Dennis Mugaa

 Dennis Mugaa

The Cartography of Water

I am writing to you to give you both my past and my present. With you, I feel heard. With you, my heart sings. I see so clearly now how essential you are to me. It’s evening here. I step on the sand and my feet turn white. I’m slightly tipsy, so the clouds over the sea appear purple. It’s high tide in the evening and the sea is back; it rushes out to meet us as if in greeting. Boats sway in the waves, a family sits on the sand and one of them takes a photograph. The water laps around our feet, covering our ankles with seaweed. Suddenly, a beach boy rushes toward us and tells us not to go any farther. Sea urchins, he says, and then he redirects us to a section without them. I lie on my back facing the sky. The water is warm, the breeze caresses my skin. Waves rock me; when they rise over my ears, my friends’ voices sound submerged, as if they are coming from the bottom of the sea. Now, without being next to you, without my phone, the only thing that connects me to you is my thought of you. The calmness I feel makes my life’s memories rise as if summoned. Yesterday, I read two lines of a Louise Glück poem: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

I first saw the sea when I was five years old. I did not comprehend its vastness; it never occurred to me that something could be so big. When I saw there was a point at which it disappeared, I asked my mother if it was the end of the world. My mother held onto me. She was smiling, perhaps amused at my wonder of the sea. The water was blue, a little green in some places; when I tapped on it with my hands, it leapt out in colorless spherical drops. It evaporated from my skin in a delightful cool; the drops dried and left white salt crystals on my body. I wanted to go deeper, to the deep sea where fishes swam, to where I couldn’t see any sand, but my mother wouldn’t let me. Her face turned to horror as soon as the water reached my knees. But I never absorbed her fear. For me, each step into the sea was a step into magic.

I’m sitting on a kikoi in a stall by the beach. It’s mid-morning and the sun makes the sea glisten. The henna artist delicately draws a tattoo on my arm. My design is three five-petal flowers connected by a swirling tendril. They lead down like a dance along my arm. The artist decorates around the flowers with intricate dots and arrow patterns. As I watch her draw, I feel peaceful. She tells me the design has no meaning; she drew it one day and thought it looked beautiful. Wiki mbili, she says as she finishes, itakaa wiki mbili. I have been tired this whole year, and the timeline she gives me feels like a reprieve.

My mother often took my sisters and me to my aunt’s during the long holiday period. My aunt had found work at the power plant in Naivasha. It was in the Rift Valley, far from where we lived. I knew about the Rift Valley from geography class. I was about ten years old. I remember you told me that when you were about this age, you asked your mother if you could drop out of school. I, at the time, loved school. I was a precocious child. I loved reading, I asked many questions in class, and I once placed first in a district term exam. I also liked the breaks when my friends and I played football or cops and robbers. I liked our swimming lessons and playing water polo, and I liked to run. I ran a lot. When we learned about the Rift Valley, we were told about lakes and escarpments. We were told it extended across East Africa; it was drawn in the books as two pairs of parallel lines running across the countries. And so when we first went to visit my aunt, I thought only about seeing Lake Naivasha. The drive was long; I passed time watching pools of water light formed on the road, appearing and then disappearing as we got closer. I don’t remember the first trip well; in fact, I don’t remember if we saw Lake Naivasha at all. I do remember that my sisters and I were introduced by my aunt to a tall dark man whom we were asked to call uncle. On Christmas Day, we went on safari to a different lake: Lake Nakuru. I think we were three or four families. We entered the lake’s game reserve in the afternoon. As we drove, we met a herd of buffalos who blocked our path. They refused to move, even after we revved the car engines. I had never seen a buffalo before; however, I wasn’t afraid or particularly impressed, just annoyed they weren’t moving. We reached the lake in the evening. We saw hundreds and hundreds of flamingos; when they took flight, the water looked as though it were pink.

