by Iman Verjee
Every time that dirt-riddled note was rolled into his palm, the blood-like smell of it hitting his nostrils, a little of his pride was replaced by anger, his values stubbed away by resentment until he forgot to be ashamed and only felt hungry, greedy for some more.
It was close to five o’clock and he counted out less than a thousand shillings in his pocket. He was ready to go home, back to the clinic, back to waiting and praying and doing nothing. And then she came. In a sleek, silver Mercedes, sunglasses so big they grazed the tops of her cheekbones. In this bribery dance, just as he was preparing to quit, Jeffery found his prima ballerina.
Hand held straight out, chest puffed, voice gruffed.
‘Stop right there!’
Right in the middle of the traffic, he stepped in front of the car so that she was forced to press down hard on her brakes. The cars behind her shrieked their horns at him, drove around the obstruction, glaring eyes tracking him through closed windows. But he was blind and deaf to them. He saw only her, perfectly polished, like a smoothed down piece of valuable soapstone.
She rolled down her window. ‘What is it?’ she inquired in a high voice. He detected a slight tremor in her mouth, her worried eyes.
‘License.’
‘First tell me why you pulled me over.’
Jeffery remained silent, keeping his hand out. Lead the dance and she would have to follow his feet. He repeated himself and she reached into her purse, handing him the red booklet. He slipped it into his shirt pocket, took a slow turn about the car; he glanced at her insurance, poked at her headlights, pounded her bumper with his fist harder than he had intended and saw her grimace in annoyance. Then he gestured at the back seat.
‘Open.’
Single words halted any possible arguments and she had no choice but to unlock it for him now that he had her documents. As Jeffery climbed in, the expensive smell of leather submerged him, edged with a pineapple-scented car freshener. The seats were cool despite the heat outside and it excited him because the Mercedes was the most extravagant thing he had ever sat in, ever touched, and he took an appreciative moment to glance around.
High-heeled shoes, forgotten packets of Trident mint-chewing gum and an extra jacket littered the seats around him – everything about their neglect spoke of the value of her life. He saw how easily the world must fall under her hands, was stung by the fact that she had more possessions in her car than he had ever had in his life. He collected that feeling and held it in his voice, used it to push away the shame that threatened to surface at any moment.
‘Drive,’ he commanded. ‘Parklands police station.’
Her thick hair fell across her cheek, olive skin shining with the beginnings of a nervous sweat. Pretty, young muhindi girl, just as David had instructed.
‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘Obstruction of traffic!’ he barked. ‘You cannot just stop in the middle of a roundabout!’
Her mouth opened and closed in disbelieving anger. ‘You made me do that!’
He tapped her license to remind her who was in charge. Under normal circumstances, he would have been appalled at himself for playing such a dirty trick, but surrounded by the gross extravagance of her life he was reminded of the hardship of his own and everything was different. ‘Come on, let’s go. Twende, twende!’
‘I’m not paying you off, just so you know,’ she warned him as she began to move. ‘I’ll go to the police station, where I will file a complaint against you.’
‘Sawa.’ He feigned indifference, finding that once he lost himself in the pretense threatening her became easier. ‘I’ll have to keep your car and maybe you in a jail cell until someone can come and pick you up. Maybe they’ll be here in twenty minutes, maybe two hours with the traffic. I’m sure you know how dangerous it is in there, especially for someone like you. It’s very possible to get HIV.’ He pushed himself forward, snickered at her through the rearview mirror and found that his face had taken on a new shape, scowling, loose lines that made him appear aged.
‘You can’t do this to me. I’m going to call my father.’
‘You’re welcome to do that once we get to the station.’ Sensing her growing unease, he straightened up and spread out his legs to appear larger. He burped and said, ‘Please go faster. We’re almost there.’
Instead, she slowed down and he knew that his chance had come. Sighing, as if doing her a favor, he said, ‘Sawa. Take out ten thousand shillings and I will let you go.’
