by Peter Kimani
“Do the people in my office know?” Anamika asked with the naïve incredulity of a young Western aid worker stationed in Africa for the first time.
“Of course—they also get a cut of the money. In fact, they are the brokers for this sort of deal. But it will be hard for you to prove—for you guys, all Somalis look the same.” Raage let out a loud chuckle.
As their friendship deepened, Raage confided that his younger brothers had settled in Minneapolis a few years ago, but they had never quite adjusted to American life. Two had turned to crime and were in jail. Another had been shot dead by a white supremacist in a street fight. Raage did not speak much about his family after that, and Anamika did not ask too many questions. But she knew they were a source of much anguish for him. What she did not anticipate was that Raage would suffer a fate similar to those of his brothers in America.
Initially, Anamika did not make much of Raage’s absence from their usual haunt. At worst, she reasoned, it may be that he had been arrested in a police swoop. He had had many such brushes in the past, but always came out of it laughing.
“Saved by Baba,” was Raage’s way of explaining that he had offered a five-hundred-shilling bribe to a policeman to win his freedom. Baba—Swahili for father—referred to the image of the nation’s leader that stares out of every currency.
Raage lived and died as a refugee but he didn’t see himself as one. “Somalis are nomads,” he often told Anamika. “We cannot stay in one place too long. Our home is wherever our camels take us. I am in Kenya, so this is my home for now. But I will go back to Mogadishu someday, buy a house, and live there permanently.” One day, out of the blue, he asked Anamika if she would go with him to the city of his birth. The question stunned her, not only because she had never entertained this idea, but because it seemed so absurdly optimistic.
Like most Somali refugees who escape to Nairobi, Raage led a subterranean existence, teaching English and Kiswahili to other urban refugees at a local community center during the day and working as a cook at a Somali restaurant at night, all the time trying to escape the snare of the notoriously greedy police officers who Somali refugees refer to as “human ATM machines” because of their penchant for demanding bribes. His fluency in English and Kiswahili often enabled him to pass for a Kenyan Somali, which is why he was so eager to teach Kenya’s official languages to other Somali refugees.
* * *
As the week progressed, Anamika started worrying that something more sinister than a police arrest was keeping Raage away. By the end of the week, she was sufficiently alarmed to seek him out at the restaurant where he worked. The grim news awaited: Raage had suffered an asthma attack as he slept. His neighbor Abdi Mohamed, who everyone knew was from the Puntland region in Somalia, but whose recently acquired fraudulent Kenyan ID showed he was Osman Hassan from Garissa—had found Raage lying on the floor of his tiny bedsit. He had died instantly. An uncle and some neighbors had already buried Raage in the Muslim cemetery nearby.
Just as so many aspects of his life had remained secret, so had Raage’s illness. “If we tell you our secrets, how will we be able to charm and disarm you?” he had once said. Anamika wondered when her secrets would consume her too.
* * *
In her ten years of practice, Dr. Shirin Manji had never encountered a patient like Anamika. Her mostly white and Asian patients tended to be much older, usually bored or disillusioned middle-aged women searching for meaning and purpose in their lives. A few were troubled teenagers dealing with addictions or the stresses and demands of modern life.
Despite her relatively young age, Anamika appeared self-assured and confident. Her smart bob haircut and perfectly manicured nails belied a woman who was always in control, one who could not let her guard down even in the midst of a crisis. But the cracks began appearing when she started to talk about her childhood home in Parklands. Was she a victim of incest or sexual abuse? Or was the pain she was experiencing the result of a rebelliousness that had taken its toll on her psyche and was now erupting as anger and depression? Dr. Manji was determined to get to the bottom of her angst but Anamika proved to be a tough nut to crack. Psychiatrists often use a method known as “free association” to pry open long-forgotten memories from patients. Patients are asked to associate an image with something they know or remember. The job of the psychiatrist is to find patterns that may lead to clues as to the reason for the patient’s mental condition.
In Anamika’s case, seemingly unrelated memories came flooding back like a badly edited movie. In the first scenario, she was having a conversation with a cousin, who had confessed to her that her grandfather used to fondle her when she was a child. In the next scenario, she saw her uncle putting his hand under the housemaid’s skirt just as her mother was walking into the kitchen. All hell broke loose that day. The maid was fired but no one said anything more about the incident.
That was how it was in Anamika’s family home in Parklands. No one spoke about anything too personal, especially a topic as delicate as child abuse or illicit sexual relations between Indians and Africans. In Nairobi, apartheid did not just manifest itself physically but mentally as well. People chose not to see what they did not want to see, or that which made them uncomfortable.
When Anamika was growing up, residents of Asian neighborhoods could go through an entire day without seeing people of other races. They shopped at the local Indian duka that sold everything from spices to safety pins. They hung out with each other at community halls or at the temple on weekends. Indians—who were collectively referred to as Asians after the Indian subcontinent was partitioned and a new nation called Pakistan was born—stuck with their own kind, as did the whites. They shared intimate domestic spaces with their African servants, but did not really know them. They bought dhania and okra from Wanjiku, the mama mboga who heaved her vegetables in a large kiondo from Kiambu to Parkands every morning, finding customers by going house to house. Everyone knew Wanjiku by name, but no one knew how many children she had or how many hours she had walked to reach Parklands.
