, I brush past children going to madrassa. There are several cats along my way. As children, my sister and I used to say that cats were djinns who’d come back to the physical world to visit the relatives they missed. Aisha loved the cats more than I did, always happy to stop and give them food anytime we passed them as we ran along in our bare feet.
Your father, when he heard that my parents would not be coming for our wedding, offered to walk me down the aisle. When he realized I was nervous, he said that all I needed to do was to take one step at a time. That I should make sure to smile at you after each step. Your cousin was your best man and my sister who’d come all the way from Lamu was my bridesmaid. She was the only family member I still talked to. Back at home, she told me, my name could not be mentioned in the family and they had also cut me out of the family photographs, erasing me. I felt so crushed, but to console me, she’d also brought some of my late grandmother’s items that she thought I would love: her lesos, perfumes, spices, deras, a rolling pin, and a final letter from my grandmother, an expression of her love for me written in her final days. I hadn’t yet made a lot of friends, so the only people I invited were those I worked with at the National Theatre where I was trying to find my feet as a theatre actress. When I reached you, I was shaking. My family had abandoned me, but here was yours, embracing me.
I find my sister cleaning a table with a wet cloth. She raises her head and sees me, but doesn’t recognize me immediately. It’s only after we maintain eye contact for some time that she smiles, drops the cloth and rushes to me, hugging me and collapsing into my body. “Alhamdulillah!
My sister, my sister, you are here! Alhamdulillah!” Her joy turns to tears, and her tears make me cry. We walk together and sit in the restaurant’s courtyard. It’s still early in the morning and there aren’t many customers around. We have some time to ourselves.
“I heard about Leshan,” she says.
“I’ve tried everything to help him get out, there’s nothing more I can do.”
“I know how much you love him.”
I sob the more she speaks of you. We talk about what has happened in my absence. As you know, my parents and brothers left Lamu not long after I married you. They left for Zanzibar to build a new life. She says that our parents are aging, that the bitterness of my leaving has never left them, and the shame they thought would disappear after they left Lamu still hovers over them. I feel guilty when she tells me this, but how have they carried their shame all these years without recognizing how much they wronged me?
I told you about the old man I was being forced to marry, but there is more I didn’t tell you, my love. After the rains fell that whole month, and my father’s business started to fail, my family didn’t have money for a long time. There was a famine in Lamu because of the rains, the farmers weren’t able to reap a good harvest and the fishermen couldn’t go out into the sea.
We were so hungry and there were days we didn’t eat anything at all. My father approached one of the richest men in Lamu whose stock of food never seemed to deplete. Immediately after my father did so, our food supply was replenished and I deeply thanked the rich man for his kindness. Twelve years later, when I was about to join a college for a diploma in theatre studies, I arrived home to find several men inside our house and there, seated in the middle of the men with a cane and white kanzu was the old rich man. I was invited in and my father announced that the old man and I were to be married in a month. It was the promise, the price he had to pay for us to get food and his business running again.
“I don’t want to marry that man,” I said to my parents after the men left.
“You have to. If you don’t, he’ll take everything away from us. We owe our lives to him,” my father replied.
“I don’t owe him. My life is mine.” “You’ll do as I say!” thundered my father. “I don’t have to do anything you say.”
“My daughter, listen to your father. We have no other option. It is you that he wants to marry,” my mother said coming closer to me, her hand caressing my face. “Can you imagine the respect we will have here? All your friends are getting married too. I got married when I was your age.”
“I don’t care! I don’t care! Have you asked me what I want?”
I left crying and it was then that I decided that I needed to leave Lamu. How could I have a husband even older than my grandmother? In leaving, I shamed my family, and I feel as if my father and mother would have preferred death to shame. When the old rich man found out that I had run away, he demanded that my father return every single cent of his debt. That was how my father lost the little wealth he had
for a second time.
My sister and I fold into each other, crying, thinking of how the rains destroyed our lives. Without them, my love, I would have never met you, and I wouldn’t have to lose you.
***
You changed the day your father began to lose his memory.
“Leshan, your father has Alzheimer’s,” the doctor said after a series of tests.
We’d rushed him to the hospital when it became apparent that something was wrong. You sat on the chair, your hands covering your head. “Daktari, how is that possible? My father never forgets things.”