We are walking up the bank of Kongo River Estuary, eight feet sinking in the sand. We walk past the point where the river drains into the Indian Ocean. Our boat is meeting us farther than we expected. When we reach it, our guide helps us into the boat and starts to paddle up the estuary. The water is calm. The oar makes ripples that I try to catch with my hands. We pass private villas sloping down almost into the river. The sunset is a warm glow on the green of the mangroves. Our guide tells us about the mangroves. He tells us they are only planted in salty water; he shows us the different types, he points out the male and female mangroves. As we paddle past a baobab tree, he tells us about a kaya hidden behind it, a sacred ancient cave where his tribe worships from. He says when people go to the cave, they go with rosewater; they pray to the spirits and always leave something behind. We round a bend and he balances the boat. We watch the sunset; it drips over us and our faces start to glow.

The pH of pure water is seven, the point from which acidic and alkaline qualities are measured. I’ve always thought of rain as pure water. As a child, I liked the gray of clouds before it rained. I liked the color of leaves as it rained, and the tapping sound rain made on iron roofing. I liked the musty smell of the earth after it had rained. When I was rained on, I felt peaceful and free. I found a word for this later in life: pluviophile. One day it rained heavily; it felt as if our roof would burst. My grandmother and I were sitting in the living room in silence. Our tele- vision had lost its signal and there wasn’t anything else to do. She turned to me and said it was raining stones. I didn’t understand, but she said it in an even tone, and therefore I had no reason to doubt her. I was curious and I ran outside to see. It was true—it was raining stones and the stones were silver. I held my palms out to collect some, but I didn’t catch any, and the hems of my sleeves became wet. My grandmother called out to me to get back into the house. I didn’t. She gave up and told me to collect some from the leaves of a plant we grew. I didn’t do that either. I picked a hailstone from the ground. It didn’t have a shape and looked like a piece from a crushed ice cube. I put it in my mouth and it melted. It tasted like water and dirt.

I’ve set aside the morning hours for writing. Light washes in through the window in white. The sea softly crashes against the shore. I hear it through the hum of the air conditioner. You told me once that you’re an open book, but that book wasn’t for everyone. I think of these words to you now as me sending you chapters in the book of my life.

The man we called uncle married my aunt two years later. I was the page boy at their wedding, but I can’t remember what exactly I did except that I was interviewed for their wedding video and I was seated in the front pew when they exchanged their vows. For the holidays that year, I went to visit my friend in Thika. He lived next to a river. The river after some distance led to a thundering waterfall. From time to time, he and I played in the river. We would go a little upstream and come down with the current to where the gate met with the brown foliage from the riverbank. The water was brown in some sections, clear in others. The river gurgled through rocks, so we could wade across it with little difficulty. We heard birds chirp and fruit flies sometimes entered our eyes. When we splashed water against the rocks, we screamed out in imitation of ancient warriors. Most days were sunny, the sun filtered through trees, and when it fell on the water we scooped up the rays with our palms. Misfortune struck when I lost a yellow slipper to the current. Days later, it rained and the water level rose; we were told that crocodiles had been spotted, so we stopped going altogether. One day, my friend’s mum took us to Splash! Waterworld. I was so excited; I had never been to a water park before. She allowed me to sit in front as she drove. She liked to drive through Runda. She liked how quaint and bourgeois the houses were; the lawns were well-manicured and the road was lined with trees, which gave the feeling of driving through a nature trail. As we drove, my friend and I played a game: we pointed out houses as fast as we could and said we owned them. I would like to think I saw your house and pointed it out. I would like to think that the order in which things happen is such that they come full circle. But I don’t believe that’s true. Nowadays, I know the route she would have taken, and there is no way we would have been anywhere close to you. We had such a wonderful time at Splash! I’ll never forget it. It was a weekday, so there were only a few people there. We went up and down the water slides as many times as we liked. We climbed up the steps to the top. My friend’s mum took a photograph of us as we entered separate slides. When I let go, I felt my body slither, twist, and turn. I closed my eyes when I was too afraid of the height, and I emerged at full speed to splash into the water. We ate fries and coleslaw for lunch, and that night, I dreamt of water slides.

