Free Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moses Isegawa Page A

said.
    ‘We even would follow her into the fields to see if she could really cultivate.’
    The floral cloth over Ilmorog countryside was later replaced by green pods and maize cobs. The peasant farmers of Ilmorog now went into the fields to idly earth up crops that no longer needed the extra earth, or to merely pull out the odd weed. Thistles, marigolds and forget-me-nots would stick to their clothes, and they would now laugh and tell jokes and stories as they waited for the crops to ripen.
    But their laughter concealed their new anxieties about a possible failure of the crops and the harvest. When a good crop was expected it was known through a rhythmic balanced alternation of rain and sunshine. A bad crop was preceded by sporadic rains or by a continuous heavy downpour which suddenly gave way to sunshine for the rest of the season. The latter was what had happened this year.
    Indeed they could now see that the pods of beans and peas were short: the maize plants were thin and the cobs looked a little stunted.
    Still they all waited for their ripeness and harvest believing that God was the Giver and also the one who took away.
    *
    Between Wanja and Munira there gradually grew an understanding without demands: nothing deep, nothing to wreck the heart. It was only, so he at first told himself, that her company gave him pleasure. For a time he felt reassured, protected even. She seemed to accept his constant attention with a playful gratitude. It was as if she would have been surprised if he had done otherwise. She often mentioned the coast, the white kanzus worn by men, the milky mnazi beer, the hairy coconut shells strewn along the Sunday beaches, the low cliffs at the water-edges of Kilindini harbour, and the wide blue waters with steamers from lands far away. She talked about the narrow Arab streets in old Mombasa town above which stood Fort Jesus — ‘It’s funny, imagine them calling it by the name of Jesus’ — and when Abdulla asked her if it was true that some Arabs could change themselves into women or cats she only laughed and asked him: but what kind of Mswahili are you to believe such things? Mswahili Mwislamu wa Bara, eh? She talked feelingly about all these things as if in every place she had been she had immersed herself in the life there: otherwise she rarely discussed her personal life, or talked about herself. Which of course Munira did not mind, for he was not one to want to tear the veils round another’s past. But he was not immune to her fatal glances and the boldness alternating with studied shyness which she bestowed on him and on Abdulla. He was, though he did not want to admit it, a little troubled by that waitingness on her face, by that pained curiosity and knowledge in her eyes. She was of course not bound to him, this he knew, and it accorded well with his spirit: he was scared of more than a casual link with another.
    Still he felt that by telling his story, so frivolous, so childish, he had surrendered a part of himself to others and this he felt gave them power over him. He went to his classes with an eye to the end of the day so he could meet her at Abdulla’s place. A beer together . . . a laugh together . . . and in the course of the evening’s chatter he would carefully edge toward the night he told the Siriana story, circling round it without actually mentioning it: but their unresponsive faces did not tell him what they had really thought of his failure. She was always near and yet far, and he found that he was getting more and more pained that she talked to Abdulla with the same intimacy:perhaps, weighing him against Abdulla, she found him wanting? He started thinking about Abdulla: how had he lost his leg? Why had he come to Ilmorog? He was surprised how little he knew about Abdulla, about anybody.
    An aeroplane flew low over Ilmorog. Children streamed out of their classrooms and all strained their eyes and raised their voices to the sky, trying hard to follow the