by Peter Kimani
“You!” My heart starts to beat like the rotors of those police helicopters that fly by low at night with a big shining light, when I realize the senior sergeant is addressing me.
“Yes?” I hear myself saying.
“She was your friend,” he says, as if he is revealing a secret. “Where was she last night?”
I shrink back. I want to say, I would think she was with you, but I dare not. She and I used to leave school and walk to Moonlight with our friend and classmate Waceke. Moonlight is in the ubabini side of Area Four, which means Waceke and the older brother she lived with had electricity. We would go there to listen to Sundowner on the radio as we did homework. Then we would walk back to our plot, Waithiegeni and I. When she started to skip school, I couldn’t go to Waceke’s house alone. I didn’t like the eyes her brother used to nibble me with, and it was unsafe to walk home from Moonlight alone.
I open my mouth to say I don’t know, but I realize he has lost interest in me. He is telling one of the officers to bring back Mama Mukasa.
Mama Mukasa returns—there is blood dripping down the side of her mouth, and her eyes are no longer visible. Her usually fleshy face is now swollen round like the moon, and has swallowed up her eyes. We all gasp in unison at the sight.
“Ehee?” the senior sergeant grunts, as if to say, This is your last chance.
“Mummy, sema ukweli tumalize hii kitu!” Mary Immaculate is wailing from her corner, urging Mama Mukasa to say what she knows, once and for all. She has taken up that keening cry again.
The senior sergeant turns back and tells her to shut up or they will make her cry forever. She quits her weeping abruptly.
“Inaonekana msichana alikuwa na kijana ya huyu mama usiku,” one of the officers reveals.
“Hmmmh!” Ouko’s girl sits up at this news, while we all turn to stare at Mukasa with surprise and some shock. Apparently, he was the one who entered the plot with Waithiegeni last night. His mother was trying to protect him, and we wonder what they did to her in the truck to make her reveal this. Right now, she turns her misshapen and bleeding visage toward her son, and there is a tear slipping out of her right eye.
“I always knew this chizi boy was a klinja!” Njenga has roused himself from a stupor and is roaring from his door, hurling insults at Mukasa. He has never liked Mukasa, but still, we are taken aback by his screaming. All this time, Njenga had been sitting there, staring at his dusty sports shoes. They have a faded Connate label on the side, but one cannot be sure because those shoes have walked many miles and have seen a lot of stitching to hold them together.
“Kijana, kimya!” the senior sergeant warns Njenga to be quiet, but Njenga leaps up and charges toward Mukasa, who is now half-crouched on his heels like a stray dog about to take a hurled stone. Njenga gets as far as our legs, which we pull back because he looks like he will trample them, when the senior sergeant hits him with his gun. Njenga falls back, his face bleeding. He lands on Ouko’s girl, and both of them let out cries of pain. Njenga holds his face with both hands, while Ouko’s girl hugs herself and pulls her knees into her chest.
“Let us hear from the young man,” the senior sergeant says, then turns to Mukasa.
“Officer, I just opened the gate for her, I was not with her,” he wails. I notice the way his Adam’s apple is bobbing up and down with fear, and I feel a little nausea rising up my throat. Maybe he is a klinja after all . . .
“Were you on the outside or inside when you opened the gate?” The senior sergeant’s voice is changing, and I am unsure what its lowered timbre is all about.
“Outside,” Mukasa replies. “I snuck out when my mother was serving customers, and then I entered with Waithiegeni so my mother would think we had been together.”
Mama Mukasa’s round face is beginning to twitch with annoyance as she regards her son. Even swollen, the threat of a beating later is written in clear lines on her face.
“Ehee. And when you saw her outside, was she alone?”
Mukasa looks away, and that is all the answer needed.
“Who was she with, boy?”
Mukasa doesn’t want to answer, but he looks up and sees his mother’s swollen face and the threat written all over her body, and he sighs. “She was with their father.”
It takes a moment to register that he is pointing at both Nyah and me, and that is when we realize our father is not with us on the potholed concrete. But at this point, we are beyond thinking as Njenga, his mother, and Mama Mukasa jump up, screaming and beating their thighs, as my sister and I cower in front of number 2, speechless.
