“No,” her aunt told her emphatically after finishing reading the letter, “I’m not taking in your sister. Or any of you.” Then she lit a cigarette and looked away. This was the 1980s in Karatina when women didn’t smoke. In fact the first woman she ever saw smoking in her life was her aunt. She smoked openly, in defiance of patriarchy. You could say she didn’t give a fag. She also drank local brew with men. She was a bad-ass before badassery had an ass. The kind that rolled her own cigarettes on her bare thighs. She remembers her as very tall and very willowy and she always went about in long old dresses that made her look like she was constantly floating.
She – merely 12 years old – had gone to see her aunt with a letter that her mom had given her a few days ago. Her mom had suddenly left them; five children and her husband, their father. But before taking off she had told her [we shall call her Rose] that she was in charge of the family now. She had handed her the said letter to deliver to her aunt in a distant village, a letter which, being a curious girl, she had read. The letter urged her aunt to take in and care for her baby sister who was only two and a half years old. She said she had tried the marriage but it wasn’t working and that she was leaving to go find a different life elsewhere, that the other children would be fine except the youngest.
Her aunt handed her back the letter and stood there, sucking on her cigarette. “Go back home,” she eventually said, “I can’t take your little sister. I have enough on my plate.”
So she went back home with her small sister. They lived in village squalour; a two-roomed shack in a small boma. One bed which she shared with four of her other siblings. A river – River Ragati- flowed at the very bottom of their boma, right outside the gate. When it rained the river swelled and rose too close; a brown churning froth running past poverty. Her father was a peasant. They had close to nothing. Their clothes hang on them like scarecrows. A meal day was the norm. “With my mom gone I had to become the mother to my siblings since I was the first born. My dad was hardly ever there.” She says. She’d walk to school and sleep half the time because the previous night she was taking care of her youngest sister who was a sickly child.
“My parents argued and fought a lot before my mom left. They often fought physically and because we lived in a small house, it felt like the world was just crashing around me. It was very frightening. I was a very smart and confident girl. I was the kind of student who was called to sing for visitors in school. But the situation at home started affecting my confidence. I couldn’t concentrate in class, always napping because, I was up at night taking care of my small sister who had stomach issues. Teachers would scold me cruelly when they found me napping and I started keeping to myself.”
There was hardly ever anything to eat; a meal a day if they were lucky. Her dad was constantly gone, coming early in the morning to drop off beans or unga or vegetables and taking off. “We were mostly alone. Just me and my younger siblings.” This went on for a few months until one day when they came back from church to find her mom sitting in their room. She had brought chips and a soda. They were excited to see her but she picked up her remaining clothes and left. “Rather, she sneaked out through a small back gate and disappeared in a coffee farm.” It was all very confusing for her, of course. Why didn’t she want to stay like other mothers? Was it her fault? A couple of months later a woman showed up and said, I’m your mom’s friend, come with me, I know where she is. I will take you to her.”
She was desperate to see her mom, so she followed the woman. They boarded a matatu to Karatina town. Her mom was working in a small restaurant tucked between a hardware store and a supermarket. She sat down at a table and her mom came and sat next to her. She looked tired and distracted. She told her, “I now work here,” her apron was dirty, “do you want a soda and chips?” Of course she wanted a soda and chips. Her mom briefly watched her eat with her head resting on her hand and then suddenly stood up and went about her business. She ate slowly and followed her mom with her eyes whenever she went about the room, serving, wiping. She had questions for her but she didn’t know how or if she should voice them. She wanted to know why she had abandoned them. If she would ever come back to them. She wanted to tell her that she was struggling in school. That her youngest sibling was constantly unwell and she didn’t know what to do. That her father was never at home. That he had started drinking heavily since she left. That they never had much to eat and the younger ones were always hungry. “But I didn’t, I didn’t have the nerve to ask her,” she says, “I ate my chips and drunk my soda and I left. Every Sunday I’d walk to go see her. I’d carry something back for my siblings. It went on for a long time. It felt normal; her living away, my dad working in a shop as a tailor and living in a single room behind the shops and me taking care of the household that they had both abandoned. It felt normal.”
In the village they became pariahs. The ones from a broken family. The children that were abandoned by their parents. Stigma stalked them. “I started withdrawing. I was embarrassed of my broken family. I lost all my self-esteem. I was nothing. We were nothing. Our drama was well known because my dad would still follow my mom to the hotel and they’d have massive fights. He was now drinking heavily, for someone who never touched alcohol. And smoking. My life had become very chaotic.” The next time she went to the hotel she was told her mom no longer worked there. She had lost her job. She found where she was staying, in a single room amongst a line of single rooms hastily built at the edge of town.