“We think that it’s possibly because of the rains of twenty-five years ago. Some older patients here have been having similar effects. Where nothing happened to their memory during the rains, but now the delayed effect is accelerated.”
“Would the memory drug help? I know it’s no longer approved, but would it help him?”
“It’s hard to say. Certainly, the side effects would be too much for him, given his age.”
“I don’t care about side effects. This is my father. Should a father forget his son and daughter-in-law when there is something that can be done?”
We left your father in the hospital that day and drove to your lab.
I sat on a table as you rummaged through the drawers searching for any remaining pills. Since the ban, pharmaceutical companies had ceased manufacturing the memory drug and only very few were left, sold at a premium in the black market.
“Where are they? Where are they?”
You found unexpired pills in a bottle and brought them to me. “Take one. Please,” you said. “My father believed in what I was doing and now he will forget about me. Forget that I exist. I don’t ever want you to forget me. Take them, please.”
Your hands shook, and I saw just how desperate your eyes were, how much you felt that your world was crumbling. Yet, I don’t know if you saw that I was still there, still part of your world and that whether or not your father forgot you, I was still there for you. This time, I didn’t resist; the only thing I had forgotten was my way home. I took the drug and gulped it down with a glass of water. Hours later, after we returned to the hospital and your father had also taken the pills, we were sleeping by his bedside when I woke crying with a sharp pain in my heart.
I remembered the love my parents had for me when I was growing up. There was my father in the years before the rains fell, playing hide and seek with me in our courtyard, and my mother, my dear sweet mother sitting down with me as she taught me how to apply henna, sharing gossip of what happened to so and so, making me laugh and telling me that I was her treasure. These were the parts of me that I had repressed so that I wouldn’t feel the pain of their abandonment. You woke to my crying, and when your father woke, too, instead of remembering, he asked us, “Who are you?” He frantically pressed the alarm to call the nurse.
***
We didn’t have a home life anymore. There was you with your new political future and then there was me, unable to move on from the constant presence and attention you used to shower me with. We were trying to have a baby, to start a family. You wanted a big family because you didn’t have siblings. You wanted your children to experience what it would feel like to have someone else to play with. You said being an only child was the reason you spent so much time with your books until you became a scientist. With this invasion into our home, I felt my womb tie itself up and when we made love, my insides resisted you. If that was how you were neglecting me for a cause, I thought, then you would do the same to our children.
The day your father was buried, you joined the 6th of October Remembrance Movement. It was like a bad dream I couldn’t wake from. Supporters came to our house as if it had suddenly become the headquarters of the movement. Everywhere I looked, there was a stranger. They came in the daytime, in the night and even in the dawn hours when we would still be asleep. They made you a co-chair of their council because they said the memory drug you’d created defined them.
“Leshan, I’m losing you to this fight,” I said in a rare moment we found ourselves alone.
“My love, it’s not just my fight. It’s a fight for all of us. For the children we will have. I promise you when this is over, I’ll be your Leshan, and yours alone.” You tried to reassure me. You hugged me, kissed me, told me you loved me.
One day, walking around the city centre after a few drinks with a friend and her husband, the skies started to rain pages and pamphlets. The pamphlets spoke about the oppression by the government, how they didn’t want us to know the truth about ourselves by banning memory. I picked one up. It was written: If we forget our memories, if we forget each other, then who are we? and the rallying call you’d adopted, Msikubali kujisahau! It was a new brave method of advocacy, a method that showed that the movement was there to stay. There were rumours too, although you never confirmed to me, of the movement having an armed resistance force, training somewhere in Mt. Elgon Forest, crossing through the border into Uganda to avoid detection. In the pamphlet, there were photos of you and the other two co-chairs of the movement. You looked less like my husband, and more like someone I didn’t know, someone I would pass along the street and not turn to look at. Your face had lost its soft features, your eyes had lost their white and you seemed unkind.
That night, I dreamt I was on a beach. I dreamt that I picked grains of sand and threw them into an empty night sky and they became stars. They looked so beautiful and I stared at them in wonder and marvel. Suddenly those stars started falling; they fell as the memories we had created together and some were even future memories, memories of our children and our grandchildren and us growing old together. The falling memories crashed and exploded like bombs into the sea and I was left alone on the beach.
I saw you less and less. I still went to the National Theatre and we performed wonderful plays, the kind I’d always wanted to, but when I looked out from the stage, the front seat where you should have been was empty. Our lives were moving apart from each other in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. It felt as if our love was suspended, and when we infrequently made love, as if our hearts were reaching out to touch each other, but never making any true contact.