* * *
We are back in our childhood home in Nakuru where we grew up. My mother was a nurse at the general hospital, and this accorded us a small flat in the staff quarters at the foot of Milimani. We are running away from an irate man who keeps calling us nugu, monkey, as he gives chase. Nyah and I are in full flight, the laughter dead on our lips. We were up in the trees, just playing, and we threw a small stone that caught this man on the head. We laughed, and he didn’t. We are running toward the line of maize plants, where he is sure not to follow. We disappear into the maize field, and dive low to the ground, trying not to pant. We can hear him contemplating whether he should run after the monkeys. He eventually gives up and leaves. And that is when we realize we are sitting neck deep in thafai, the stinging nettle . . .
* * *
They ask us where our father is. There is shouting and screaming directed at us.
“Leave them alone!” Wanji shouts from nowhere, stilling the commotion.
“Those girls are raising themselves with no mother and with a father who doesn’t even talk to them,” Sweetie says, coming to stand by us. “Moraa and Nyakerario are good girls.”
We are both in tears now. The senior sergeant boots our door down and enters with his rifle drawn. We start to scream, because we know our father is asleep on the floor, and if he does not respond, he will be shot. The police are inside our small house. I can hear the lamp breaking, followed by the stench of spilling kerosene. If someone is careless, they could start a fire. I break free from Mama Mukasa’s grip and jump into the dark shack. The senior sergeant is turning our father around so he can see our father’s face. Then the senior sargent jumps back, a small cry on his lips.
“You!” he exclaims. The two men stare at each other. Father says nothing. The senior sergeant appears to lose all his verve. He lowers his weapon, comes out of our house, and goes back to the scene of the crime.
We are all breathing hard, wondering what is going on. We see him lift the sheet that is covering Waithiegeni. He pulls it back, and most of us turn away from the sight of her naked grayness. Except for me. I watch him look at her. I watch him shake his head. Then he pulls the sheet back up and tells his officers to take Waithiegeni to the mortuary. Everyone falls silent as she is lifted onto a black polythene sheet. Her head lolls a little, but her eyes remain open. The senior sergeant tries to shut her eyes but fails. Mama Njenga cries at full volume. This time the senior sergeant lets her be. Njenga follows his mother and sister to the police truck. Then they are gone.
After a minute or two, Ouko’s girl enters number 7 and comes out with a bucket, some Omo detergent, and bleach. Then she proceeds to wash the blood off the floor. We stare at her in disbelief.
“I am pressed,” she says simply as she starts to hum, scrubbing the floor.
* * *
Waithiegeni is buried the day the KCSE exam starts, at the Langata Cemetery. I do not go, because I am taking the exam. For me, and for her.
On the last day of exams, I spot Senior Sergeant Devo near Huruma Primary. He is in his van, the one that took Waithiegeni away. I duck so that he doesn’t see me, and walk on home.
By now, whispers have come and gone that Waithiegeni had been heavy with Devo’s child, and that Devo has a wife and three children. No one knows how Waithiegeni died, but Mary Immaculate is back to scrubbing her floors, and Mama Mukasa is back to making her brews. I don’t talk to
anyone, not even our silent father, about what Devo saw underneath the sheet—the blood, the tissue, and the tiny limbs that lay by Waithiegeni’s legs.
HAVE ANOTHER ROTI
by Rasna Warah
Parklands
Anamika was nervous as she drove into the 1960s art deco bungalow, on 6th Avenue in Parklands, that Dr. Shirin Manji had converted into an office. The entrance was through the type of verandah that Anamika, and probably the psychiatrist herself, played in as a child, with its terrazzo floor and quaint pillars that seemed to evoke a misplaced grandeur.
The office was sparse but cozy. There were no pictures of family on Dr. Manji’s desk. Anamika noticed that she did not wear a wedding band and suspected she was single.
