My brother was given the name Mazda. Two days before he was born a truck branded with that name had overturned outside the village, spilling its contents, and my father had carried home two big bags of cornmeal. Mazda, who started crying every morning at dawn just like a cockerel, learned to walk when he was only seven months old. He had crawled earlier and faster than any other child my mother had had or heard of. He had crawled over the sand as fast as a snake. Then at seven months he got up and ran. He never walked. It was as if he knew even then that his time on earth would be limited. His feet could move like no one had seen before.
Everyone knew there was something special about Mazda. He wasn’t like other children. But no one knew if his life would turn out well or not. The year he was six there was no rain. The earth turned brown and my father spent a lot of time shouting to his unseen enemies from the roof. My mother stopped speaking and we often went to bed hungry.
It was then, one morning when we had looked in vain for signs in the sky that promised rain, that the woman with the blue hair came walking into the village. No one had ever seen her before. She smiled and her body rocked as she walked, as if she had an invisible drum inside that beat a rhythm for her to dance to. She must have been a stranger from very far away; no one recognised the dances she did. But she could speak our language and glitter fell from her hands and she stopped in the middle of the village. Right by the tree where my father and the other men held their meetings to decide important matters about the problems that inevitably arise when people live so close to one another.
She stood there and simply waited. Someone ran off and told my father and the other men that a strange woman with blue hair had come to our village. My father was the first to arrive. He stood some distance from her and looked her over. Since she was very beautiful he went home and changed his shirt. The chief of our village, called Mbe, did not have good eyesight and did not like strangers turning up in our village. My father and the other men tried to explain to him that glitter fell from this woman’s hands and that her hair was completely blue and it was probably wise to find out why she had come. So Mbe reluctantly allowed himself to be led over to her and asked the woman to approach him. Then he smelled her.
‘Tobacco,’ he announced. ‘She smells of cigarettes.’
