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

up, pumped more pressure into the lamp to add to the light.
    ‘Do . . . you . . . know . . . him?’ Munira faltered.
    ‘No,’ she said and then added slowly, ‘but he reminded me of my past . . .’ She paused again and sat down hitting the empty cup with her foot. She picked it up and put it aside. ‘Yes, take me, for instance,’ she started again in an introspective tone, which was very captivating. ‘I sometimes ask myself: why should a silly happening . . . a boy’s visit . . . a girl’s and boy’s school affair . . . why should such a thing affect one’s life? You know such affairs — Abdulla talked about it the other night – a gift of a pencil, a stolen sweet, love-letters copied from books . . . all ending in the same way . . . 
maingi ni Thumu: manyinyi ni cukari
 . . . tear drops on paper circled with x x - kisses.’ She raised her head and laughed. ‘Maybe they are right: a lot of words is poison: a few words are sugar. Later I was to see cases of sugar words turning out to be poison. Now this boy. His name was Ritho. He and I were in the same class at Kinoo Primary School. Girls can be cruel. I used to read his letters to the other girls. We would giggle and laugh at him, all the way from Kinoo to Rungiri. But his gifts of pencils and sweets – these I did not tell to anybody. It was all childish and a game that amused us. And then we were late in school one Friday. We were watching a football match between our school and Rungiri. We called them KADU and we called ourselves KANU, which they resented. KANU lost to KADU. Ritho walked me home and we talked about the game. Then he talked about Uhuru. He said there would be increased chances, especially for poor people. Therefore he was going to work very hard: go to a secondary school . . . university . . . engineering. Yes, he was going to be an engineer . . . his ambition was to design and build a bridge over a road or over a river. Can you imagine this . . . at that age, then? It felt good. But boys were always more confident about the future than us girls. They seemed to know what they wanted to become later in life: whereas with us girls the future seemed vague . . . It was as if we knew that no matter what efforts we put into our studies, our road led to the kitchen and to the bedroom. That evening it felt so good to be with one who was so confident in his heart’s desires that I seemed to share in his ambitions. I thought I also could see a light and I swore to work harder. He did not appear so funny and clumsy and ridiculous any more and we held hands in the dark. A man coughed as he passed by: I thought he wasshaped like my father – but I did not care. I ran home and hung my deerskin bag in its place on the wall and sat down: my mother asked me: why have you not changed into ordinary clothes? I said it was Friday and I would anyway be washing the school uniform the following day. And is that why you have come home late? I kept quiet. I recalled Ritho’s letters . . . my love is as uncountable as the sands of the sea, the trees in the forest, or the stars in the sky or the cells of my body . . . and his ambitions and now I wanted to laugh and tell my mother about Ritho and his dreams of becoming an engineer. I said: I was late watching a football match at school. We were supposed to stay and cheer our side — And with whom were you just now? My boy friend, I said just like that and now I laughed. Mother, he — I started. But the look in her eyes killed the words. My father said: She is now a woman, she even talks to her mother as equals. They locked me in my room and they both beat me, my father with his belt and my mother with a cowhide strap we used for tying and carrying things. This will teach you to come home holding hands with boys! This will teach you to be talking like equals to your mother. It was so unfair and I was determined not to cry. This seemed to add to