I was 15 years old and had thousands of parasites in my blood. Malaria. I was greatly fatigued, I was running a fever, I had a bitch of a headache and my joints felt like termites were building a nest in them. I was alone in the whole dormitory which was deathly quiet because it was almost 5 pm and the whole school was out in the field for the mandatory games. I was curled in bed, head covered, my body temperature high but also feeling extremely cold.
At some point, I was woken up by what I first thought were sobs. If you’ve had malaria you’d know that sometimes it makes you hallucinate (the fever, I guess) and so I momentarily thought it was just going crazy with the parasite, but then I realised the sobs were coming from the bottom bunk bed I shared with another student. We lived four in a small cubicle. I stayed still and listened to him sob. He was in Form Three. Form Threes never cried, that was for the province of crybaby Form Ones who cried for their mommies because someone had stolen their bar of soap. Again. After what seemed like a while listening to him sob, I leaned over the edge of the bed and said, “What’s wrong?” I started him. He didn’t think I was in the room. He wiped his tears with the back of his and tried to compose himself. “What are you doing in the dorm?” He asked suspiciously. The metallic bed squeaked as he stood up and busied himself with packing.
His box (metallic suitcase) was open and he threw folded clothes in it. At first, I thought he had been suspended but nobody there would have been a prefect standing over him supervising the move out. And nobody cried after suspension unless they were those crybaby Form Ones who cried for their mommies because someone stole their bar of soap. But you had to be a villainous character to be suspended in Form One.
“Are you going home?” I asked him, almost enviously, because we all craved an excuse to go back home. He nodded and continued packing. I stayed there watching him pack in silence, his back to me, my chin on the edge of the bed, feeling the metal through our mattresses that were never any thicker than a slice of bread. Sleep was not something you engaged actively in high school, it always felt like you were only allowed to sleep because it was night and dark.
“Something happened?” I pressed. He didn’t say anything. He ignored me, opening the drawer, stuffing folded clothes in a small backpack, wedging bathroom sandals in his box. Then his shoulders sagged and they started shaking and eventually, he stopped packing, and as he stood holding the edges of his opened box, dissolved in loud sobs. This time without restraint. He sat down on his bed and sobbed in his palms. “My mom died.” He said eventually. “Oh shit!” I said. That’s the only language of condolence I knew at that age. What did we know about death and loss and grief? We were too young to be losing our parents. He eventually stood up and finished packing, with little defiance this time. Then he padlocked his box, threw his backpack on his back, and said bye without looking at me and then he was gone. His footsteps echoed down the long corridor as he went to bury his mother. But I recall feeling sorry for him, yes, but then I recall making it about me. I started feeling fearful for myself; what if it had been me who had been fetched with the news of my mother’s death? What would I do? How would life even continue? What would that mean for my future? From then on for the rest of high school, I had a morbid anxiety that someone from home would fetch me with the news that my mom had died. It didn’t like surprise visits, relatives popping in to visit. (Very rare). I just hoped I wouldn’t have to pack my shit when everybody was in the dorm, milling around pretending to acknowledge the fact that I was crying uncontrollably. Thank God, it never happened. Not in high school, at least, but it happens it doesn’t matter when.
I don’t know if my dorm-mate remembers the details of that fateful evening in the dorm the way I remember it because you always remember the day death came.
When I heard the news I was at my desk at home. I was working on a storyline from a pre-interview I had done with Nyashinski. To be fair I was also watching some interviews on nudists and people with weird fetishes on Soft White Underbelly. (I try to fill my time with constructive content). News was that a military chopper had gone down in the bushes of Pokot. There was a rumour that the general, the highest-ranking military officer, was in it. I thought, Ah, there is no way and went back to watching an interview with Adam, an adult baby diaper lover. An hour later, the news channels had confirmed it. General Ogolla was in the chopper. It felt very dire, important, and grave, a flag-at-half-mast kind of event.
I don’t know the General anymore than I know Steve Zhao, the CEO of Nairobi Expressway but it felt very close. It felt like someone you knew had died, or someone who looked like someone you knew. As news streamed in, about the crash, and the videos of the wreckage up in flames, I felt mournful like he was a relative. A distant relative, one of those distant relatives you don’t talk to, but who you meet at funerals and have brief small talks with: Oh, you are Symon’s son! You are already a grown man, I last saw you when you were a child, you might not remember. What do you do nowadays? How’s that working for you? OK, nice to see you again, let me find a bottle of water.
I couldn’t work anymore. I went and sat on the balcony and scrolled the internet obsessively. I read up about him and sought videos of him. Suddenly this man was of interest. He looked like a decent fellow (I don’t know how one can look decent in photos), someone infallible but with a decent core. Someone with great discipline, with an impregnable routine. Someone who stood for something. Someone who went to shags once in a while and lived in a massive house with a grey roof. He reminded me of some massive homes in our village of ‘important’ people back in Nairobi who come in for a day or two and head back. Nobody knows them that well, but they hold important positions in public spaces. So they are legends. I bet the villagers of Ngi’ya were proud of the general. They must have frequently pointed at his boma and told visitors proudly, “That’s General Ogolla’s home,” because everybody wants to warm against the fire of greatness.
