Tracking the Scent of My Mother
By Muthoni Garland

My father wooed my mother in a 1200 Datsun pick-up sold so soon afterwards that it must have felt to her like a false promise. But she did not complain about that, or the fact that he was already married. Senior-mother, a stout and loudly religious woman, had borne him five daughters – Mercy, Charity, Faith, Hope and Grace.
His five acres grazed the River Sagana in Ihwagi on the outskirts of Karatina, where the old Mountain-of-God loses its shadow. Ihwagi is a small village, five miles from a small town, two hundred miles from Nairobi. Until my notoriety, it was a village that might only be visited by an outsider during political campaigns.

By day my mother tilled the land, and by night my father tilled her. She birthed me and my brother, Joshua, in quick succession.Drippings of my father's bragging reached us though the rumour mills of Senior-mother's bible study meetings, and in the conversations of casual labourers during tea-picking season. But what was there, I wondered, to admire in a boy who couldn't climb trees or swim in the Sagana like me? A boy who swelled his mouth like a Colobus monkey to release nasty screams? A boy who gripped my mother's breast and sucked until she whimpered?…

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