WORK IN PROGRESS.....
She didn’t
really quite know how she got there. It had all felt like a dream. Except that
it had been such a fiasco getting out of town, escaping the mental cells that
her father tried to lock her into just before she climbed aboard the plane and
flew across land, seas and more land until she finally reached that
inexplicable destination, Nairobi.
Her whole
experience prior to boarding that aircraft had been a blur. She’d been born
into a situation where she felt as if everything had been prearranged, preordained.
Other people seemed to know who she was and what she was supposed to do. Not
that she knew herself or had a clue what she wanted to do with her life. But
one thing she did know. She had to resist the sense of fate that seemed to
hover over her head. She refused to accept the destiny that elders and the
stars seemed to have charted out for her.
What made
that imperative of refusal to comply most obvious was the fact that none of her
brothers were kept in a box the same way her father sought to lock her in. All
three seemed to have free reign over their lives. They could come and go, excel
or fall down, and frequent all kinds of places without a note of negation.
But not her.
Her every move seemed to be monitored and checked. And more often than not,
those moves, once seen, got curtailed or shut down altogether. The one good
thing about that early awareness that she was being surveilled is that she
quickly learned how to move ‘under the radar’ as her friend Sarah put it. She
learned how to avoid the surveillance cameras, the family spies who might see
her at venues that her elders (including her older brother) deemed ‘off
limits’.
Not that she
overtly lied about her comings and goings. But she got so she knew she wouldn’t
go anywhere or do anything with her life if she didn’t learn the art of subterfuge,
the strategy of going undercover and moving with stealth. In college, she took
keen interest in guerrilla warfare since it had those elements of improvisation
and spontaneity and quick wittedness that appealed her immensely. She loved to
watch movies about spies and covert action heroes. They felt like her comrades
and role models.
But while
she was still a kid, her best defense against being stuck on a shelf and
treated like a hot-house plant was to go out and play side by side with the
boys.
She took
pride in being a tomboy, in climbing trees and shinnying up slippery jungle gym
poles. She played baseball and found her most prized possession at age nine was
not a doll but a Left-handed catcher’s mite.
She was also
a runner, and ran the 50 yard dash in a flash, often tied with her best friend,
a Turkish girl whose parents were Democrats and peace activists, the exact
opposite of hers.
When she
inherited her older brother’s bicycle at age ten, she instantly got on the bike
and flew away without a moment’s tuition. She could feel the bike becoming her
key to freedom, mobility and an ability to escape and discover new horizons.
In fact, it
was the bike that taught her to be a voyeur, to speed by new situations so fast
that she couldn’t be snagged, tagged or tugged into any untoward circumstance.
She was curious about all that lay outside the radius of her family’s home turf
and the confines circumscribed by her father.
But she
actually had to give credit to her oldest brother for his instilling in her the
feeling of fearlessness. For it was he who never failed to challenge her to ask
questions, inquire deeply and strive to figure things out wherever she might
be.
But it
invariably also put out a double message: on the one hand, he wanted his little
sister to explore the universe just as he loved to do. But he also had those
hang-ups that tried to shut down little girls who talked too much and asked too
many questions. But even his efforts to shut her down taught her to be strong
and to fight his inherited conservatism that sought to retain the pernicious
posture of a patriarchal status quo.
That
conservativism is what ended up turning him against her when she got the
scholarship to study in Kenya and then decided to stay. He said she was wasting
her life, but he didn’t understand that for the first time, she felt like she
had a handle on her life; she felt almost free to discover the person she was
meant to become.
Ironically,
she didn’t anticipate that it would actually be much harder to fly under the
radar in Nairobi. On the contrary, for various reasons, despite her efforts to retain
anonymity, she found it practically impossible.
It was
largely that impossibility that got her in so much trouble. (to be continued) 840
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