Roy stopped talking. We sat and stared at the shadows, oversized and faint off the lattice fence.
“It was an accident, Roy,” I said finally. “It wasn’t your fault. You need to let it go.”
Before I could say anything else, I heard Amy hollering behind us, her voice slurring slightly over the music.
“Hey, you two! We’ve been looking all over for you!”
I started to wave her off, but Roy jerked out of his chair, tipping it to the ground.
“Come on, woman,” he said, taking Amy by the waist. “Let’s go dance.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A T FIVE-THIRTY IN the evening, our train rumbled out of the old Nairobi train station heading west for Kisumu.
Jane had decided to stay behind, but the rest of the family was on board-Kezia, Zeituni, and Auma in one compartment;
Roy, Bernard, and myself in the next. While everyone busied themselves with storing their luggage, I jiggled open a
window and looked out at the curve of the tracks behind us, a line of track that had helped usher in Kenya’s colonial
history.
The railway had been the single largest engineering effort in the history of the British Empire at the time it was built-
six hundred miles long, from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to the eastern shores of Lake Victoria. The project took
five years to complete, as well as the lives of several hundred imported Indian workers. When it was finished, the
British realized there were no passengers to help defray the costs of their conceit. And so the push for white settlers; the
consolidation of lands that could be used to help lure newcomers; the cultivation of cash crops like coffee and tea; the
necessity of an administrative apparatus that could extend as far as the tracks, into the heart of an unknown continent.
And missions and churches to vanquish the fear that an unknown land produced.
It seemed like ancient history. And yet I knew that 1895, the year that the first beams were laid, had also been the year
of my grandfather’s birth. It was the lands of that same man, Hussein Onyango, to which we were now traveling. The
thought made the history of the train come alive for me, and I tried to imagine the sensations some nameless British
officer might have felt on the train’s maiden voyage, as he sat in his gas-lit compartment and looked out over miles of
receding bush. Would he have felt a sense of triumph, a confidence that the guiding light of Western civilization had
finally penetrated the African darkness? Or did he feel a sense of foreboding, a sudden realization that the entire
enterprise was an act of folly, that this land and its people would outlast imperial dreams? I tried to imagine the African
on the other side of the glass window, watching this snake of steel and black smoke passing his village for the first
time. Would he have looked at the train with envy, imagining himself one day sitting in the car where the Englishman
sat, the load of his days somehow eased? Or would he have shuddered with visions of ruin and war?
My imagination failed me, and I returned to the present landscape, no longer bush but the rooftops of Mathare
stretching into the foothills beyond. Passing one of the slum’s open-air markets, I saw a row of small boys wave to the
train. I waved back, and heard Kezia’s voice, speaking in Luo, behind me. Bernard yanked on my shirt.
“She says you should keep your head inside. Those boys will throw stones at you.”