was reading the other day about these knives from…where was it?’ he snapped his fingers trying to recall. ‘It must have been Germany. Si-they are the ones who make good cars?’
Beatrice squinted wondering what knives had to do with cars, but this was Mr. Mathai, ladies and gentlemen.
‘They are so sharp they can slice through a wooden board. In fact, I was telling my wife,’ this was the first Beatrice was hearing of this, ‘I was telling her that we should start importing them and selling, we can make a killing in the business and…’
The moving date was agreed upon. In two weeks, the Mathais would be the newest residents of Malaba Estate. Annie saw them off, standing shoeless in the heat of January’s unyielding sunshine, her feet getting burnt by the hot concrete of her verandah, as if this early disappointment in life had somehow dulled her other senses.
~
On their way out, Mr. Mathai kept up a steady stream of one sided conversation. He noted the potholes on the road that looked like they’d been filled up quickly awaiting a proper date to fix the road that, as yet, had not arrived. The bitumen holding the road together like a bandage had cracked in on itself, the friction worsening the original potholes. The handsome maisonettes were gently wrapped around with a riot of colour in the form of bougainvillea fences of all varieties; white, red, lilac, orange. The colours, intertwined or in block formation, looked as if an artist had sprayed the petals onto the shrubs creating a visual masterpiece.
On their way to Annie’s house, they had driven straight down from the gate taking the long route round to the house. From Annie’s house they continued straight on to complete their tour of the oval-shaped estate and it’s homes. At the other end of the estate, just before the main exit, the bougainvillea fences came to an abrupt halt for three houses on the right hand side of the road. The fences had been replaced with stone walls and the black gates guarding the houses had metal carvings on them, painted in gold. Each stone wall had broken soda bottles and glass jutting out at the top, the glass pieces so close together you couldn’t find a surface to place the palm of one hand flat.
When he noticed these homes, so different from the others, Mr. Mathai slowed down, peering into the verandahs. He noticed the long corridor connecting each of the three houses together. Just outside the last house, two boys and a girl played a game of hopscotch, further ahead of them on a red velvet sofa, sat two grandmothers and not far from them were two house-helps peeling potatoes as they balanced their bottoms on overturned buckets.
‘We’ve made it! We’re sharing an estate with people that rich?’ Mr. Mathai pointed a thumb backwards as he drove off, shaking his head in disbelief. According to him, all Kenyan Indians were wealthy and the idea that he would be living in the same estate as them was titillating.
~
Just outside Malaba’s gate stood several kiosks garishly painted red with Coca-Cola scrawled on their bodies. Whilst the estate had been quiet and serene, the kiosks were an industry of activity. At once, you were overtaken by loud conversation, the sight of people lying idly on the grassy knolls leading up to the kiosks, chewing miraa and dozing off in the midday sun, house-helps strolling from one kiosk to the other in search of garlic and gossip, bicycles piled high with crates of soda stopping to unload here, cycling a little further to unload there.
The Kiosk directly across the estate gate looked to be the busiest. Whilst several people stood at the window of The Kiosk to make purchases, others sat around it’s direct vicinity on tiny wooden stools or plastic chairs people watching, talking amongst themselves, shouting down from time to time to someone walking past (a greeting, a rebuke, a reminder then laughter again). It was as if they had been transported to the markets in their respective home villages by this sight, so uncharacteristic of the Nairobi they’d come to know. Nairobi was already becoming the type of city where conversation was a luxury and time a finite resource, but here across from Malaba Estate stood a world that was far removed from the city that stretched beyond.
Though they had driven passed the kiosks on the way in, they’d both been preoccupied with the impending tour of Annie’s house (for different reasons as you can imagine by now). This time, they watched with fascination, Mr. Mathai trying to picture himself inserted into the on-going narrative before them.
‘I think we need to buy some water,’ Mr. Mathai said. Before Beatrice could protest the decision, he’d parked the car on the side of the knoll and jumped out to begin his ascent to The Kiosk. Though the people around The Kiosk kept up their conversations, their attention was drawn to the stranger who was presently making a show of greeting everyone as if they were long time friends.
Ng’ang’a, The Kiosk owner and unofficial arbitrator of conversation around his Kiosk, asked the question on everyone’s mind: Who are you and where are you from?
Now, it must never be forgotten that Nairobi was, as capital cities go, brand-spanking new, an afterthought of a city, a miracle if you will allow. Unlike other African Capital Cities, Nairobi had no rich deposits of minerals to speak off, no sea or ocean to flow out of. In short it had no obvious advantage save for its national park, and lions do not bring in the same revenue as diamonds or oil. Nairobi was a city anchored on luck and the Great British Experiment: The Lunatic Express.
And yet!
My to have seen it then. It was as if they spun money out of air, industrialisation out of a vast nothing. Nairobi’s beauty was in its alchemy, how it conjured riches from what had always been a swamp.
In the 1990s, most of the city’s inhabitants could not trace back their roots in Nairobi beyond one generation. The overwhelming majority were new. Some came running down from the highlands, afraid of a life of endless farming. Others came by way of the Great Rift Valley, hungry for a chance to become Nation Builders. Others still, crossed borders, desirous of a new life in the metropolitan heart of East Africa. Then there were those who came carried along the Tradewinds of the Indian Ocean, singing that here, in this city they were destined to find Love and Wealth. To be a Nairobian was to be struck with the ravenous lunacy that plagues only the alchemist.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Series of First Encounters, February, 1991
Packing up their thirty-five square foot cube of a flat took no time at all for the Mathais. Beatrice took little with them. Most of their clothes, furniture and even photo albums were handed down to relatives. The past, sticky as it is, cannot be conveniently handed down but Beatrice’s belief in “forward always backwards never” did not allow for the possibility that you couldn’t hand over a memory just because it didn’t fit in with Annie’s Italian furniture in the new house.
The rent? How could they afford this move up in the world? Their business selling care spare parts was thriving as the city council operated Kenya Bus Services collapsed and got cannibalised into inefficiency, pushing up the purchase of cars significantly. Many of these new car owners were not versed in how to take good care of their cars. As a result, they needed spare parts as early as six months into owning their ‘new’ cars. The business had its moral angle to it though. The spare parts––not all––but a number, were stolen parts from cars left unattended and promptly raided of everything but the engine.
Regardless of the questionable provenance of some of their products, this little shop at the bottom of Kirinyaga road was Beatrice’s shrine. The shop was the only place where she felt that the person she was, was right and necessary and enough. Here, she’d spend her days in her own version of bliss: quiet consistent labour towards a future of plenty. What a disappointment for Beatrice when, even after all these years––whether she was ringing up an order, or waiting for a supplier to pick up the phone on the other end––in those brief caesuras of life where a quiet moment was unexpectedly snatched and the clock ticked the seconds a little louder than those that came before––an image would slip into her mind seductive and unbidden.
Macharia that last afternoon they spent together. Even after repeatedly rinsing him from her mind, bleaching the memories that hurt most, the smell of his skin was like a favourite perfume you don’t wear anymore because it reminds you of that time. If she