This inability or unwillingness to connect with those of a different race or class became evident to the eight-year-old Anamika when Wanjiku stopped coming to her home in Parklands to sell vegetables. Neither her mother nor her grandmother knew where to look for her or who to ask about her whereabouts. Later they learned from a neighbor’s maid that Wanjiku had died of a disease that was left undiagnosed for too long—perhaps because she was too busy working or because she did not have the money for treatment.
The void left by Wanjiku was never filled; by the time she had disappeared from their lives, housewives in Parklands had started shopping at the swanky new Sarit Centre mall, where one could even pick up plump imported oranges from South Africa, a delicacy that Wanjiku had not been in a position to offer.
After Independence, racially zoned areas were desegregated but apartheid never quite went away—another type of segregation based on class replaced it. The colonial administration was gone, but the colonial mentality remained. Waiters left their ten-by-ten-foot hovels to work in five-star hotels with heated swimming pools; domestic workers cleaned houses with four bathrooms but in their slum shacks they only had access to pit latrines. Tycoons who made fortunes after buying off white settlers’ farms at throwaway prices looked down on their impoverished brethren who fought in the war for Independence. No one questioned the hierarchy of privilege; everyone knew his or her place. But underneath there was seething anger—which sometimes erupted into physical violence—that no one dared to acknowledge.
“We are all underwater creatures,” Winnie once told Anamika. “We live below the surface of the water, only coming up for air when it is absolutely necessary. Showing our true selves is too scary for us Kenyans. We never grew comfortably into our skins, maybe because we have been told for so long that our skins are ugly, not white enough. We always wear masks because knowing too much about our true selves may make us loathe who we have become.” Anamika loved Winn
ie because she always spoke her mind, which was so rare in this city of make-believe.
Speaking one’s mind was particularly taboo in Parklands, which is probably why Anamika struck up a friendship with the fiercely outspoken Winnie. Girls were taught to be silent, uncomplaining, obedient. Stepping outside the boundaries of the little bubble the residents had created for themselves meant inviting danger, especially of a sexual kind. Yet everyone knew that the boys and men in this neighborhood were crossing these boundaries all the time. It was common knowledge that teenage Asian boys lost their virginity in the hidden brothels and bars in seedier parts of the neighborhood. Gangbangs in these brothels were a coming-of-age ritual among Asian adolescents. These same nice, well-brought-up boys then went on to marry nice, well-brought-up Hindu virgins.
But when it came to food, well, they could talk about it all day. Samosas, bhajias, chevda, jalebis, rasgullas, mishkaki, chicken tikka. Housewives in Parklands learned how to make all these when they were girls and competed fiercely with each other over who made the best kheer and whose pakoras were the tastiest. The fragrance of biriyani from a neighbor’s kitchen was enough to ferment jealousy and start tongues wagging. “What happened in Usha’s house last night that made her cook biriyani today?” a housewife would ask a neighbor. “You think her husband beat her again? Is that why she has been wearing sunglasses all day even though it is raining? And did you see the new Peugeot her husband bought her last month? Wonder how much beating she had to endure to earn that. She always cooks biriyani after a thorough beating, have you noticed?”
In Anamika’s childhood home, like in most Punjabi households, food was not just a passion but the very reason for existence. Her family not only obsessed about food the way an addict obsesses about the substance he abuses, but talked about food all the time. Perhaps talking about it prevented them from confronting their own pain or reality. Often food or talks of food became substitutes for meaningful or uncomfortable conversations.
It was the conversations—or the lack of them—that Anamika remembered most vividly, especially in the days after Raage’s death. She recalled how talks at her childhood dinner table were dominated by how well the curry had been cooked or how nice and soft the rotis were. If she dared bring up a topic unrelated to food, such as how the headmistress scolded her in front of the whole school, or how she was bullied in the playground, or that she had tried to kill herself the previous day by swallowing twelve Panadols, the topic would quickly turn back to food. “Have another roti!” was a common response from her mother, or, “Can I give you some more daal?” There was no tragedy in her family that food could not soften.
Sometimes food was used to forestall a much-needed discussion, such as the one Anamika should have had with her mother when she began menstruating. She got her period fairly early, when she was just eleven. But because she was still considered a child (though her breasts had started to grow at an alarming rate), she was ashamed to tell anyone about it. Luckily she had seen her older cousins use cotton wool during their periods so she snuck into her grandmother’s bedside cupboard and stuffed her underwear with a bunch.
She hid her period from her mother and grandmother for two whole days, until her grandmother discovered soiled cotton wool on the bathroom floor and decided to make a public announcement just as her father walked in from work.
“Anamika got her period!” she yelled, much to the consternation and horror of her father. Anamika burst into tears and ran into her room, swearing never to come out until the periods stopped. What seemed like an eternity later, her mother—an attractive woman who had tolerated years of humiliation for bearing three girls and no son—came into the room with a tray of food. “Here, I made you pakoras,” she said. The woman-to-woman conversation Anamika was expecting didn’t materialize, though her mother did tell her that now that she was menstruating, she should keep away from boys and not eat ice cream. (To this day she has never understood the bit about the ice cream.)
