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the sound of a sheet shaken out. Maybe that was what frightened him—not so much that the wind was there, but that he couldn’t keep it out.
    At different times during the night he knew that he was still awake.
    Then asleep.
    The crickets started and it was six a.m. He saw the light of the sun rising over the veld, thin and cold, and come like a knife sideways into the room. He could feel the cold of the morning in his nostrils.
    He wanted his sister to be awake, to share it with her. He wound the knots of the blanket tighter around his feet, pulled it up to his ears, and watched from the envelope of warmth, the regular movement of her breathing, her shoulder rising and falling. She faced into the wall—that was how they both slept.
    And then he fell asleep again and somehow nobody got him up in time. When he woke up the room was full of a strong yellow light from the thin curtain, which made a transparent screen and trapped the heat of the morning. He heard his sister and got up on his elbow, his body still moist with warmth in the stuffy room. He heard the hadeda’s hard cry pitting the sky (he realized he’d been hearing it for some time in his sleep). Then the
blaf-blaf
of the city dogs. Then he lifted the curtain and saw Leah outside the window, running toward the house in thick woolen stockings under a summer cotton dress—“Papa, Papa, they’re here!”—and shortly after that the door to the room opened, and there was his mother’s shape in the doorway, and he got up and ran into her arms, and his father stood behind her, smiling as he had not for many months, saying, “Ah, very good!”
    That night he sat with his siblings watching the snowy programmes on South African television. His father called him into the study, where his mother sat on the windowsill with her hands folded in her lap. His father went to sit next to her at his chair. Both of them wore the expression of people with news to deliver.
    Then his parents told him that when his mother left he would be going back with the rest of the family to Ghana.
    “Why, Papa?” he asked.
    “To finish your schooling there,” his mother said.
    “And to teach you to become a Ghanaian,” said his father.
    HIS PARENTS SENT HIM to a boarding school not far from the village in which his father had been born. Accra was an hour away. Nii Boi Town an hour more.
    On his last night in Gaborone his father said to him, “When you go home it will be for all of us. That is our place.”
    They were sitting on the bed in the room he shared with his sister. Then his father left the room to let him finish his packing.
    He began to cry.
    Partly he cried out of sadness, to be leaving the house, and his father and sister. Partly out of gratitude to his father, for giving him the thing his father wanted so much for himself but could not have—to go home, when his father could not.
    “You will be so happy,” his father told him as they said goodbye.
    “I will, Papa,” he’d replied.
    But he wasn’t.
    His first few weeks in his mother’s house, before school began, were an unexpected shock. He grew fat from the kenke at Fish Pond Drop. But most of his childhood friends had grown up and left. They’d built houses on the football pitch. His grandfather was dead. The electricity never lasted for more than a few hours. He was bored. He missed his sister and father, he missed the life they’d had, even out there in the desert where the emptiness never stops threatening and safety feels temporary even if you are with people.
    When they sent him to school the water made him sick for a week. He did not speak the language well, he was used to his privacy, he wasused to quiet, and a feeling soon came over him, of disaffection and despair that softened his will and made the world lose its shape, and as a consequence many things happened at that time that should not have happened, and would not have happened except for that.
    This was in the town of Akwapakrom, on the Akwapim