Home! Sweet Home!

“How often have I lain beneath the rain on a strange roof, thinking of home?”

|William Faulkner//American novelist// via As I Lay Dying, 1930|

All too relatable, and not in any way admirable, yet quite laughable because when most of us leave home, we believe it’s time to get away and/or pursue greener pastures. Until the greener doesn’t seem so green anymore.

Selina ran away from home at 16. Her desire to have a better, rich and creamy life had matured from a voice deep within to a ghost haunting away her sanity and tormenting the last of her hopeless existence. She could no longer stand the poverty she was born into. She reeked of it and the smell choked life out of her.

There is nothing beautiful about poverty, I tell you. Nights of toss and turn tuned on the rhythm of the gunshots outside. If the bullets don’t kill you, a neighbor’s unkempt cooking stove will explode, the flames will find you and make you funereal ashes.

Poverty, the benevolent spirit, the curse…which torments, bewails and shackles you to the same misery year after year.

‘Not me. Not anymore.’ Selina thought.

Shamim and her aunt picked Selina up from the bus terminal in Dar es Salaam. Shamim and Selina met in primary school in Kenya and had been good friends since. When Selina contacted Shamim and lied that her mother and sister had died, Shamim’s family accepted to take her in.

Shamim’s parents had died in a road accident when she was six years old so she lived with her aunt, Zabibu. Zabibu was a wealthy business woman, making Shamim a suitable target for Selina’s scheme.

A few weeks later, Zabibu got Selina a job as a cleaner at a hotel within the city center. While wiping dust off the hotel room windows, she enviously watched luxurious cars speed by. She admired the business people crossing the roads, boisterously. How secure and confident they seemed. She often stared and  smiled, waved and whispered: Dear Future, I see you’re well. Marrying you soon. Sadly, her life wasn’t progressing as fast as she wanted it to. Her struggles still showed by the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, her soggy skin, rough palms and grotesquely chewed-out, once-jigger-infested feet. Each time she passed by the hotel’s bar, she would find men and women raising glasses in the air, laughing, dancing and chanting. How happy and satisfied with life they seemed.

Who are these people? Some so young. How did they get there? There must be a short cut. And I will find it, Selina often thought.

She prepared all her questions and went to Zainab. She was a successful business woman…after all!

“What do I do? Where do I start?”

“Are you willing to do anything to achieve your dreams?”

“Yes!”

The following morning, Zainab took Selina to a house in the suburbs. Inside, they found a group of about 15 girls who seemed of my age, and an older woman.

“Prepare her,” Zainab said to the older woman.

Selina trusted Zainab so she did not question the instructions. What followed was a session of physical therapy.

The other girls helped clean up Selina’s flaws and taught her how to wear make-up and lace it with expensive perfume and Shea butter lotion. The older woman explained the tricks of the game, the rules and the tools used.

It was a brothel masquerading as a massage parlor.

At the time, the business was fresh and thus so lucrative in Dar es Salaam such that six months into the job, Selina joined the bourgeoisie class of the society. Round of applause…anyone?

Ten years later and here she is, on a rainy night, on a strange roof gnashing her teeth at how she lost her soul to gain the world. She misses home. Back at home, her body was unsightly and dirty by dust but her dignity was intact and beautiful. She could dare lift her hands to the Holy one but with the filth they were presently dressed in, she dared not. She felt lost, too wandered off. But even if she found her way back, she would find bare ground and funereal ashes because the flames of the neighbor’s unkempt cooking stove caught up with my family two years ago. Her confession became her possession.

We’ve lost a friend or two to the world and in our continued involvement with them, we may have came to the realization that home isn’t necessarily where our families are but is also our life purpose or where we find peace and security, and that no matter how far gone we may be from home, we will always yearn to find our way back. I also learnt that if it was written in our destiny that we’ll go East, whether we opt to go North or South, one day we’ll have to go East and that’s when our lives will truly begin. It all boils down to accepting that, too often the short cut, the lie of least resistance, is responsible for evanescent and unsatisfactory success |Louis Binstock|.