She scoffed. ‘I don’t have that kind of money.’
‘Okay, eight thousand.’ He saw that she was almost crying, felt bitter and hoped that she would. He wanted to ask her what she could possibly understand about desperation. A part of him wanted to put her in the jail cell, just to teach her a lesson. It was absurd that she should have four half-full bottles of water in the pockets of her back seats – that for those things he considered life, she treated as luxuries she could afford to waste.
‘I have four thousand on me and that’s it. That’s all I’m giving you.’
He tried to stop his hands from shaking as she pulled out the notes from her purse and threw them at him. His breath was ragged, cut short with disbelief, as he shoved them deep into his pocket.
‘Just drop me at the station and carry on.’ His authority established, he sat back comfortably and enjoyed the short ride. He decided that he wouldn’t tell his senior officer about the money – he would use it for his mother today and give the officer back what he made tomorrow.
He instructed the girl to stop at the gate, springing out and smiling – ‘Thank you, madam! Have a very good evening’ – and slipped one of the water bottles into his back pocket.
When she was gone, he touched the money lightly, felt it flutter as if alive. Altogether he had collected close to five thousand shillings, enough to get his mother to the hospital. Enough to get her the care she needed, at least for now.
He was so lost in his own thoughts that he didn’t hear his name being called. A hand stretched out to stop him at the entrance to the station. The senior officer was smoking on the concrete ledge of a small flower garden. ‘Jeff,’ he called, as if to a friend, rising and flexing the thick muscle in his neck. ‘You have something for me.’
Not a question.
Jeffery considered lying but from the raised eyebrow, the way the cigarette drooped warningly from the corner of his mouth, Jeffery knew the officer had seen him climbing out of the car, heard the joy in his voice as he waved the lady away. He wondered if it was too late now to slip most of it into his trouser pocket but the man was already standing before him, hand out waiting.
‘Please, sir. I need the money today; it’s a matter of life and death.’ There were no spaces between his words, just a hurried plea.
‘Isn’t everything?’ The officer’s fingers curled in an indication for Jeffery to hand it over. ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry! I will give you your share.’ His long fingernails scratched Jeffery’s skin as he took the notes, licking his thumb and counting them out.
After he was done, he rolled it into a thick wad, handing Jeffery two hundred shillings. ‘See? Did you think I would cheat you?’
‘This is only two hundred bob.’
‘Are you questioning me?’ The voice was no longer friendly.
‘But I gave you five thousand!’
‘And I asked you for thirty. I’m the one being generous.’
Jeffery turned to leave, anxious to return to his mother. But the officer’s heavy hand pulled him back. Something was tugged out of his pocket and his trousers became light. ‘Thank you, I’m very thirsty.’ The officer opened the bottle. Tossing the cap aside, he took down half the contents in one voracious sip. When the man came back up for air, gasping and sucking on his cigarette, he barked, ‘What are you looking at? Go, before I kick you out of here for good.’
There were no streetlights in Kibera to pierce the inky blackness that came with nightfall. He walked as if blindfolded, unable to se
e two steps ahead of him. There were momentary flickers of yellow from some shacks, illegally obtained electricity, which was dim and buzzed like swarms of insects overhead. Jeffery had none at home because, like everything else here, you had to pay someone else for it – thirty-five shillings a month – and he was saving to take them away from here, to be the first man in generations of his family to move out of the slums and into the city.
He was careful to stay as close to the walls as possible, wanting to avoid the flying toilets. With nightfall came violence and many people chose to stay within the shaky yet safer confines of their houses, relieving themselves in paper bags rather than risk going outside. They then threw these bags out onto the street, as far from their homes as possible. Sometimes, the bags of human waste landed, if you were unfortunate enough, on the roof above your head, bursting open as they hit the sharp corners of galvanized metal and raining down in clumps of sticky wetness. If you were luckier, they would be thrown at your feet and spray only your shoes and the hems of your trousers, which were more easily wiped away.
