Dreams from My Father

happened to run into an acquaintance of the Old Man’s outside Barclay’s Bank. I could tell that Auma didn’t remember his name, so I held out my hand and introduced myself. The man smiled and said, “My, my—you have grown so tall. How’s your mother? And your brother Mark—has he graduated from university yet?”
    At first I was confused. Did I know this person? And then Auma explained in a low voice that no, I was a different brother, Barack, who grew up in America, the child of a different mother. David had passed away. And then the awkwardness on all sides—the man nodding his head (“I’m sorry, I didn’t know”) but taking another look at me, as if to make sure what he’d heard was true; Auma trying to appear as if the situation, while sad, was somehow the normal stuff of tragedy; me standing to the side, wondering how to feel after having been mistaken for a ghost.
    Later, back in her apartment, I asked Auma when she had last seen Mark and Ruth. She leaned her head against my shoulder and looked up at the ceiling.
    “David’s funeral,” she said. “Although by then they had stopped speaking to us for a long time.”
    “Why?”
    “I told you that Ruth’s divorce from the Old Man was very bitter. After they separated, she married a Tanzanian and had Mark and David take his name. She sent them to an international school, and they were raised like foreigners. She told them that they should have nothing to do with our side of the family.”
    Auma sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe because he was older, Mark came to share Ruth’s attitudes and had no contact with us after that. But for some reason, once David was a teenager, he began to rebel against Ruth. He told her he was an African, and started calling himself Obama. Sometimes he would sneak off from school to visit the Old Man and the rest of the family, which is how we got to know him. He became everybody’s favorite. He was so sweet, you know, and funny, even if he was sometimes too wild.
    “Ruth tried to enroll him in a boarding school, hoping it would settle him down. But David ended up running away instead. Nobody saw him for months. Then Roy happened to bump into him outside a rugby match. He was dirty, thin, begging money from strangers. He laughed when he saw Roy, and bragged about his life on the streets, hustling
bhang
with his friends. Roy told him to go home, but he refused, so Roy took David to his own apartment, sending word to Ruth that her son was safe and staying with him. When Ruth heard this, she was relieved but also furious. She begged David to come back, but when he again refused, she tacitly accepted the arrangement with Roy, hoping that eventually David would change his mind.”
    Auma sipped on her tea. “That’s when David died. While he was living with Roy. His death broke everybody’s heart—Roy’s especially. The two of them were really close, you see. But Ruth never understood that. She thought we had corrupted David. Stolen her baby away. And I don’t think she’s ever forgiven us for it.”
    I decided to stop talking about David after that; I could tell that Auma found the memories too painful. But only a few days later, Auma and I came home to find a car waiting for us outside the apartment. The driver, a brown-skinned man with a prominent Adam’s apple, handed Auma a note.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “It’s an invitation from Ruth,” she said. “Mark’s back from America for the summer. She wants to have us over for lunch.”
    “Do you want to go?”
    Auma shook her head, a look of disgust on her face. “Ruth knows I’ve been here almost six months now. She doesn’t care about me. The only reason she’s invited us is because she’s curious about you. She wants to compare you to Mark.”
    “I think maybe I should go,” I said quietly.
    Auma looked at the note again, then handed it back to the driver and said something to him in Swahili. “We’ll both go,” she said, and walked into the apartment.
    Ruth lived in Westlands, an enclave of expensive homes set off by wide lawns and well-tended hedges, each one with a sentry post manned by brown-uniformed guards. It was raining as we drove toward her house, sending a soft, gentle spray through the big, leafy trees. The coolness reminded me of the streets around Punahou, Manoa, Tantalus, the streets where some of my wealthier classmates had lived back in Hawaii. Staring out Auma’s car window, I thought back to the envy I’d felt toward