Saaku ran away. Well, she did not literally run away. I watched her strut down the dusty path, carrying a frayed raffia bag, making no attempts to hide between the shrubs, lacking any fear of being caught. I looked on until all that was left of her was a speck, and until that too eventually disappeared at the point where the sky meets the earth.

She left on a Saturday because she knew our mothers would be busy with housework, and our fathers caught up in their weekend gambling under the acacias. On a Saturday, the other children would be at the weekend bazaar, pilfering sweets and trinkets with high hopes of going unnoticed. The day my best friend ran away, the sun hung low like a saffron medallion, guiding her path while I looked on with hands shielding my eyes.

Now, looking back, we should have run away together, hand-in-hand, our brown bodies camouflaged by the shrubs, because that’s what best friends do. We had heard our mothers say Eden was a long way from home: several bus and boat rides away. When they spoke of this place, they spoke of it reverently, pointing towards the horizon, north of the sunset.

Many had left before Saaku, mostly men, because the women said they could not bear to leave their children behind in search of greener pastures. Wearing their Sunday bests and carrying nothing but raffia bags filled with maize and dried fish, things that would not spoil, their families saw them off amidst prayers and tears. After several months, the travellers would send photos of themselves decked in heavy jackets that fell all the way to their knees, standing shin-deep in what looked like a blanket of white ice. Sometimes, these pictures were accompanied by short letters and crisp green bills that had to be exchanged in the city for money their families could actually use. In these letters, they said Eden was a place of abundance and that sometimes you had too much choice. Even bread, they said, came in several varieties.

Saaku and I pictured this Eden, a place with crisp green bills hanging from trees and ice falling from the sky like soft wafers. Everything we knew about this place we had heard from the families of those who had left, and Saaku’s father – who, might I mention, had never been to Eden himself. Saaku and I would sit around his radio while he listened to the news, which was usually read by a deep-voiced woman who swallowed half her words. We heard of the incredible things the people in Eden had achieved, how they had sent men to the moon and how their buildings were so high, they almost touched the sky.

“Do people in Eden die?” Saaku had asked her father once. She had a tendency to ask questions children should not ask.

Her father chuckled, which surprised us because he was not the sort of man who chuckled. “Yes, they do, but not like us. They don’t die because their doctors are on strike or because there is drought. They die because they choose to.”

Saaku and I looked at each other, puzzled. Her father was not a man of many words. Not to us. Not even to Saaku’s mother. Papa Saaku was a stout man with a stern face, who relayed his expectations succinctly and expected to be understood.

Saaku and I were fascinated by this place where people chose whether or not they wanted to die. For weeks we lay on her bed in her parent’s bungalow, comparing life in Eden with life here, where nothing really happened. Here, our money was worn and dirty, and things like milk and soap were as seasonal as fruits and vegetables.

Tell us: Do you think things are as rosey in Eden as the children make out? Where do you think Eden is?