I was born not just because I had conceived a notion to stay, but because in between my coming and going the great cycles of time had finally tightened around my neck. I prayed for laughter, a life without hunger. I was answered with paradoxes. It remains an enigma how it came to be that I was born smiling.

TWO

ONE OF THE reasons I didn’t want to be born became clear to me after I had come into the world. I was still very young when in a daze I saw Dad swallowed up by a hole in the road. Another time I saw Mum dangling from the branches of a blue tree. I was seven years old when I dreamt that my hands were covered with the yellow blood of a stranger. I had no idea whether these images belonged to this life, or to a previous one, or to one that was yet to come, or even if they were merely the host of images that invades the minds of all children.

When I was very young I had a clear memory of my life stretching to other lives. There were no distinctions. Sometimes I seemed to be living several lives at once. One lifetime flowed into the others and all of them flowed into my childhood.

As a child I felt I weighed my mother down. In turn I felt weighed down by the inscrutability of life. Being born was a shock from which I never recovered. Often, by night or day, voices spoke to me. I came to realise that they were the voices of my spirit companions.

‘What areyou doinghere?’ oneof themwould ask.

‘Living,’ I would reply. ‘Livingfor what?’ ‘I don’t know.’

‘Why don’t you know? Haven’t you seen what lies ahead of you?’

‘No.’

Then they showed me images which I couldn’t understand. They showed me a prison, awoman covered with golden boils, alongroad, pitiless sunlight, aflood, an earthquake, death.

‘Come back to us,’ they said. ‘We miss you by the river. You have deserted us. If you don’t come back we will make your life unbearable.’

I would startshouting,daringthemtodotheirworst.OnoneoftheseoccasionsMum came into the room and stood watching me. When I noticed her I became silent. Her eyes were bright. She came over, hit me on the head, and said:

‘Who areyou talkingto?’

‘No one,’ I replied.

She gave me a long stare. I don’t remember how old I was at the time. Afterwards my spirit companions took great delight getting me into trouble. I often found myself oscillatingbetweenbothworlds.Oneday Iwasplayingonthesandwhentheycalled me from across the road with the voice of my mother. As I went towards the voice a car almost ran me over. Another day they enticed me with sweet songs towards a gutter. I fell in and no one noticed and it was only by good fortune that a bicyclist saw me thrashing about in the filthy water and saved me from drowning.

I was illafterwards and spent most of thetimein theother world tryingto reason with my spirit companions, trying to get them to leave me alone. What I didn’t know was that the longer they kept me there, the more certain they were making my death. It was only much later, when I tried to get back into my body and couldn’t, that I realised they had managed to shut me out of my life. I cried for a long time into the silvervoidtillourgreatkingintercededformeandreopenedthegatesofmy body.

When I woke up I found myself in a coffin. My parents had given me up for dead. They had commenced the burial proceedings when they heard my fierce weeping. Because of my miraculous recovery they named me a second time and threw a party which they couldn’t afford. They named me Lazaro. But as I became the subject of much jest, and as many were uneasy with the connection between Lazaro and Lazarus, Mum shortened my name to Azaro.

I learnt afterwards that I had lingered between not dyingand not livingfor two weeks. I learnt that I exhausted the energy and finances of my parents. I also learnt that a herbalist had been summoned. He confessed to not being able to do anything about my condition,butaftercastinghiscowries,anddecipheringtheirsigns,hesaid:

‘This is a child who didn’t want to be born, but who will fight with death.’

He added that, if I recovered, my parents should immediately perform a ceremony that would sever my connections with the spirit world. He was the first to call me by that name which spreads horror amongst mothers. He told them that I had hidden my special tokens of spirit identity on this earth and till they were found I would go on fallingilland that it was almost certain that I would diebeforetheageof twenty-one.

When I recovered, however, my parents had already spent too much money on me. They were in debt. And my father, who was rather fed up with all the trouble I brought, had grown somewhat sceptical of the pronouncements and certitudes of herbalists.Ifyoulistentoeverythingthey say,hetoldMum,youwillhavetoperform absurd sacrifices every time you step outside your door. He was also suspicious of their penchant for advocating costly ceremonies, the way quack doctors keep multiplying the ramifications of ailments in order to make you spend fortunes on their medicines.

Neither Mum nor Dad could afford another ceremony. And anyway they did not really want to believe that I was a spirit-child. And so time passed and the ceremony was never performed. I was happy. I didn’t want it performed. I didn’t want to entirely lose contact with that other world of light and rainbows and possibilities. I had buried my secrets early. I buried them in moonlight, the air alive with white moths. I buried my magic stones, my mirror, my special promises, my golden threads, objects of identity that connected me to the world of spirits. I buried them all in a secret place, which I promptly forgot.

In the early years Mum was quite proud of me.

‘You are a child of miracles,’ she would say. ‘Many powers are on your side.’

For as long as my cord to other worlds remained intact, for as long as my objects were not found, this might continue to be true.

As a child I could read people’s minds. I could foretell their futures. Accidents happened in places I had just left. One night I was standing in the street with Mum when a voice said:

‘Cross over.’

I tugged Mum across the street and a few moments later an articulated lorry plunged into thehousewehad been standingin front of and killed an entirefamily.

Onanothernight Iwasasleep whenthegreat kingstareddownatme.Iwokeup,ran out oftheroom,andup theroad.My parentscameafterme.Theyweredraggingme back when we discovered that the compound was burning. On that night our lives changed.

The road woke up. Men and women, all in wrappers, sleep marks on their faces, blackened lamps in their hands, crowded outside. There was no electricity in our area. The lamps, held above the heads, illuminated the strange-eyed moths, casting such a spectral glow over the disembodied faces that I felt I was again among spirits. One world contains glimpses of others.

It wasanight offires.Anowlflewlowovertheburningcompound.Theairwas full of cries. The tenants rushed back and forth with buckets of water from the nearest well. Gradually, the flames died down. Whole families stayed out in the night, huddled amongst the ragged ends of their clothes and mattresses. There was much wailingfor lost property. No onehad died.

When it was so dark that one couldn’t see the far corners of the sky and the forest lacked all definition, the landlord turned up and immediately started ranting. He threw himself on the ground. Rolling and thrashing, he unleashed a violent torrent of curses on us. He screamed that we had deliberately set his compound on fire to avoid paying the recently increased rent.

‘How am I going to get the money to rebuild the house?’ he wailed, working himself into a deaf fury.

‘All of you must pay for the damages!’ he screeched.

No one paid him any attention. Our main priority was to find new accommodations. We gathered our possessions and made preparations to move.