The semester break arrived sooner than Julius expected. For most students, it meant returning to their homes scattered across Kenya—Eldoret, Kisumu, Mombasa, or the villages tucked in remote corners of the Rift Valley. To Julius it was a long ride out west, back to the home of his childhood, where his father plowed the soil and his mother made millet porridge in the morning.
His phone was buzzing when he packed his bag in a small hostel room. An announcement was made on the screen:
Maria: Are you going to travel home this week?
He was so hesitant to respond. Yes. Busia. My village. Why?
Her reply was almost instantaneous. Can I come? Just for a short visit. I would like to know where you are raised.
Julius's heart thudded. The image of Maria in Lwanya evokes enthusiasm and discomfort. His family was conventional; particularly his father who bore the burden of the old. Busia had few foreigners, and had never had one go to his homestead. What his grandmother would say? Would the villagers stare?
But as he pictured the eyes of Maria illuminating upon the view of River Sio, or her drawing-pad with pictures of burghs and villages, some little thing within him melted. Possibly it was high time that his two worlds met, though clumsily.
Their westerly trip followed the highway down past Nakuru and across the interminable tea-fields of Kericho, to the sugarcane belt of Kakamega. Maria was sitting before the window, admiring the changing sceneries. She enquired about all of it the boda bodas that buzzed at the market centers, the women with their sacks of maize on their heads, the vivid matatus with slogans painted on them such as Gods Plan or Mboka ni Mboka.
At some time the bus burst into laughter when Maria tried to purchase roasted maize using the window at a Bungoma stop. Her Kiswahili was awkward and insistent: Mama, nataka mahindi moja. She overpaid and Julius was to be told why but the peddlers could only smile having been helped by her.
When they finally got to Busia town, evening shadows were stretching long along the earth. They paid a boda boda to drop them the final miles to Lwanya. Maria was hanging closely behind Julius when the motor-cycle raced along the dusty lanes lined with cassava-gardens and children waving their hands at them. The atmosphere was filled with the odor of woodsmoke and wet soil.
Already waiting at the homestead, the mother of Julius, Mama Grace, was tying her wrapper around her waist. She gazed at Maria in amazement and wonder. Julius was bowing his head. "Mama, this is Maria. My friend from school."
The eyes of Mama Grace softened, but she was wary of her tone. "Karibu, Maria. Welcome."
Inside, the compound bustled. Goats bleated and hens pecked and the younger sisters of Julius peeped in through the back of the kitchen hut, giggling at the foreign woman. Maria humphed down in greeting, as Julius had bade her, and even succeeded in timorously asking a question of Lubukusu, Wasibayu buya, that caused that old grandmother, sitting upon her stool by the fire, to laugh heartedly.
A supper was taken under the stars: we had ugali and sukuma wiki and tilapia out of Lake Victoria, on enamel dishes. Maria now found it difficult, but going on in the lead of Julius, her fingers pinched the ugali, and she dipped it into the sukuma. The family was observing her with eagerness and their eyes were wandering back and forth between Julius and his guest.
Sometime in the evening, when the lamps had been lowered, and the homestead had become silent, Julius and Maria sat a little distance away out in the huts, under the star-loaded sky. The chirping of the crickets was heard, and the fragrance of the night flowers hung in the air.
Your place is beautiful, Maria mumbled. "It feels… alive."
Julius looked at the darkness. "It is simple. But it is everything I know. When I am here, I am Gamu. In Nairobi, I am Julius. I do not know who I really am sometimes, I wonder.
She turned to him. "Maybe you are both. You don't have to choose."
He listened to what she had said, the burden of which sank down on the years of expectation that his family had carried upon his shoulders. His father intended that he would complete school, go back and run the land. However his teachers encouraged him to study another graduate course in a foreign country, maybe even Europe. And now of Maria, whose presence was like a transom between two worlds, was at his elbow, urging him to be of either.
The voice of his grandmother, singing a Luhya lullaby, old and old, was heard in the hut. Maria listened, eyes shining. What is it, what does it mean? she thought.
Julius translated: she sings of the river with the tales, of the children who have to go away and come back home.
Maria was bending backward with the stars before her face. And perhaps it is my song too to-night.
And the night fell, and there was a silence between them--not embarrassing, but intimate. Julius was aware of the pressure of the moment, that thin thread of relationship between his world and hers. He had never thought it before that Maria would visit Lwanya, but possibly Lwanya would visit him, and he would sew up all his decisions.
And when the stars glittered overhead Julius knew that this contact of cultures- this halting, wavering contact was no longer a one-time interest. It was already a story, and the story that was going to change both their lives in a manner that neither of them could fathom.