Dr. Manji had the kind and concerned face of a doting aunt. Droopy brown eyes with a twinkle of mischief framed by wavy hair that had a tinge of whiteness emerging in a shapeless fringe that covered her forehead. She was slightly overweight but pleasant-looking. She had been recommended to Anamika for the sole reason that she was Asian. She didn’t look much older than her patient; if they had met under different circumstances they might have even been friends.
“Why are you here?” asked Dr. Manji as Anamika settled into the beige velvet sofa that smelled slightly of mildew.
“I don’t know,” Anamika shrugged. “I don’t want to be here, to be honest. I find talking to psychiatrists a waste of time and money. I am only doing this because my employer is paying for it.”
If Dr. Manji was taken aback by her client’s candor, she did not show it. The doctor at UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency where Anamika worked, had suggested that she might be having a nervous breakdown after colleagues found her crouched under a sink in the office bathroom. The kindly Canadian medic from Toronto who had left a thriving practice to help out the world’s refugees—but who ended up treating highly paid self-indulgent UN staffers—gave Anamika a couple of tranquilizers and names of psychiatrists and psychotherapists in Nairobi who he believed could help her.
Anamika had initially resisted the idea but eventually relented when her childhood friend Winnie suggested she give a woman psychiatrist named Dr. Manji a try. “Only an Asian woman can truly understand another,” she had advised. Anamika wasn’t sure. When two people are too much alike, they can’t help each other—because they know the sins of their tribe too well, and are adept at hiding them, not just from themselves, but from each other too.
Besides, she found the whole concept of talking to a complete stranger about intimate details of her life to be unnatural and unnecessary. Psychiatrists coax patients to remember things they have carefully stowed away and forgotten. Why exhume that which is already buried?
* * *
Excavating memories can be a delicate and risky maneuver. Quite often the temptation is to bury the memories in the hope that the pain they cause will go away. Anamika had managed to bury these memories for most of her adult life. Then, shortly after Raage’s death, the memories resurfaced like a tsunami, particularly when she was drinking, which was pretty much every day.
They say people drink to drown their pain; Anamika’s drinking precipitated more pain. Not only were her memories more vivid when she was intoxicated, but they also resurged like episodes in the 24 TV series: Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—bang!
One evening she was home alone watching a Bollywood movie. Shah Rukh Khan had just confessed his undying love for Kajol through a song-and-dance routine in the Swiss Alps. Then, suddenly, whoosh, images of Raage’s lifeless corpse swirled in her head. Then other more cheerful images surfaced: She was on her way home from school, gathering tadpoles in her compass box from the stream near her house on 2nd Avenue in Parklands. She brought them home, hoping to see them grow into frogs. Of course that didn’t happen; the tadpoles died in her dripping compass box, their lifeless forms lying on their backs in utter surrender. Or when in the twilight hours, she and her two younger sisters would trap fireflies that lit up the garden in bottles, hoping that their bright neon-green light would illuminate their bedroom at night. Or Diwali nights, when the whole neighborhood was enraptured in a blaze of firecrackers, as the sweet smell of jalebis and rasgullas wafted from every corner.
Anamika’s childhood was comfortable but cloistered. Racially segregated neighborhoods like Parklands offered an illusion of safety, but the suffocating norms and traditions of Indian family life created internal frictions and spawned rebels who couldn’t wait to escape. In those days, everyone knew their place—the Indians lived worlds away from whites-only enclaves in Karen and Muthaiga and the dingy slums of Majengo and Mathare where the African working classes eked out a subhuman existence. The pecking order was clear: Europeans/whites first; Indians/Asians second; and Africans last. Unfortunately, not much changed in the years after Independence despite the desegregation of schools and the rise of a post-Independence black elite. On the contrary, a new type of segregation based on class and tribe emerged.
Anamika had no African friends until Winnie, the most clever girl in class at the mixed-race primary school they both attended, came along and imposed herself on her one morning after Miss Patel’s math class. Winnie insisted on sitting next to Anamika in the games room, where segregation was enforced even in the types of games the girls played. The Indian girls always went for group activities like rounders, while their African counterparts preferred athletics. Winnie and Anamika’s friendship blossomed.
