Dog Meat Samosa

by Stanley Gazemba

  The bill arrived ceremoniously, tucked inside a leather folder that rested on a gleaming white saucer. Gichamba coughed slightly and reached for a toothpick, busying himself trying to extract an imaginary morsel stuck between his teeth.

  Aunt Muthoni casually reached over to retrieve the folder, glancing inside before folding it shut. She signaled the hovering waiter with a wave of her hand as she reached into her Gucci handbag with the other. Fishing a blood-red wallet from the depths of her handbag, Aunt Muthoni flicked it open sufficiently wide so they could all see the credit cards and travelers cheques stacked within. Just as casually, she peeled out a bunch of thousands, which she slipped into the folder beside the bill and pushed toward the waiter. The waiter, in his turn, bowed deeply and disappeared with the saucer. Gichamba, stunned, thought it the most blatant display of wealth that he had ever encountered.

  Belching deeply, Aunt Muthoni rose and smoothed her dress. “I think we are ready to go,” she announced, picking up her handbag. “Next stop is a boutique where we’ll get Mugure dressed up properly. She has to look good in front of the cameras, you know.”

  Gichamba rose to his feet, certain that there was very little role, if any, for him in this tightly woven script. He felt like the shabby gardener who had been dragged to his master’s staff party, well aware that the wielder of the purse strings held the true position of power.

  As Mugure stood to leave, a phone began to ring. Prrrrrrrr…prrrrrrrrr…prrrrrrrrrrr!

  Aunt Muthoni froze, her carefully cultivated composure momentarily jarred by the shrill sound. “Would that be my phone?” she asked, a furrow of lines appearing on her heavily made-up brow as she reached into her handbag and pulled out a slick titanium-cased phone. It quickly became apparent, however, that the shrill ringing came from the shabby black bag on the floor by Mugure’s feet.

  The aunts and Gichamba again took their seats and waited as Mugure removed the various bulky parts of the phone from the bag and assembled them on the table. There was, however, a critical component missing—a charging unit fashioned out of an old car battery, a chunky hand-crafted adaptor, and discarded crocodile clips that a local mechanic had fabricated. Too bulky to fit in a bag, the charger was used only at home. Fortunately, the phone was sufficiently charged for Mugure, with trembling hands, to make a call.

  Aunt Muthoni drew her seat closer to her niece, straining to follow the conversation. The phone company wanted to send a vehicle to fetch them. A silver-capped ballpoint pen appeared in Aunt Muthoni’s hand as if by magic, and she quickly scribbled the name of the restaurant and the street on a napkin, pushing it toward the perspiring Mugure. The caller confirmed the address and informed them that a company vehicle would be coming shortly to fetch them.

  Mugure was a bundle of nerves as they waited outside, suddenly conscious of her cheap plastic sandals and dusty, cracked feet, and thinking wistfully of the boutique they no longer had time to visit. Aunt Muthoni rubbed Mugure’s shoulder in an attempt to put her at ease. A few minutes later, a green van bearing the logo of the phone company appeared round the bend, cruising slowly down the street. The vehicle stopped beside the restaurant and the passenger door opened to reveal a beefy man in a suit and tie. Stepping onto the pavement, he hesitantly approached the group.

  “Habari!74 I am looking for a young woman by the name of Mugure …Trizah Mugure,” he said.

  “Good morning, sir,” Aunt Muthoni cried, flashing a million-dollar smile. “This here is Mugure, and I am her aunt, Muthoni. Are you from the phone company?”

  “Yes, that’s right, madam,” said the company official with a wide smile. “And I guess you know already the good news I bring to your niece! But perhaps the sidewalk is not the best place to break the news, yes?” he added, his attention shifting smoothly from Muthoni to Mugure. “Perhaps we can get in the car and find somewhere better?”

  The company official shepherded the bewildered Mugure into the back of the van and seated himself next to her, fussing over her like a favourite uncle. From a cool-box, he produced chilled bottles of mineral water and passed them around. Deprived of her charge, Aunt Muthoni climbed into the passenger seat beside the driver, her expensive handbag clasped in her lap. After settling herself, she called a friend on her titanium-cased phone, chattering away in a mix of English, Swahili, and Gikuyu, loudly enough so that all could hear the details of the lucrative business deal she was negotiating. Gichamba slid the door of the air-conditioned van shut as the driver engaged the gear shift, and they rolled away into Nairobi City’s bumper-to-bumper traffic.

