a dry spot to set up the stove, to warm some food for the twins. But the rain was coming down too heavily now, and after a while she gave up.
“Jigana, so did you see those Maisha’s ma men?” she asked.
“There were three white men, plus driver. Tall, old men in knickers and tennis shoes. I shook hands with them. Beautiful-beautiful motorcar. . . . I even pinched that monkey.”
“Motorcar? They had a motorcar? Imachine a motorcar to pick up my daughter.” She stretched forward and held my arms, smiling. “You mean my daughter is big like that?”
Otieno woke up with a start. He stood groggily on the cushions, then he climbed over Mama’s legs, levered himself over me with his hand on my head, and landed in the flood outside the shack in a crouch. He began to lower thin spools of shit into the water, whiffs of heat unwrapping into the night, the cheeks of his buttocks rouged by the cold.
When Otieno returned to the shack, he sat on Mama’s legs and brought out her breast and sucked noisily. With one hand, he grabbed a toy Maisha had bought for him, rattling its maracas on Mama’s bony face. She was still looking ragged and underweight, even though she’d stayed in the hospital to have her diet monitored after Baby graduated from the incubator.
Mama took out our family Bible, which we had inherited from Baba’s father, to begin our Ex-mas worship. The front cover had peeled off, leaving a dirty page full of our relatives’ names, dead and living. She read them out. Baba’s late father had insisted that all the names of our family be included, in recognition of the instability of street life. She began with her father, who had been killed by cattle rustlers, before she ran away to Nairobi and started living with Baba. She called out Baba’s mother, who came to Nairobi when her village was razed because some politicians wanted to redraw tribal boundaries. One day she disappeared forever into the city with her walking stick. Mama invoked the names of our cousins Jackie and Solo, who settled in another village and wrote to us through our church, asking our parents to send them school fees. I looked forward to telling them about the lit parks and the beautiful cars of Nairobi as soon as my teachers taught me how to write letters. She called out her brother, Uncle Peter, who had shown me how to shower in the city fountains without being whipped by the officials. He was shot by the police in a case of mistaken identity; the mortuary gave his corpse to a medical school because we could not pay the bill. She called Baba’s second cousin Mercy, the only secondary school graduate among our folks. She had not written to us since she fell in love with a Honolulu tourist and eloped with him. Mama called Baba’s sister, Auntie Mama, who, until she died two years ago of a heart attack, had told us stories and taught us songs about our ancestral lands every evening, in a sweet, nostalgic voice.
The sky rumbled.
“Bwana, I hope Naema put clothes on Baby before she left,” Mama said to me, the middle of her sentence wobbling because Otieno had bitten her.
“She put Baby in waterproof paper bags. Then sweater.”
Otieno, having satisfied himself, woke up Atieno, who took over the other breast, for they had divided things up evenly between them. Atieno sucked until she slept again, and Mama placed her gently near Otieno and began to shake Baba until he opened one eye. His weak voice vibrated because his face was jammed into the wall: “Food.”
“No food, tarling,” Mama told him. “We must to finish to call the names of our people.”
“You’ll be calling my name if I don’t eat.”
“Here is food—New Suntan shoe kabire.” She reached out and collected the plastic bottle from me. “It can kill your stomach till next week.”
“All the children are here?”
“Baby and Naema still out. Last shift . . . and Maisha.”
“Ah, there is hope. Maisha will bring Ex-mas feast for us.”
“Ex-mas is school fees, remember?”
Mama groped inside the carton again. She unearthed a dirty candle, pocked by grains of sand. She lit the candle and cemented it to the trunk with its wax. Taking the Bible, she began to read a psalm in Kiswahili, thanking God for the gift of Baby and the twins after two miscarriages. She praised God for blessing Maisha with white clients