I sat there and thought to imagine that after an illustrious career, after rising to the top of a formidable institution like the military, it ends with some local Pokot herdsmen pulling your body from the wreckage and laying you on the dusty grass-patched ground. Those Pokot herdsmen not knowing whose bodies they were standing over? Lying at their feet were sons, fathers, husbands, and someone who had the ears of the president on military matters. It all didn’t matter, now they would be referred to as remains in the media. These people whose tubs of toothpaste still retained the shape of their thumps from a few hours before, their phones with reminders, meetings for later that evening, all that would not be honoured. Now they had been reduced to just bodies at the dusty sandaled feet of herdsmen.
I stared at my ferns on my balcony, half of them dead or dying (I’m tired of the neediness of plants), and imagined frantic phone calls being made, men with shiny medals on their chests being pulled out of meetings, faces grave with disbelief, choppers carrying men with guns rising off from military bases and then someone in boots standing over the bodies next to the burning chopper and saying on the phone, “Yes, sir, it’s him.” And Duale, the CS, slowly sank in his chair and told whoever was in the room, ‘Please give me a moment.’
I remember thinking, ‘Where are his spectacles? Where were the General spectacles?” Did they find them? He went about his whole day, his life, in spectacles, but they must have been knocked off his face in the horrible moment preceding the crash. Did someone find his spectacles?! I pictured them with shattered lenses, lying in that tragic poetry of death.
That shit remained with me, and I grieved for this stranger. On Friday, I went for a drink with Ben who is from Ngi’ya and I was relieved to find out that I wasn’t the only one who was mourning like he knew him. We drank whisky and shook our heads at the tragedy that had befallen this man and his family. Subliminally, we were talking about our mortality because sooner or later, some people will talk about us in a bar while drinking whisky.
Later, soaked with grief, I attended a Book Club by She’s Mercedes as a guest author. They had picked my latest book as their read of the month. It was a room full of lawyers, business women, bankers, entrepreneurs, engineers, medics, mothers, spinsters, wives, sisters, and girlfriends, who all love reading and who all drive Mercedes and also engage in CSR activities. And to read books and meet to talk about books means they also talk about life. And when you talk about life, you will find new ways of living it. Hopefully, better ways. And they took issue with the main character who doesn’t tell his friends when he falls on hard times. It didn’t seem like a big deal seeing as how most men just brave their problems on their own. We think it’s gallant to go down with our sinking ship. “What do the men in the book clubs you attend think about that?” someone asked and I said that I have never attended one book club for me because I have been invited to exactly none. Men don’t do book clubs. That’s like asking us to sit in a circle and hold hands for the whole evening. Read a book and gather around to talk about Samora the protagonist.
Those book clubs are usually fun but you need a drink in hand to go through an evening with a room full of ladies. The She’s Mercedes were nice though, and Laura, their chairlady, sent me off with a bottle of my favourite whisky. Quite unprecedented. May they get more Mercidie (plural of Mercedes) in their lives.
Saturday, my sister went to get some plants from a farm in Machakos. A place called Zamar Springs is an events space on the slopes of Mua Hills. We talked about the tragedy of the General the whole time. “You work your whole life, and a year before you retire, your chopper falls off the sky and you die.” She’s got eight years to retire herself. The gardener at Zamar seemed to be showing off a bit with all the plants and things. I wouldn’t have imagined that Machakos would have plants I would wow over even though I’ve reached the end of my rope with house plants. I saw some ferns in the nursery and looked away, lest they recognise me. It came down in big buckets on our way back.
I went to the gym on Sunday. It was almost empty. There are two TVs in the gym, one showing the general’s burial while the other a cricket match. I, together with a handful of chaps, stood watching the 19-gun salute burial with sweaty brows while a handful of Indians watched the cricket match. I mentioned this dichotomy to someone who said, “But that’s what death does, it reminds the living to keep living.”
I don’t think Death wears black. I don’t think Death has a forked tail and goes about with a pitchfork, poking people with it. I don’t think it has red fiery eyes and fangs for teeth. I think Death has black gloves, though, because there is hair on his knuckles and he’s embarrassed by them because he’s vain. I actually think death has a pleasant facial bone structure, something a sketch artist would find fascinating. I think in good light, when he looks away slightly, I think death has a face one would describe as handsome, with little shadows trapped by those cheekbones. I think death is gentle but sometimes when he comes for you, his actions can be violent. I think sometimes he might even be apologetic as if to say, ‘Look, this is not personal, I’m simply doing my job.’ I think when he’s upon us we fight and resist because we don’t want to go because we feel like we still have stuff left to do, goodbyes to say, so we kick and scream but he grips your hand with the grip of death, with his gloved hand and he says, “stop it, stop it, we are going” and we are crying and saying, “please, let me tell my children goodbye, let me write my will,” but he pulls you away easily because he’s stronger than he looks like. So you have no choice but to go. Sometimes, in that process, he knocks off your spectacles.
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