  

  Gichamba blew out the tin lamp and lay wearily upon his bed. It was past midnight, and he could hear his neighbours snoring through the thin wooden walls. He had stopped by a kiosk on his way home and bought a packet of cigarettes, which had kept him company through the long, restless night. He wished Mugure were with him. They had agreed, however, that Mugure should be based at Aunt Muthoni’s house in Wangige for the time being. The phone company staff could collect and return her without concern for their own relatively run-down shack or lack of security. While it would take three days of paperwork and publicity photos before they took possession of the car, Gichamba and Mugure had now joined the prestigious class of people who owned a factory-fresh Mercedes Kompressor.

  Gichamba still could not believe it. They had had the opportunity to sit in the Mercedes earlier that day, and he could still smell the leather upholstery, feel the sleek curve of the silver hood, and recall his admiration of the three-pointed star mounted on the bonnet. He had felt an almost electrical charge, sitting behind the wheel and inserting the key fob in the ignition, knowing that he was at the wheel of one of the most impressive vehicles ever to travel the roads. The staff seemed to realize that neither Gichamba, Mugure, nor Aunt Muthoni knew how to drive because they smoothly guided them through the procedure of opening and starting an automatic Mercedes. The staff had patiently explained the intricacies of the car’s computers and the other automated complexities that kept that icon of class on the road. Mugure had been too nervous to sit in the driver’s seat, and despite Aunt Muthoni’s offer to tutor her, the company officials requested Gichamba take the wheel. Even in the excitement of the moment, the power play taking place in the wings was not lost on Gichamba.

  The flurry of activities that had followed left his head in a spin. News people, hungry for a front-page piece, swarmed over them like vultures to a fresh carcass, camera bulbs flashing, shouting countless stupid questions like, “Do you have a bank account?” or, “Was that your first time inside a Mercedes?” Salespeople in grey suits lurked in the crowd like jackals at a lion’s kill, seeking a moment alone with the lucky winner so that they could cut a deal. All manner of banking types waited to seize the winners’ attentions, keen to offer investment advice should the couple decide to sell the car. Among these were the curious onlookers, awed at the notion of giving away a Mercedes Kompressor to a couple of cracked-heeled peasants who could not tell satnav from central locking. At last the company staff muscled them out of the crowd for lunch, Aunt Muthoni and her accomplice marshaling Mugure along like her twin shadows, with Gichamba left to play catch-up, lugging the black elections observer’s bag with the chunky phone equipment inside. He’d barely had the chance to hand Mugure the black bag and slip her his hundred shillings before she was whisked away in a taxi.

  Now, as he reflected on the events of the day it occurred to him that their lives had taken a dramatic twist. They were no longer ordinary laborers trying to scrape together a living on the brinks of the mean and sprawling city. Now they were in the money and could afford to live “the high life.”

  

  The following morning, Gichamba left their shack to retrieve a newspaper. As he had feared Mugure’s face was splashed across the front of both the Nation and the Standard. POOR GIRL WINS AN E-CLASS MERCEDES, one headline proclaimed. TO BED A PAUPER, RISE A MILLIONAIRE
read another. The papers depicted a photo of Mugure perched gingerly on the bonnet, a shy smile curling the corner of her cracked lips, one dusty foot in its cheap sun-bleached sandal swinging over the gleaming fender of the nine-million-shilling silver Mercedes.

  Gichamba bought both papers, folded them carefully inside his jacket, and strolled to a nearby food kiosk where he would have a quiet place to read the articles. Seating himself at a quiet back table, he ordered tea and mandazi before reading through each article twice, memorizing every word as if he were a student preparing for an exam. He appeared in one photograph featured in the Standard article, a dim figure at the back of the crowd, clutching the black elections observer’s bag that contained the magic phone. Aunt Muthoni appeared prominently in nearly all the pictures, standing proudly beside Mugure and flashing a bright smile at the cameras.