But despite this, Jeffery had always found night-time in Kibera peaceful. He passed a bar where people were laughing and telling each other stories over a drink, their outlines lit by a gasoline lamp that threw gold beams upon the wooden tables. Further down the road, an old man was grilling goat meat over a small jiko and he waved at Jeffery as he passed. A man and woman talking, a TV playing a dubbed-over telenovela and the bleating of goats – sounds of the living, the persevering. Despite it all, losing themselves in the small bits of normalcy they found, whilst clinging to hope. There is always tomorrow.
As he approached his home, he heard new noises – people crying, curious onlookers peeling back the curtain he had hung up over their door for privacy, and glancing inside. He began to run, tripped over a bump in the street and had to steady himself by grabbing the low roofs on either side of him. He felt the sharp edge of the metal dig into his skin but was unable to sense the pain as he half-crawled to the door.
‘Get out, get out.’ He pushed people away with his shoulders and stepped into the dark room, instantly gagging at the smell. It kept him at the entrance, the crushing stench of rot, feces and death. It was so brutally raw, encompassing him as if it were a solid presence – like the Devil himself.
At first he couldn’t make out his mother because no light reached in that far, but as he staggered toward the back wall, his eyes adjusting to the shadows, he glimpsed the outline of her still figure. Someone had picked her up from the floor and placed her on the bed, a good Samaritan who had the kind sense to wrap her in a shuka before propping her up against the wall of the shamba so that she appeared to be sitting, waiting for him as she usually did. The only thing that gave it away was the way her neck tilted upward, her mouth frozen stiff and her bones marble-cold. He shook her, dragged her forward and slapped her cheeks but as soon as he let her go, she fell back. There wasn’t a single thing in her that was moving, that wasn’t empty.
A hand on his shoulder. ‘She’s gone. Be happy for her – she is at peace.’
‘I tried, I really tried. Don’t, why? Please, don’t.’ A string of nonsensical words caught on his tongue. ‘I’ll get the money tomorrow. Please don’t leave me.’
How quickly her face, which had always been so young, had sunken. Her body, which had always been so strong, shriveled down to that of a little girl’s. He tried to force her eyes closed, not able to bear seeing his reflection in them, to be taunted by a feature belonging to the living, but each time he did, they slowly opened again.
‘Jeffery.’
‘Leave us alone.’
A warm wetness surrounding him – he climbed into the bed beside her, bringing her close, tucking her head beneath his chin. Feeling her so close, knowing that soon she would be completely gone from him, he started to cry.
He thought of the woman in the car once again, wondered how it was possible for people to exist here, living on too much – who spent and spent and yet when they reached back into their pockets, found that they were still full, still filling up, while people like him were left to live and die like animals by a government who saw no profit to be made from such a desolate place.
When he next spoke, it was to no one in particular because by that time everyone had left. ‘Why have they forgotten us? Is Kibera not also a place? Are we not also human beings, citizens of this country?’ He kissed his mother’s pointed nose, her once proud forehead. And the next time he pushed her eyes closed, he kept his fingers pressed down against her lids, whispering against her icy cheek, ‘We are Kenyans too.’
19
There was an old fruit market opposite their apartment block that sat on a large, abandoned field that was marshy and easily mistaken by most people who drove past it to be a rubbish dump. It was packed full of crude, make-shift stalls created from cardboard boxes and bright, plastic crates. Most of them were covered by thick, polythene roofs designed to protect the goods from the heat and unexpected rains, which came down heavy and without warning. The crates overflowed with colorful rivers, the neon pink flesh of watermelon and the dark yellow of passion fruit, clouds of pure white sugar cane that were impossible not to sink your teeth into, feeling the juice flood into your mouth.