I hold up a coconut and it obscures fishermen paddling next to an island. My friends and I talk about the scars on our bodies and how we got them. I show them a scar below my left knee that I got when I was twelve years old. I miscalculated a jump between two beds and was cut severely by blunt wood. Our boat captain shows us the point in the sea where Kenya meets Tanzania, but I ignore him. I prefer to think of the sea as borderless. Dolphins swim next to our boat as if escorting us. We take photographs of them when they come up for air. The boat stops. We dive into the water and suddenly we are swimming with the dolphins. It’s so beautiful. They move swiftly below us, and we lose sight of them by the time we get to a coral. Blue, yellow, and white fish swim along the barnacles of the coral reef. I take off my snorkel and swim toward a dark spot inside the ocean, but when I get closer, I become afraid and turn back. We swim to a shallow place in the middle of the sea where boats are anchored. Here we stand on the contours the sand has formed. The water is clear and reflects sunlight softly. We walk in the sea and sit where the waves are strongest. When they hit us, we laugh until we swallow water.

Water takes the shape of the container it is in. We wouldn’t visit my aunt for the next two years—in the first year, because of the post-election violence, and in the second year, because my mother was unwell. When we resumed, I was in my mid-teens. I was often bored and spent most of my time alone. I used to have charisma, but I lost it around this time because I stopped liking people. I was too concerned with myself. I closed myself in earphones, memorizing rap songs, I watched series on my own, and when I went out, I wore a hoodie so that no one would talk to me. Life changed for my aunt too. She became a mother. Her baby was so tiny. Often, my aunt came home for lunch to nurse her baby in between work. She told us how her work was, and she told us about the hot springs around where tourists went. It was around this time that her conversations became filled with stories of children drowning. She had always been afraid of large bodies of water since she was a child, she feared drowning, and I suppose this fear was magnified by her having a baby. Most afternoons, I went for long walks in the housing estate. My walks brought me to the members-only club my aunt was part of. The club was next to the lake. It had a swimming pool that was always under maintenance. I would sit in the restaurant, order food, and eat. After I ate, I walked across the lawn and down to the lake. I walked to the pier, which protruded a little into the lake, and I stood leaning on the railing. The water was still around me. It covered the grass, washed through the moss at the bottom of the pier, and slightly submerged the trees on the bank. From a distance, a fisherman’s boat cruised by. I would stand there for a while not thinking about anything.

I once met a palm reader from Peru. He had learned the art from his grandmother. I stretched out my hand to him and he read my palm. He told me I was a passionate person and that once I decided on something, I lost sight of everything else. He told me something about my future, but I forgot what he said. Perhaps I never wanted to find out in the first place. It’s late at night here; I am dancing with my friends, the sound of the sea is drowned out by our karaoke, but still I think of you. I wonder: What would you do if you knew your future? Would you change it? And if you changed it, does that mean it was never your future to begin with?

Water is always in movement. It moves from the forests to the rivers to the sea. It evaporates and comes down again as rain. It moves in a cycle, and so does life. Nowadays, my aunt has two children. We no longer have school holidays for us to spend at her house; instead, it’s my cousins who have them. They are ten and seven years old, about the same age my sisters and I were when we began to visit my aunt. They come to visit us when they are out of school. Mostly they sit,watch cartoons, and go up and down the stairs. They tell me stories that I sometimes listen to, or sometimes don’t. My aunt still talks about drowning, but at least here there’s no large body of water for her to be worried about.

It’s jacaranda season in your city. I wonder if you still go for walks with your family. I wonder if you notice the purple flowers on the road, if you take photographs under some of the trees to stop time. Remember the first time we met? In Village Market? I thought you were lost when you slowed down and craned your neck. Your eyes were so white and deep, like water falling into a ravine. In the afternoon’s light, you looked like a Miguel song. After I asked your name, I asked where you were going. You answered, “I don’t know.” Now, I’m surprised at how honest you were, because you told me you tend to lie all the time. Even after we talked, I thought I would never see you again. It’s our last day here in Diani. My henna tattoo has started to fade. We walk down to the beach one final time. Palm trees sway; lesos and deras billow into a bow in the wind. A man walks a camel along the shoreline. My friend takes off her sandals and walks slightly into the water. The waves let go of her feet as if they know that every time we visit a place might be our last.