  “I think I know that girl,” said a waiter, who had noiselessly appeared at his elbow. “Isn’t she the one who runs a phone kiosk down the road? Ngai! She won a Mercedes? She sold me a scratch card just the other day!”

  Gichamba finished his tea in a hurry and left, his face trained on the dusty path, avoiding the gaze of people on the street. As he approached the wooden kiosk where his wife ran the phone business, he noticed a white car parked beside it. A woman in office attire leaned against the car bonnet, sipping coffee from a travel flask and chatting with a tall, thin man in faded jeans and a khaki windbreaker. Slung around the man’s neck was a camera fitted with an expensive telescopic lens. Gichamba didn’t need to be told who they were.

  Without a second thought he turned on his heel, pretending to buy a cigarette at a kiosk across the street, all the while watching the journalists from the corner of his eye. They wanted to unearth every detail of the lives of the peasant couple who had hit the jackpot; to dig out the extent of their penury and lay it bare for the voyeuristic public as if they were a disemboweled carcass on a butcher’s hook.

  Gichamba hurried up the road to a market muratina75 den where the owner sold the potent chang’aa liquor by the tot.

  “Karibu, Gichamba,” the elderly proprietor greeted him, flashing a gap-toothed smile as he hurried over with a dripping glass. “It is unusual to see you here at this hour.”

  Gichamba dug into his pocket and took out a handful of coins, counting out the money as the old man poured the drink and placed it on the table. The proprietor, however, refused payment. Leaning close, he whispered, his breath a blast of stale mutura and chang’aa: “This is on me, Gichamba. It is for the car. We are all so proud!”

  Apparently, Gichamba learned, the story had been featured on the previous evening’s seven o’clock news, and watched by crowds of people on the cheap Greatwall TVs installed in the social places around the market.

  “Gichamba, you really have made this village proud,” the old man said with a wink, still grinning broadly. “I never imagined that one of our own would be on TV some day!”

  Gichamba raised the glass and took a long swig, the ammoniac fumes biting the back of his nostrils. He gulped hungrily, welcoming the sting of the harsh liquor as it spread like molten lava in the pit of his stomach. He was clearly going to get drunk early today.

  

  Mugure, similarly, was trying to come to terms with the transformation wrought in the past twelve hours. The massive bed in Aunt Muthoni’s house, with its down-feathered coverlet and pristine white sheets, felt strange after her straw-stuffed gunnysack mattress. Worried that she was somehow soiling the sheets, and lacking the familiar sound of roaches scavenging for scraps, Mugure slept poorly. Upon waking, she was confronted by such an array of breakfast delicacies she had been spoilt for choice.

  Several beauticians hired by Aunt Muthoni for what was, no doubt, a princely sum were now intent upon transforming her from a backwoods peasant to a fashionable young lady of the city. They had coaxed her wiry hair into a chick bob, applied all manner of gels and potions to her face, neck, and upper body, and were now employed in lavishing polish on her fingernails and toenails. It was a lengthy process, but they were doing their best to keep Mugure entertained. One attendant gently massaged her shoulders in the adjustable ergonomic chair, with its foot and head rest and rotating massage beads. A stack of glossy fashion magazines and chilled, freshly pressed fruit juice was situated carefully within reach.

  This, Mugure thought, must surely be the lap of luxury, and yet in the back of her mind she felt unsettled. She hadn’t talked to her husband in over twelve hours, and she had started to worry about him. She wondered if her parents in Kerugoya had heard the news, perhaps from one of the wealthier villagers who owned a TV set or the headmaster of the village school who habitually bought a newspaper. Mugure would have liked to have called them, but her parents—like their neighbors, small-scale farmers necessarily focused on scratching out a meagre subsistence from tiny patches of land—didn’t own a phone.

  As the beauticians gently immersed Mugure’s feet in a milk solution to soften chapped and roughened skin in readiness for a cosmetic peel, Aunt Muthoni breezed into the yard wearing a burgundy terrycloth robe with a Marriot logo on the breast, her hair wrapped in a thick rose-colored towel.

  “And how’s our little queen today?” she asked, smiling brightly.

  “I am fine, Aunt Muthoni,” Mugure replied with a demure smile.

