Dreams from My Father

window and looked out at the curve of the tracks behind us, a line of track that had helped usher in Kenya’s colonial history.
    The railway had been the single largest engineering effort in the history of the British Empire at the time it was built—six hundred miles long, from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to the eastern shores of Lake Victoria. The project took five years to complete, as well as the lives of several hundred imported Indian workers. When it was finished, the British realized there were no passengers to help defray the costs of their conceit. And so the push for white settlers; the consolidation of lands that could be used to help lure newcomers; the cultivation of cash crops like coffee and tea; the necessity of an administrative apparatus that could extend as far as the tracks, into the heart of an unknown continent. And missions and churches to vanquish the fear that an unknown land produced.
    It seemed like ancient history. And yet I knew that 1895, the year that the first beams were laid, had also been the year of my grandfather’s birth. It was the lands of that same man, Hussein Onyango, to which we were now traveling. The thought made the history of the train come alive for me, and I tried to imagine the sensations some nameless British officer might have felt on the train’s maiden voyage, as he sat in his gas-lit compartment and looked out over miles of receding bush. Would he have felt a sense of triumph, a confidence that the guiding light of Western civilization had finally penetrated the African darkness? Or did he feel a sense of foreboding, a sudden realization that the entire enterprise was an act of folly, that this land and its people would outlast imperial dreams? I tried to imagine the African on the other side of the glass window, watching this snake of steel and black smoke passing his village for the first time. Would he have looked at the train with envy, imagining himself one day sitting in the car where the Englishman sat, the load of his days somehow eased? Or would he have shuddered with visions of ruin and war?
    My imagination failed me, and I returned to the present landscape, no longer bush but the rooftops of Mathare stretching into the foothills beyond. Passing one of the slum’s open-air markets, I saw a row of small boys wave to the train. I waved back, and heard Kezia’s voice, speaking in Luo, behind me. Bernard yanked on my shirt.
    “She says you should keep your head inside. Those boys will throw stones at you.”
    One of the train’s crew came in to take our bedding order and tell us that food service had started, and so we all went into the dining car and found ourselves a table. The car was a picture of faded elegance—the original wood paneling still intact but dull, the silver real but not perfectly matched. The food was just fine, though, and the beer served cold, and by the end of the meal I was feeling content.
    “How long will it take to get to Home Square?” I asked, wiping the last bit of sauce off my plate.
    “All night to Kisumu,” Auma said. “We’ll take a bus or
matatu
from there—another five hours, maybe.”
    “By the way,” Roy said to me, lighting a cigarette, “it’s not Home
Square
. It’s Home
Squared
.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It’s something the kids in Nairobi used to say,” Auma explained. “There’s your ordinary house in Nairobi. And then there’s your house in the country, where your people come from. Your ancestral home. Even the biggest minister or businessman thinks this way. He may have a mansion in Nairobi and build only a small hut on his land in the country. He may go there only once or twice a year. But if you ask him where he is from, he will tell you that that hut is his true home. So, when we were at school and wanted to tell somebody we were going to Alego, it was home twice over, you see. Home Squared.”
    Roy took a sip of his beer. “For you, Barack, we can call it Home Cubed.”
    Auma smiled and leaned back in her seat, listening to the rhythm of the train on the tracks. “This train brings back so many memories. You remember, Roy, how much we used to look forward to going home? It is so beautiful, Barack! Not at all like Nairobi. And Granny—she’s so much fun! Oh, you will like her, Barack. She has such a good sense of humor.”
    “She had to have a good sense of humor,” Roy said, “living with the Terror for so long.”
    “Who’s the Terror?”
    Auma said, “That’s