One time she went to visit her mom for a night and found a man inside her house. He had a big Adams Apple that moved up and down his throat whenever he spoke. He asked her with deadpan disinterest, like you’d inquire about lost luggage, “Is this your little girl?” Her mom nodded meekly. Her mother seemed small next to him like a misplaced comma. The man leaned on the wall with his wide back and smoked, half his legs dangling from the edge of the bed. He occasionally tapped the ashes in a matchbox and drank something clear from a water glass. His Adam’s Apple moved and made a noise when he swallowed. At night — when the lights were off and she lay curled on a thin mattress on the floor — she heard him groan like a wounded animal. The bed moved vigorously and her mother made whimpering sounds. When she woke up in the morning the man had gone. Each weekend she would find a different man in her mom’s house. Sometimes she’d wait outside the door as they finished their business. Other times she’d have to endure the sounds they made in bed. She didn’t know what commercial sex was then, she would only learn much later that her mom had become a prostitute.
“At 13 years and living in the village your whole life, you don’t know that someone can sell their body for sex.” She says.
I took her for fish at Big Fish on Church Road. It’s always a very tricky affair having fish with someone, anyone, from the mountains. The mountains here being anyone who hails from anywhere past Uthiru. And Kabete. It’s a very dicey — and often — soul-weary affair. First, because of the questions they might ask. Questions like if it ‘has bones.’ Sigh. This is not a pawpaw. It’s fish. Of course, it has bones. And no, the eyes can’t see you even though they seem open. The fish is dead, which means the eyes are dead. And yes, we eat the eyes. What does it taste like? It tastes like eyes. The fear of being pricked by the said bones always seems to be bigger for them than the fear of hunger. Wiser men, wahenga, had put in place measures to mitigate that eventually. The general rule of thumb when a fish bone gets stuck in your throat is to roll a large lump of ugali and swallow it whole. Not a pellet, a lump. It will scrape the pesky bone in. And anyway, a fishbone never killed anyone, it’s in the handbook of our culture. However, it’s always fascinating to see how they pick through the fish carefully, delicately, as if the fish is still alive and they might wake it from a nap. Rose wasn’t an exception. But she had carried such a heavy weight of melancholy to the table that I didn’t have the heart to chastise or mock her for eating her fish with such disrespect. It pained me, nonetheless.
She sat for her KCPE and passed. Unbeknownst to her, her mom and father had decided to split the children. Those named after his mom would remain with him and those named after her mom would be shopped off to her mom. “So my sister and I went to live with my grandmother. We left our siblings behind. I only knew of this arrangement when I went back home and my dad was so mad she dragged us back to my mom and told her, we had a deal, they can’t stay with me, I don’t want them. Take them and take them back to your mother.”
She didn’t have enough money to get into high school even though she passed well — 536/700. She had been invited to join Bishop Gatimu Ngandu Girls High School but of course nobody would pay for her. “I considered going to a cathedral school in Meru that offered scholarships but that year they had raised their intakes to 550. Her mom didn’t seem very invested in her going to school, she sent her back to her grandmother’s. “After staying at home doing nothing, I told my grandmother that I would repeat KCPE and see if I could score the 550 to qualify for the scholarship.” Going back meant paying for registration, some small school fees and a uniform. She re-joined class eight using home clothes until her mom sent the uniform over much later.
She scored 598 that year and was in the scholarship program. “High school was horrible! I had no self-esteem at this point. I was scared to express myself or even be next to people. I was scared of the girls from Nairobi who spoke well and had better clothes. I couldn’t raise my hand in class because of my accent; my ‘r’s and ‘l’s, were a mess. Other students would laugh at how I spoke so I only spoke when I had to. I felt like nothing.”
“By this time my mom had started living with this one man I never liked. I realised that she never told him she had other kids. She had made him believe that my other siblings were her sister’s kids.” She says. “When I was in Form three my mom got pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy who immediately started getting sick. She stayed in the hospital for a long time. During holidays I would stay with the baby in one wing of the hospital ward while she was in the other wing. Then the baby died. I remember going to visit her and her asking me, ‘Now that you are here, who have you left the baby with?’ I couldn’t tell her that her baby had died.”
When she was in Form Four, an uncle of hers showed up in school. The uncle told her that they had to go back home immediately. “I just knew it.” She says. “I just knew it.” When she got home she learnt that her mother had died. She, like her baby brother, had died of AIDS. “ I didn’t cry for her. I never shed one tear for my mother.” She says. “In fact only recently I ran into a strange photo of me laughing at the funeral. Her dad never attended the funeral, neither did her siblings. I was just very indifferent to her death.” After the burial she went back home and sat for her KCSE. “By this time round, my grandmother was tired of me and my sister staying with her. So she threw us out. I had to go back to my dad and plead with him to take us in. He agreed reluctantly and finally we were back to our old home, reunited with my other siblings.”