The ground was always muddy and littered with a rainbow of fruit peels, cockroaches and discarded paper bags. Intermingling with the sticky smell of fruit was the charcoal scent of Mary’s Kitchen, a family-run establishment that consisted of two plastic tables covered in plaid cloth and four chairs. It was located at the far corner of the market and was always packed with tourists and locals alike, forever with bottles of lukewarm Tusker beer, no matter what time of day it was, scraping up the restaurant’s most famous dish of nyama choma.
Michael had introduced them to the goat meat, grilled over an open fire. He used his teeth to tug at the crisp, charred edges. He had showed them how to drizzle it with kachumbari, a mixture of chili sauce, onions, diced tomatoes and fresh coriander, scooping it up in ugali, a type of bread made from maize flour. Pressing it down into soft white baskets, he had placed the meat in the center, rolling it up and pushing it into his eager mouth, then washing everything down with a long swig of coke.
It was nearing the end of their summer vacation, when the days seemed even more precious and difficult to hold onto. They found Michael sitting cross-legged on the floor of the veranda, a stainless steel bowl in his lap, deftly picking apart pea pods and letting the small, hard vegetables roll in his palm before dropping them one by one into the bowl with a soft ching.
‘Everyone is at the market,’ Jai told him.
‘I promised my mum I would help her finish this.’ Michael’s fingers never stopped moving even as he looked up to talk to them. ‘You guys can go ahead without me.’
He had been careful to follow Angela’s instructions ever since that evening spent arguing on the brown sofa. They had come back to work the next morning to find that Mrs Kohli had locked up most of the drawers and cupboards, leaving open only those that Angela needed to do her work.
‘It’s just for safety,’ she had said, but there had been a quickness to her movements, a suspicious sprint of her eyes, which had made Michael believe that no matter how upset his mother’s words made him, they held a heavy truth.
‘I hope this doesn’t have to do with what Tag said.’ Jai sat down beside him.
‘We didn’t believe him – you know that,’ Leena added.
‘I know. And thank you for helping me.’ He looked up at her and she blushed slightly under the concern of what he said next. ‘I hope you didn’t get into any trouble because of me.’
‘It was fine.’ Her voice was higher than usual.
The night it happened, the two of them had received a ranting lecture from their mother after she had demanded to see the sweets they had claimed to buy.
‘We finished them,’ Leena told her.
‘Where are the wrappers or did you eat those as w
ell?’
‘I threw them away.’
‘And yet I have not found one in any dustbin around the house.’ Pooja leaned down to glare at her daughter. ‘I hope you aren’t taking the blame for what Michael did. Stealing is very serious.’
‘Michael didn’t do it. He was with us all day.’
‘He could have hidden it – these kharias are very clever, you know,’ she warned them.
‘I’m sorry, Ma. It won’t happen again.’
‘Of course it won’t!’ her mother had yelled. ‘Because you never took it to begin with! Don’t let me catch you pulling another stunt like that otherwise I’ll never allow you to play with that boy again.’
Now, sitting around Michael as he shelled the peas, Jai gestured to Leena to do the same. She folded her oversized T-shirt in her lap and pushed a handful of green vegetables into its folds. She stared down at the long half-moon shapes. ‘What do I do with these?’
Michael dropped his peas into the bowl and came closer to her. As he took one from her lap, she noticed the smooth, wide surface of his hands – the cleanness of his palm. There were no dark, extra lines like the ones that ran through hers; just soft, undisturbed skin and fingers that did everything with meticulous care.
‘See this marking here?’ He pointed to the division that ran down the entire length of the pod. ‘That’s the opening. All you have to do is this.’ He pressed it softly between his thumb and forefinger and it popped cleanly open.
He showed her the three peas sitting inside – a trio of wrinkled, miniature golf balls. He dropped them into her cupped palm and she closed her fist around them, running their ridges against her skin. ‘Easy, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
He went back to his spot closer to her brother; they were racing to see who could clear the most pods the fastest but she stayed as she was, peas in hand. She traced their inflexible, hexagonal pattern and threw two of them into the bowl, allowing the third to linger. It stuck to her skin, refused to let go and she slipped it into her pocket.