It is no wonder that she always had a difficult relationship with food. Friends told her that when she ate, it was as if she was at war. The knife stabbed the meat, the vegetables were mutilated, and no bit of the plate was left without wounded morsels of food. Perhaps because she found eating so traumatic, she was also allergic to cooking.
But then maybe food was how her family expressed love. There are many words for love in Indian languages. Urdu and Hindi have at least three words, each with a connotation that is unique to that word—ishq is a playful and passionate kind of love, muhabbat is a deeper and more enduring kind, and pyaar is a universal word for love, one that you can apply to your lover as well as to your pet dog. But these words are rarely spoken. A husband rarely tells his wife that he loves her; the language of love is spoken through the body—a meaningful meeting of the eyes, a slight touch of the hand, a smacking of the lips after a good meal. Often “I loved the chicken curry” is code for “I love the person who made this chicken curry.” Saying no to a second helping can cause deep hurt and distress. “You don’t love me? Is that why you are not eating?”
Associating food with love was always problematic for Anamika. She could see that the extra helpings of love that her family were getting were seriously impacting their health—her father was a gentle and hardworking man who made a living as an accountant at a big insurance company, but he had weight issues that led to diabetes, which eventually killed him. Anamika and her sisters were overweight when they were kids. Yes indeed, they were loved a lot. Her younger sisters went on to marry men who also loved food—and whiskey. The youngest divorced her husband after five years of marriage because the whiskey got in the way of the love.
The piece of land in Parklands where Anamika’s family home once stood is now occupied by a towering office block, the result of a property boom and gentrification that have consumed almost all the old bungalows in Parklands. Gone are the art deco verandahs and red Mangalore tile roofs, as are the frangipani and mango trees that littered every garden.
Where can Anamika go now to rekindle memories of her grandmother’s storytelling, or the fragrance of her mother’s special chicken biriyani?
* * *
It was Anamika’s fourth visit to Dr. Manji. As during all her sessions, she quickly settled into the velvet sofa that was positioned across from Dr. Manji but at a slight angle. A box of Velvex paper hankies sat on the small coffee table that separated her from the psychiatrist. She noticed that it had been recently used—one mangled wet hanky lay on the floor beside her.
In the earlier sessions, Dr. Manji had already asked the standard questions about her childhood that every psychiatrist is programmed to ask. Anamika had told her, rather unconvincingly, that hers had been a magical one, with picnics in the Ngong Forest on weekends and beach holidays in Mombasa during Christmas. No big dramas. Lots of food and laughter.
“No violence or abuse that you can remember?” Dr. Manji had asked.
Anamika had told her that apart from beatings from her mother—which Indian mother doesn’t beat her children?—she couldn’t remember being physically violated.
“What about sexual abuse?”
“Apart from that time when my drunk uncle’s hand landed on my breast, I really can’t think of any other incident. Why are you asking?”
Dr. Manji scribbled notes in her large red notebook, letting out little sighs now and then, like a child who is forced to do her homework instead of being allowed to play outside. After a few minutes of note-taking, she looked up, her face a little pensive. “I should have asked this earlier,” she said, “but are you in a relationship?”
Anamika didn’t know what prompted Dr. Manji to ask this question. It seemed a rather dramatic shift from her earlier line of questioning. “No, I am not in a relationship and I am not married.”
“Any reason why? Not that I think it is not okay to be unmarried. I am not married myself. I just want to know if it is a deliberate choice.”
“Didn’t find a nice Indian man
.” She hoped Dr. Manji would detect the sarcasm in her voice.
“Not even a boyfriend?”
“Uhhm. Yes, but he’s dead now.”
“Asian?” Strange question to ask, Anamika thought, but then completely relevant in the Kenyan context.
“No, Somali.”
Dr. Manji’s plump hands curled up as if she were suppressing a thought. She glanced up from her notebook, and gave Anamika an inquisitive look.
The room went silent for a few seconds. The response had clearly startled the psychiatrist, but she continued with her probing after mustering a poker face.
“Did your family have a problem with that?” Again, a completely relevant question in the Kenyan context.
“No, they didn’t.”
“Really? That’s unusual.”
“No, it’s not that. My parents died a few years ago and my sisters, well, I just didn’t tell them. Raage was Somali after all, and a Muslim.”
“What part would they have had a problem with, him being a Muslim or a Somali?”
It struck Anamika that Dr. Manji was herself a Muslim, an Ismaili, so she responded as tactfully as she could: “Being Muslim might not have mattered if Raage hadn’t been a Somali to boot. You know how we Kenyans view Somalis, especially now with al-Shabaab and all that. One of my distant relatives was killed by al-Shabaab terrorists in the Westgate mall attack. Besides, I just didn’t think it was necessary to talk about it since Raage and I had no plans to marry.”
“When did Raage die?” Dr. Manji asked after a long pause.
“Two months ago.”
“Is that when you had the nervous breakdown?”
“I wouldn’t call it a nervous breakdown, but yes, I did start drinking a lot. And then there were the nightmares.”