‘So we’re going to shave our heads, right? For tonsure?’
‘Mother is supposed to do that, not us,’ Gabriella frowned.
‘And has she?’ Naila scoffed.
Gabriella stared ahead, hands on the wheel. Contessa opened her mouth, closed it. Lilliana sighed. The girls tossed their dark, wavy manes and fell silent, gazing out of their respective windows as Gabriella drove home. Naila was only twenty-two herself but as the eldest, her authority still muted them – which was too bad because she could have used a warning. As it was, she walked into the family home in Kamwala unprepared.
At first everything in the sitting room looked the same. The patchy orange carpet. Framed family photos infesting the walls. The American stereo system hulking blackly in the corner with its tangle of dust-furred cords. Workers steadily criss-crossing the room. And Mother, ruling over it all. She was unaccountably sitting on the back edge of the sofa, a heap of white hair between her knees. She was sorting it, issuing commands to the workers all the while. Naila’s eyes fell on the packets of brown, red and yellow hair lying like dead fish on the sofa beside her – chopped and dyed and priced. If her sisters had quit the hair business, then how—
‘So you decided to come home, did you?’ Mother asked without looking up.
The pile of white hair between her legs twitched – Naila blinked – and a face nosed its way out from it, cheeks wrung with wrinkles, a sloppy smile between them. Naila rushed over and sat on the sofa and took Nonna’s birdboned hand in hers.
Nonna Sibilla was Naila’s accomplice. She had opened an escape hatch from this family by taking Naila to Kalingalinga that day ten years ago. Naila had fallen out of the jacaranda tree and into a new world. That world was dirty and scary and unclear – like being inside a dust storm – but it was real and she had loved it: the crowd of people running her through the compound, the speedy drive to the hospital, Dr Lionel Banda’s flashing eyes, the smell of his cologne mingling with Dettol and soap, the stinging pull of the stitches, and the wet slime of plaster mummifying her broken wrist. Naila had loved it all and she loved her nonna for tossing her into it.
After that accident, Mother had put severe restrictions on them both, but Nonna had continued to smuggle little liberties to her granddaughter. Nonna had covered for Naila when she snuck out to clubs. Nonna had washed cigarette smoke and whisky sweat and semen from Naila’s clothes. Nonna had given Naila financial support when she transferred to a university abroad. Nonna had encouraged her with curt, signed Whatsapps when Naila chose to major in political science. But Naila had neglected her grandmother over the past two years, as she began to spend more time at protests than in classes, and to take holidays with friends rather than home in Lusaka.
To see her intelligent, mischievous, rebellious grandmother reduced now to a pile of white fur, to see her fall under the axe of time and Lovely Luxe Locks Ltd – it redoubled Naila’s grief. She had lost her two closest allies in the war of her family.
* * *
Ding. The cabin lights came on. Naila lifted her head from the Cadbury man’s shoulder. He pulled his hand off her leg and smiled forgivingly, as if she had been the one to impose this intimacy. The flight attendants paced the aisles like antic tightrope walkers, with fixed smiles and mussed make-up. They were done with coddling. They snatched Naila’s blankets and demanded her headset, they claimed her rubbish and chastised her tilted seat. Naila snuffled her apologies and slid open the window shutter.
It was midnight. Darkness above, darkness below, both littered with grains of light. Out there was a fatherland. The engines grew louder, heaviness swelled into the loftiness, and the plane began its leisurely downward spiral. It landed with a scorch and a wobble, slowed with a blustering sound, then swung grandly round. Digit-All Beads, now permitted, immediately strobed over the cabin, clashing like light sabres. The seat-belt sign went off and passengers popped up to queue in the aisles. Naila boycotted the rush and stayed staring out of the window.
Everything is always flashing at airports. But only at night do you really notice the pulse of it, like fireflies with their rhythmic pickup lines. Once, when she was nine, Naila had heard