  “Really?” Aunt Muthoni looked her niece up and down with a critically appraising air. “I can see we are finally getting somewhere with you,” she said with satisfaction. “Now you are starting to look like a real lady. I will leave you in the capable hands of these lovely girls for now as I make some phone calls. Just let the maid know when you are done, girls, won’t you?” With that, Aunt Muthoni sauntered off, her ample hips swinging in the robe, a tune humming on her lips.

  The car that Mugure had won was sold the following day, with the dealer who handled the sale knocking three-quarters of a million off the showroom price before deducting his own commission. “Remember this is a Mercedes. And one thing you should know about a Mercedes is that it starts to depreciate in value the moment you turn on the ignition,” he advised his clients. “Why, in some cases, the car will lose value the moment it leaves the showroom, regardless of whether it was even turned on or not!”

  The same afternoon the car was sold, Mugure’s parents arrived from Kerugoya. Wanjiru, it turned out, had been dispatched in a taxi earlier to fetch them after Aunt Muthoni had noted Mugure’s growing anxiety.

  “Mugure, is that really you?” Mugure’s mother exclaimed as she stepped out of the cab, her stained teeth flashing in a radiant smile. “Is this really my Mugure?”

  Mugure’s mother was a small woman clad in her country Sunday best—a thick hand-knitted brown jersey, worn over a faded nylon dress that fell to her ankles. Her thick, corny toes poked through holes in her tattered canvas shoes, and tufts of grey hair sprouted from beneath her tightly tied head cloth. She embraced her daughter, her callused farm-toughened hands mussing the elaborate bob as she fussed over Mugure, both women with tears in their eyes.

  Mugure’s father clambered out of the car, yanking up the band of his oversized tweed trousers and adjusting the frayed coat that nearly swallowed his bony frame. Slapping a worn fedora on his bald pate, he approached his daughter, his dark eyes assessing her with the same scrutiny he applied to the cattle he traded at the Saturday village market.

  “Baba,” Mugure said, shaking her father’s bony hand.

  “How are you, my daughter?” His wizened face split into a huge smile, and the grey stubble in the folds of his chin quivered as he shook with laughter. “Mugure, is this really you?” His bout of mirth ended in a prolonged wheezy cough. The old man spat a fat wad of tobacco-stained phlegm into the dust and rubbed it in with the heel of his worn akala shoe.

  After bathing, Mugure’s parents were to be driven to town to be outfitted in new clothes and shoes, after which the old man would b
e deposited at a bar in the Wangige market. Aunt Muthoni had carefully selected this particular bar because of the band’s mugithi76 songs and the elderly clientele the music attracted. The taxi driver, under strict instructions to ensure that the old man lacked for nothing, would bring him home after the evening’s festivities were over.

  The women, meanwhile, retired to the backyard to catch up on the latest news from the village, carrying a pot of strongly brewed tea and soft-boiled ngwaĉi.77

  ***

  Mugure’s elderly parents rested in cane chairs on the verandah, a glass of fresh fruit juice at the old woman’s elbow, and a bottle of cold Tusker at her husband’s. His crisp new shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and a new Stetson rested in his lap. Between two thick, calloused fingers, he held a hand-rolled cigarette—the kind that make women pinch their noses—and periodically flicked the ash into the carpet, forgetting the heavy cut-glass ashtray that sat on the table. Aunt Muthoni had tried to coax Mugure’s father into smoking the more fashionable Sportsmans cigarettes instead of this foul-smelling variety, but he was not to be persuaded. There was something about taking a pinch of shag out of his worn leather pouch, spreading it on a scrap of old newspaper and adding a touch of spittle as he worked it with his fingers that was akin to a ritual.

  An insistent rattle of iron and chain sounded from the driveway below. “Is there a visitor at the gate?” Mugure’s father asked, craning his neck to look over the veranda.

  “Yes,” his wife confirmed, leaning over the railing. “A man.”

  Although situated in the outskirts of the city, Wangige was not a particularly safe place to live. Aunt Muthoni, like other wealthy residents, had walled herself in behind chain-link fences and a six-foot-high wrought-iron gate. Wangige could not be more unlike his idyllic home town of Kerugoya, the old man reflected, where he could take a shortcut through a neighbor’s farm and catch the family at their midday meal in the shade of a banana grove.