Prologue
The Girl in the Mirror
The bathroom light in Room 14 had a bad bulb, and it flickered when the generator took over from the power company. Amara stood under it at ten past three in the morning and looked at the girl in the mirror.
She did not know her very well.
The girl had good skin. People had always said so. She had a straight nose from her father and a wide mouth from her mother, and the mouth was painted a shade of brown that had cost forty thousand shillings in a shop at Acacia Mall. The wig was a good one. It had cost more than the mouth. It sat on her head like a decision someone else had made, and under it her own hair was pressed flat and tied down with a stocking.
She took the wig off. She took the stocking off. Her real hair came up in short, tight curls, the way it had when she was twelve and her mother cut it with kitchen scissors on the veranda in Kyotera, saying, "Hair is not where your beauty lives, my daughter."
Then she took a wet tissue and wiped off the brown mouth.
That was better. That was a little better. But the girl who looked back at her was still somebody she had to think about before she knew her name.
Her phone buzzed on the edge of the sink. It had been buzzing for an hour. She turned it over with one finger and read the name on the screen, and turned it face down again. She did not want to answer. She did not want to cry either, and she was not going to do that tonight. She had done enough of that in taxis and under hostel blankets, with the music from the next building covering the sound.
Outside, a boda boda went up the road with its engine screaming. Somewhere a dog was barking at it. Down the corridor a girl was laughing in her sleep, or maybe on the phone. Amara could never tell with this building.
There was a voice note on the screen from her mother. It had come in at nine. It was one minute and forty seconds long, and she had not played it. She knew what it said. It would say, Amara, my daughter, how are your studies? Did you eat? Joel has passed his mock. I am praying for you. It would end with, Don't forget who you are.
That was the part she could not listen to.
She put both hands on the cold edge of the sink and leaned toward the glass until her breath made a small cloud on it.
Almost two years ago she had stood at a bus stage in Kyotera with a mattress tied to the roof of a taxi and a sack of matooke at her feet. She had been nineteen. She had thought that when she looked in a mirror at the end of it all, she would see a woman with a degree and a good job and a roof for her mother. She had thought it would be hard, but simple. Work. Wait. Win.
Nobody had told her the road bent. Nobody had told her you could walk it for months and not notice that you were no longer going where you meant to go.
Tomorrow Nathan would be at the gate at four o'clock. He would be carrying two rolex wrapped in newspaper, because he had said he was hungry and she had said she was not, and he had said he would buy her one anyway. He would be late. He would say sorry in his funny voice and make some joke about the Prophet. And she would have to look at him and decide.
She had made the decision four times today. She had unmade it four times.
The bulb flickered. For a moment the room was half dark, and the girl in the mirror was only a shape, hair and shoulders and a pale face. Then the generator caught, and she came back. Eyes open. Mouth bare.
"Who are you?" Amara whispered.
It was a stupid thing to say to glass. The girl did not answer.
But the question stayed in the small bathroom with her, and it was a fair question. If somebody had asked her back then, she could have told them in one breath. She would have said, I am Nakamya Amara, first-born of Rose, student of Mwanga Hill University, and I am going to make my mother proud.
She had been so sure.
Where did it start? She tried to find it, the way you look for the first wrong stitch in a piece of cloth. Was it the first gift? The first lie? The first night in a car with the windows up and a man's voice saying, Don't worry, I will take care of you? Or earlier than that, the day she stood in a queue under a hot sun and understood, for the first time, that other girls had something she did not?
She did not know. She only knew it was a long way back.
She dried her face. She hung the wig on its hook, where it swung a little and settled, a headless person watching her from the wall.
Then she went and sat on her bed and, with the phone still face down beside her, began to remember.