After almost ten years, I finally wrote, directed and starred in my own production. The play was inspired by my experience with my family. It explored the complexity of relationships between family members and how families can be a deep source of pain and drown the individual with expectations. It was titled “Aziza,” and the story revolved around a princess whose life had been planned out for her despite her dreams. You didn’t come even though you promised you would. I didn’t know where you were. Instead, you sent me flowers as if they could replace you. So many people attended the opening and subsequent runs. Government agents came to spy on us, perhaps looking for you. But if they’d asked me where you were, I would have said, “My husband? I don’t know where he is. If you find him, tell him I’m looking for him too.”
***
I’m walking towards Shela Beach, remembering when the 6th of October Remembrance Movement staged a coup. I woke that day at dawn to find you were not in bed and that there were no guests. Odd, since members of the movement frequently stayed in the house or guest house. I made myself a cup of tea in the kitchen. Afterwards, I sat on our couch in my robe and put on the television. I dropped my cup, stunned by what was happening. The streets were barricaded by army officials and the streets were covered by glass. It said that the army was fighting against the movement which was trying to take over the country. So, it was true: the movement did have an armed resistance group. I didn’t want to believe it. I changed into a pair of jeans and left the house in search of you. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I didn’t want to hear of your death on television.
I couldn’t find you. Hours later, long after evening had arrived and I’d gone back to the house, I saw on the news that the coup had been suppressed and that you had been arrested. Your first phone call was to our landline, “My love, my love, are you there? I’m so sorry. I thought we could do it,” you said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want you to be involved.”
The following days were a whirlwind. I came to see you in the cells. I remember your frame in the court sessions, how you looked thinner and thinner, and yet I never saw remorse in your eyes; you seemed so determined, and hundreds of people attended the sessions holding placards with photos and illustrations of you. They said they loved you, but did they love you like I do? Will they suffer the same way I’m suffering on the day of your execution? Will they want to forget you the way I would like to? Had they devoted their lives to you? Did they give you everything?
If the rains of memory erosion had not happened, I would have grown up on this archipelago with my father, mother, brothers and sis- ters, and my friends and I would have spent the rest of our lives jumping off the pier into the sea which gave us life. I would not have met you and I would never have fallen in love with you, and you would not have created the memory drug and I’m certain you’d still have been a good scientist—a scientist without the politics. I wish I didn’t know of a life outside Lamu. I wish I could wake up and it is twenty-seven years ago and my grandmother and I are on the way from the market and the rains which made us lose our memories do not fall.
Here I am, on the beach, on the date and time of your execution. The clouds are hanging low and it starts to rain. It falls ceaselessly. I’m not where you are, but because I love you, that love closes the distance between us and I see the executioners raise their guns, I see you stand and look at them. I hear them fire and I fall onto wet sand. But I also see you and me in our bed. It’s morning; sunlight filters in softly and glistens off our bare bodies. From the mirror facing our bed, we appear intimate and beautiful. You tilt my head up and you kiss me. You kiss my lips, move down my neck, down my body and you tell me that you love me and that you’ll never leave me. Then I see us dancing, the way I sometimes do whenever I dream of you. We are in the pavilion of a country club dressed in all white. Our friends are around us and we are dancing slowly in celebration of life and love as the sun sets. “Hapo Zamani” plays and everything feels perfect, in harmony, as it should be: the sounds of laughter from our friends, the delicious smell of food, Makeba’s voice and the light falling in warm orange on our clothes. You gently touch my waist; we hold eye contact and we flow into our fairy tale ending. Memory, your father said to me, can be a kind of prison.
The sea roars, calling to me; the waves fold and unfold furiously into each other. I rise to my feet and walk into the water. The boats moored at sea sway violently. Behind me, a dhow sailor calls to me, and just as quickly, his friend tells him to let me go, that I am a djinn going back to their home in the sea. Perhaps what they say is true—my sadness could drown a ship. I hope the rains falling will help me forget you. I hope they’ll drown all my memories. I hope they will unburden me. A wave rises in the middle and I walk towards it. In the distance, beyond the channel, lightning strikes and thunder roars and when the heavens open up again, the rain comes down and washes over me, but stubbornly, all my memories of you remain.