KenyanBibliophile

“Tell me, sweetheart, what do you love best in the world right now?”
Ayaana deflected: “Pate.”
Delaksha said, “I never made it there. A pity.”
Nioreg asked, “What’s to love?”
The ideal of home, which distance amplified. Ayaana tuned into a vision of home as if she were a home-comer. Her face softened as she clothed her island in her mother’s scents and the Almighty’s stars. In Ayaana’s grammar, her listeners glimpsed Muhidin and Munira, witnessed the surge of Pate’s moonlit seas from a sand dune and smelled a jasmine infused night. Ayaana’s Pate was an antidote to desecrated worlds, so that when Ayaana finished her remembering, there was silence. She picked her chopsticks as the ocean whooshed answerless questions.
Nioreg’s tough-man mask slipped. “Miss Ayaana, we shall visit your home, yes?”
Delaksha took Ayaana’s hands. “Don’t let the world change you.” Delaksha was addressing both Ayaana and Pate.”
― Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea