the carcass, the other gently tearing the strips of flesh as though it hurt the animal to cut it up.
“Choma, chemsha, au tumbukiza?” Gathenji would ask, pausing to look at the customer. “My friend,” he would continue, “let me tell you, undo kwo undo. If you want this for a roast then you need a little fat. Just a little fat to help it sizzle,” he would explain, the knife slicing through a hump the color of bad milk. He would meticulously gather the meat and the chops of hump and drop them on the scale with the violence of Moses crashing the clay tablets on Mount Sinai. The scale would perform a jerky dance before the meter rested on the exact weight requested. Gathenji would tap the metal lid to ensure the weights were right, then flash a toothy grin at the waiting customer. “Sawa sawa?” he would ask, piercing a metal rod through the pieces of meat, rolling them into a parcel before throwing it over his shoulder so that the bundle landed on the kitchen table with a soft thud. “Hiyo ni choma!” he would then shout, indicating that the meat was for roasting.
“How do you manage such accuracy?” a puzzled customer would pose, while handing Gathenji the money.
“My friend, let me tell you. Undo kwo undo. One by one. I’m the meat master,” Gathenji would reply with a hint of pride as he retrieved the change—the hundred-shilling notes in the right breast pocket, fifties in the left, the mashilingi in the left side of his trousers, the twenties in the right. All other big notes were stashed deep inside Gathenji’s layers of clothes, in a pocket sewn in his coat that he called kabangue, which meant he would rather die than part with its contents.
As the meat roasted, Gathenji would march around to different customers, complete with his chef’s hat, like an admiral inspecting a guard of honor, and gently place a chopping board bearing sizzling meat on the table to placate some enraged customer who had been waiting for hours.
“This is kionjo. Just to whet the appetite as the meat cooks,” he would say. Hungry patrons would grab the pieces faster than they were cut, and praise the butcher for a great job. And wait.
But when the meat they’d ordered was done, bewildered revelers would form a line at the butchery demanding their pound of flesh, for Gathenji seldom sold them the requested weights. Since the area was generally poorly lit, and drunks often dimmed their eyes as alcohol took effect, none of them ever noticed the thin, colorless string attached to the scales. No one ever wondered why Gathenji always wore flip-flops, which allowed easy pull of the string using his toes. Those who had been shortchanged threatened not just to go after Gathenji’s kabangue but his throat as well. More often than not, the disputes tended to boil over and spill onto the music stage, ending in a fragile truce that would hold until Gathenji delivered the entrails, the only conciliatory dish available, but itself a subject of constant conflict.
“This offal is not equivalent to the meat you stole from us,” someone charged one evening.
“Who said I stole meat from anyone?” Gathenji demanded, meat cleaver in hand, the naked lightbulb dancing above his head. There was a tense silence. Someone coughed nervously. Gathenji relaxed and dropped the cleaver and walked clumsily toward the complaining party, his large belly protruding, the flaps of his dust coat swishing like a duck’s tail.
“One of these days, we are going to roast that belly of yours,” someone declared, eliciting laughter.
“It would roast well in its own fat,” another remarked.
“My friend, let me tell you. Undo kwo undo. The Bible says one eats where one works. I eat from the sweat of my brow. We have a saying that when someone is full, he should cover his stomach. But if there is a hungry man, that I shall feed.”
“So what happened to our meat?” the voice that had accused Gathenji of theft insisted.
“My friend, let me tell you. Undo kwo undo,” Gathenji returned confidently. “Did you not hear of the fool who quarreled with the fire for consuming his meat? Or do you think fire eats vines and mikengeria?”
“Wee, barman, give Gathenji a Tusker,” someone shouted. “Give him a drink. He has spoken like ten elders!”
And so, this type of dispute over meat and offal would be resolved with glasses of beer followed by: “Waiter, give us another round. And don’t let Gathenji thirst. Hey, Gathenji, give us another kilo and a half. And don’t let too much heat eat away the juicy parts. Give it some bones too!”
From his counter, Gathenji would shout: “Hey! Let the Indian Raj play us some music to seal the deal!” Era and Rajan and the rest of the band would have no choice but to oblige.
Such distractions kept Rajan’s mind off the kissing stranger, and his angst subsided; he quietly wondered if it was the revelers’ ability to endure that allowed them to bear his musical privations. But he still felt, without being able to explain it, that the kissing stranger knew him. That’s why she had kissed him in that dark corridor. And even after he’d given up searching, he could not forget her.
Then one day she returned. Just like that. Rajan was onstage at the Jakaranda, stretching out a hand to fish a pretty girl from the audience, when he detected the unmistakable sweet, spicy perfume. Like a bee drawn to a flowering plant, he leaped offstage and strode over to the table where he believed the scent was wafting from. He found himself standing within a foot of a stunning young woman. Even in the waning light, she was quite a presence. She sat ramrod straight, with long, lush black hair that reached her waist. When she rose to greet Rajan, he saw how her tiny waist supported massive hips, or as Gathenji the butcher liked to say, she carried her hips and her neighbors’. And when she moved, no matter how gently, her erect breasts shook lightly; her skin appeared to change from brown to white and back, as the oscillating lights did their dance around her.
3
In 1902, shortly after Master’s Monument to Love had been built, Sally did make a trip to Nakuru, and experienced firsthand how the town got its name. As she hoisted a leg up to board the carriage which had been sent to fetch her, a cheeky whirlwind, ngoma cia aka—or the female demons, as locals called it—picked up pace and swished her skirt this way and that, before knocking her hat off. When Sally bent to pick up the hat, the wind blew her long, flared skirt up and over her head, exposing her hindquarters that resembled a Maasai goat’s—if you ignored the cream drawers that resembled her light skin.
The African servants who had been sent to fetch her had the good sense to flee for dear life, fearing they might somehow be implicated in the ignominy. While they may not have conspired with nature to embarrass the English woman, seeing her nakedness carried with it a tinge of violation. After all, muthungu and God were one and the same. That’s the story locals liked sharing while devouring mounds of food, although the connection between the whirlwind and Sally’s naked truth and her rejection of Master, as most still called McDonald, was never quite stated outright.
But in a land where myth and history often intersected, what happened to the woman of England is uncertain. What’s more certain is that McDonald vowed he would never speak to another woman after Sally rejected him—for the second time.
* * *
The first time Sally left McDonald was preceded by a confrontation in South Africa, his last station before his British East Africa Protectorate posting. It was early morning. He had returned home unannounced to retrieve a diary he had forgotten. He had left Sally in bed, perhaps staring into space, picking her nose, or doing those things that most housewives did before they could summon up their energies to rise and face another day.
For Sally, there was nothing to face, save for the sun that she shielded herself from by wearing a sombrero as she cut flowers from her lawns maintained by a full-time gardener, hands gloved against the prick of rosebush thorns. One could tell the progress of Sally’s day from the trail of cups. The cup beside the bed was for the early-morning tea, taken in her nightdress, feet thrust in frog-shaped warmers, while leafing through a magazine bearing big images of thoroughbred dogs. The cup by the window was for the ten o’clock tea, consumed behind dark