The first thing I see is white. It is blindingly pure and I have to raise a hand to shield my eyes. When the light fades, I blink 8 times, trying to grasp my surroundings.
The room I stand in is warmed kwa the flames dancing in the fireplace. A burgundy kitanda sits on the flowered Persian rug, accompanied kwa two arm chairs and a glass coffee table.
The swali "Where am I?" leaves my mind in that glance. It is replaced by "Why?" and zaidi urgently "How?". I walk cautiously mbele and run a hand over a bookshelf crowded with thick encyclopedias and vibrant fairytales.
This place.
This house were I lived as a young child, where my father taught me to ride a 2-wheeler in the driveway and my mother filled with the scent of baking chokoleti with an tanuri, joko full of brownies.
This house.
This nyumbani had burned, been consumed kwa angry red and machungwa, chungwa and yellow, greedily reducing little zaidi than mournful grey crumbs. I saw the feasting with my own eyes, watched it again and again in haunting nightmares.
And suddenly, a woman enters the room. She is me, twenty years from now. Though her hair is straighter, shorter than the waves that cascade down my back. Her eyes are a clearer, bluer sky than my storm-clouded greys. And something else. Something about the way she holds herself says she has seen too much, but her warm smile suggests she has learned to forgive and accept unchangeable memories.
"Mom?" my voice cracks as I speak a word beyond my vocabulary, stolen from me kwa those hungry devourers from Hell.
"Aryess." The voice, the way she speak my name, so familiar, so living, ringing every note of the measure, sends a shock through my body and freezes me where I stand. It's her. It's impossible. It makes sense to me in only one form.
"Am I dead?"
The room I stand in is warmed kwa the flames dancing in the fireplace. A burgundy kitanda sits on the flowered Persian rug, accompanied kwa two arm chairs and a glass coffee table.
The swali "Where am I?" leaves my mind in that glance. It is replaced by "Why?" and zaidi urgently "How?". I walk cautiously mbele and run a hand over a bookshelf crowded with thick encyclopedias and vibrant fairytales.
This place.
This house were I lived as a young child, where my father taught me to ride a 2-wheeler in the driveway and my mother filled with the scent of baking chokoleti with an tanuri, joko full of brownies.
This house.
This nyumbani had burned, been consumed kwa angry red and machungwa, chungwa and yellow, greedily reducing little zaidi than mournful grey crumbs. I saw the feasting with my own eyes, watched it again and again in haunting nightmares.
And suddenly, a woman enters the room. She is me, twenty years from now. Though her hair is straighter, shorter than the waves that cascade down my back. Her eyes are a clearer, bluer sky than my storm-clouded greys. And something else. Something about the way she holds herself says she has seen too much, but her warm smile suggests she has learned to forgive and accept unchangeable memories.
"Mom?" my voice cracks as I speak a word beyond my vocabulary, stolen from me kwa those hungry devourers from Hell.
"Aryess." The voice, the way she speak my name, so familiar, so living, ringing every note of the measure, sends a shock through my body and freezes me where I stand. It's her. It's impossible. It makes sense to me in only one form.
"Am I dead?"