A letter to join Moi University came by post. With no prospect of raising any monies needed she decided to work as a househelp to a fairly well-to-do family in Nyeri. Her wage was 1,300 bob, “I saved a chunk of it. The rest I’d sent to my siblings and some to my grandmother.” She applied and got HELB when she joined university. “That HELB money helped me educate all my siblings throughout my four years in university.”
Then she started catching a break. After university, she sent an application letter by post [ as was common then] to a big corporation and she was surprised when they replied months later with an invite for an interview. She wore her best clothes; a long chaste skirt, a white blouse, and her old shoes. Her hair smelled of woodsmoke. She came to Nairobi for the first time for the interview. It was overwhelming, all the city stimulus. It felt so loud and so shiny and everything seemed to move all around her at a fast speed. In the lifts of the building, she didn’t dare press the button to the floor she was going to so she just stood there and hoped someone would get off on the same floor. She was interviewed in a boardroom that was cold even though there were no open windows. She held her hand under the table and prayed they wouldn’t smell the village poverty on her.
Two months later she got a letter; she had gotten the job. Off to Nairobi she came, moved in with a friend from university who lived in Ngara as she saved up to move out three months later and then brought in her siblings to live with her.
She now had a great job at this company that everybody wanted and still want to work for. She started building herself, running away from her past, her childhood, covering it with things, trappings of affluence. She was rising up the social ladder. She pushed the person she was at the very back; the child of a mother and a father who abandoned her, a grandmother who didn’t want her, a child of poverty. “My father died in 2011, of alcohol poisoning. I wasn’t sad when I learnt he had died. It felt like a load off my shoulders.”
But then you can’t really run away from who you are. It all surfaces. “I realised that even though I’m very competent at what I do, I suffer from great insecurities.” She says. “My self-esteem is still at the very bottom. I have constantly felt like a fraud. I have a good job but I feel like I’m not good at the job, that I don’t deserve it. I suffer from self-doubt and imposter syndrome. I don’t have the guts to go for other jobs because I’m afraid the people I work with will discover that I’m no good. I have turned down leadership roles because of my self-doubt. What if I can’t make it, I ask myself. Who would agree to be led by someone like me? I have constantly battled with this feeling. I hide who I was and where I’m from. Nobody knows where I come from because I’m embarrassed of my past. I find that I can never fight for myself. When someone hurts me, I step away. I make excuses for them. I don’t know how to be angry, to scold anyone. I cry a lot. I’m a ball of emotions. I always think I’m on the wrong, that nothing good happens to me, that I don’t deserve anything good. Even a relationship.”
Everytime she meets someone new it doesn’t go very far. “I’m needy and clingy because I’m always afraid that people will always leave me. Maybe I cling to these people because I’m looking for a father who didn’t leave. But they always leave. ”
She has carried the stigma of rejection all her life. “I don’t understand the reason why everyone rejects me, from my parents, relatives and now prospective partners.” Her voice breaks. “And the pattern is always similar despite these being totally different people who have no affiliation.” She has never been in anything she can call a relationship. She met and had a child with someone who was a mere friend. That someone also left. She called it a ‘curse” in her emails to me; this phenomenal where people leave her. Where nobody stays. This streak of bad luck or rejection.
There is a way to turn over your fish once you are done with one side. I get frustrated when people break the “spine” of their fish. You are supposed to turn it gently so that it doesn’t crumble. When Rose turned hers — and I can’t blame her — it looked like someone had sat on it. She picked on this side and finally gave up on it. One last thing; the head is the final pleasure. There is a unique part on either side of the head that has a strand of flesh. That flesh cures insomnia. [OK, I’m lying, but I suspect it cures something, otherwise why did God put it there?]. I normally gorge the eyes and eat them. My favorite part of the fish is the gills. Crunchy and crispy. Squeeze lemon on it and eat it. You haven’t finished eating fish until you have eaten the gills. Rose left the whole head. Untouched.
Anyway, she started seeing a therapist. When she met me they had gone through ten sessions and she had cried a river, unearthing the pain and hurt from childhood. The therapist made me write letters to her dead parents. She sent me the letters. They are terrible letters that offer a glimpse into her childhood. They are unforgiving in nature. They are angry. “But writing them has helped me.” She said. “I’m now looking for that girl I was before 12, before my mom left and my dad left and everybody left. I’m looking for peace with my past. I also have a son who I’m giving everything I didn’t get. I’m being a mother I didn’t have.”
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