After the office bathroom sink incident, Winnie—who was now a successful lawyer—suggested that Anamika write down her feelings, and when she was finished, burn every page in a symbolic act of redemption and forgiveness. It didn’t work. Erasing memories from a page does not erase them from the mind.
* * *
We all have secrets that we do not wish to share with anyone because they are too shameful or too painful or because they remind us of the person we once were but which we do not want to remember anymore. It’s called self-preservation. It is how the human species has evolved. If we remembered everything, from the moment we are violently ejected from our mothers’ warm and comfortable wombs into the harsh and cold world, we might never get on with the task of living. So we choose to forget, or at least to remember passively.
Which is why Anamika was so baffled and scared when her fleeting memories flashed in Technicolor. At one point she thought that she might be losing her mind. The notion that she might actually be insane, or worse, a hopeless alcoholic, occurred to her when she began seeing images of a smiling Raage standing next to her bed in the middle of the night.
Their first encounter had been at a training workshop for midwives where Raage was hired as an interpreter by a local NGO. He was fluent in Somali, English, Kiswahili, and Arabic, and also knew a bit of Italian, the language of his nation Somalia’s former colonial master.
Raage did not have the dark, lean good looks of a typical Somali; he could pass for an Arab or a Swahili from Kenya’s coast with his light-brown skin and soft wavy hair, which could be attributed to his mother’s side of the family, whose ancestors settled in Mogadishu from Persia some one thousand years ago.
“My mother’s family were Reer Xamar, the original inhabitants of Mogadishu,” he explained to Anamika. “Unfortunately, they were overrun by the pastoralists, who didn’t care much for urban life. These plundering pastoralists, my father’s people, destroyed my city.” The latter wasn’t exactly true; Raage’s father had held a senior position in Siad Barre’s government and was hardly a camel-riding nomad. But clan-based feuds between urban warlords with a pastoralist mindset had no doubt played a part in decimating a city that was once so beautiful that it was referred to as “The White Pearl of the Indian Ocean.”
Raage’s ability to laugh at himself and the predicament his country was in was what first attracted Anamika to him. “Don’t be fooled,” he had warned her. “We Somalis are born actors. We know how to hoodwink people.” Months later, when the friendship had deepened, he told her he
loved her. She believed him.
But underneath that cheery, carefree facade lay a deeply tormented soul and, as Anamika would learn belatedly, a frailty that rarely bubbled to the surface. Most Somalis, whether born in the throes of civil war, or the relative calm of exile, grieve for their fallen homeland. Unprocessed trauma is the term for it, and Raage had all the hallmarks of the condition, which Anamika could neither decipher nor treat.
Instead, Anamika had her own cries for help. Raage listened patiently, with the wisdom of those who have known real suffering but have survived through sheer resilience and optimism. How selfish of me, Anamika would scold herself the next day, to reach out to a refugee who has nothing and to expect him to comfort me. What must he be thinking? She could not possibly compare Raage’s trauma with her own feelings of unrootedness. A century after her great-grandfather was recruited in India by the British as a station master for what was then known as the Uganda Railway, Anamika still did not feel like she belonged in her country of birth. Her and Raage’s mutual feelings of “not belonging” to this place called Kenya is probably one of the things that drew them to each other. That feeling of being, but not really being. Of claiming spaces, but not being of those spaces.
The first time Raage reached out to kiss her, it felt like they had both found a home. Raage clung to Anamika afterward like a toddler latches onto his mother. Even though they were both in their thirties and had been in relationships before, that kiss felt like first love, an intoxicating mix of broken innocence, curiosity, and longing.
They mostly met at a café near her office, where many Somali refugees and their families gathered as they waited for one document or another to be processed by UNHCR. One day, as they sat having coffee, Raage pointed out a young Somali woman wearing a full-body black hijab. “You see that woman over there? She is a Kenyan Somali but pretending to be a Somali refugee, just so she can be resettled in America. A genuine Somali refugee in Dadaab sold her his lottery for $10,000 dollars.” Lottery was the term used by refugees who had secured resettlement in a third country.