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and farmers, trading nations, empire builders, and the forgetful. Such were the people for whom Nyipir had carried the new Kenya flag. There was also the anthem created from a Pokomo mother’s lullaby:
    Eh Mungu Nguvu Yetu
    Ilete Baraka kwetu
    Haki iwe ngao na mlinzi .…
    O God of all creation, Bless this our land and nation, Justice be our shield and defender.…
    Blended cultures, intoxicating fusion—the new, revised Kenya. Bead kofia on his head, cloaked, fly-whisk flicking, the Leader spoke. His voice was a bass drum. Glory! Goodness! Forgiveness! Education! Work hard! Nyipir had tended the fire-lit euphoria inside his body. Harambee! Harambee! A nation brought to task in a clarion call that had hauled steel across the land and built a railway. The national summons. Response—a howled Eeehhhhhh!
    But then came the fear.
    It split words into smaller and smaller fragments until words became secret, suffocating, and silent. No one cried when the voracious, frenzied seizing of lives began. A new word slithered into the landscape— Nyakua : plunder, possess. Entitled brigandage. But it was cleansed to mean “hard work.” In the nation, slow horror, as if all had woken up to a vision of violating, crowing ghouls crowding their beds. Nyipir remembers how bodies started to stoop to contain the shame, the loss, the eclipse. Such eyes-turned-inward silences so that when bodies started showing up mutilated and truly dead, the loudest protests were createdout of whispers. To protect new post-independence citizen children, like most new Kenya parents denying soul betrayals, Nyipir built illusions of another Kenya, shouting out the words of the national anthem when he could as if the volume alone would remove the rust eating into national hopes. Keeping mouths, ears, and eyes shut, parents had partitioned sorrow, purchased even more silence, and promised a “better future.”
    Plane drone, slight turbulence.
    They bounce. “Better future.” It is a groan in Nyipir’s head. He rubs its tautness. His daughter is staring through the plane’s window. Below, more greenhouses. Flower farms. Ol Donyo Keri—Mount Kenya, a sentinel that is a revelation.
    Nyipir shouts, “The mountain!”
    The pilot looks back.
    “My son … uh … he likes …” Nyipir’s voice cracks.
    The pilot scans the horizon and swings the plane right to circumnavigate Mount Kenya. “Batian, Lenana, Macalder,” he intones. The late-afternoon sun has colored the sparse snow crimson. Ajany squashes her face against the windowpane and feels their northward swing in her body. Soon the flamingos appear, on oyster-shell-colored water next to the milk-blue Anam Ka’alakol-Lake Turkana. The pilot says, “There’s Lake Logipi.” They know. This is their territory. Teleki’s volcano, a brown bowl, windy landforms. They pass over Loiyangalani, toward Mount Kulal. Shift northeast, toward Kalacha Goda. They level over the salt flats fringing the Chalbi. Hurri Hills in the dusk light, and then, below, a wide unkempt stripe carved into the land. The plane flies through the layers of time, reveals the hollowed brown rock below from which Ajany and Odidi would survey the rustling march of desert locusts, dry golden-brown pastures where livestock browsed, and they would run after homemade kites, eat cactus berries, and curse one of the land’s visiting winds, which had ripped the kites to shreds.
    Wuoth Ogik.
    Home.
    Ajany crushes the screaming stuck inside her mouth, clutching a secret string and squashing it in her fist. First landing aborted. They veer upward. Ajany scrunches her eyes shut, grits her teeth, and prays theywill stay suspended in space and lost to time. Second descent. She is anticipating the crash. The end. The plane evens out, crabs into a soft landing. Dust twirls on their tail.

    There were outposts in the world where the sun’s rays burned into lingering phantoms of the British Empire. Babu Paratpara Chaudhari was wiping the jar containing