“What is your name?”
“Kanana,” said the girl from the bus.
“I heard you, in that office.”
“You needed saving.”
“Am I in danger?”
Kanana said nothing.
They sat in darkness.
A story came to him, slowly, gently, word by word, like the strokes of a sketch.
“Back home,” Muthomi said, “there is an old tree right in the middle of the village. They say that on the other side of the world, there is a tree exactly like ours, and underground, their roots join to hold the whole earth together.”
He was deeply homesick, but there was something else, too. Sadness, maybe. Bitterness.
“In the old days,” he continued, “good people would come from far and wide to enjoy the fruit of the Ndoro tree. But robbers would come in the night, to steal the fruit for the barter. So, the good people found the most vicious, menacing dog they could find, tied it to one of the big roots of the tree, believing it would keep the thieves away. That’s all they knew, that’s as far as they could think.”
He scratched at the mark on his arm. He watched the brush strokes swishing in the darkness, white ink on black canvas.
“The watchdog stayed in the cold, dark, dust, wind. The thieves still came. To an entire gang of thieves, this vicious dog was nothing but a puppy. It died that first night, killed by blows to the head. Still the thieves took fruit from the tree, still the villagers tied more dogs, even tried to train them to fight. While the villagers fought in vain with the bandits, the Ndoro tree stopped bearing fruit. They blamed the barrenness on the thieves’ endless greed. But the elders, who watched silently over the village, whose advice was ignored by the hot-blooded villagers, knew the truth: the tree would accept no more sacrifice. Too many dogs had died. Cruelty is a sin.”
The brush strokes ceased. The image was complete.
“I am lucky to be here,” said Muthomi, staring at the illusion in the dark. “Even if everyone else seems to hate me, and the words are too strange and too many, I am no longer rummaging through rubbish for scraps of string and hide and calling it a living. I sleep in a good bed, I wear good clothes, and I eat more than I could have hoped for back home. I am getting better learning than Mama Oti could ever give.”
The picture faded away.
“So why do I feel like the dog tied to the tree in the middle of the night?” he mused. “Isn’t it better to protect the whole village, to fence it, to choose the best warriors to watch over the people in the night?”
“Better to lose a dog than to lose a...