A girl rescued a kitten that had fallen into a latrine. A little black kitten. You wonder what a kitten was doing in a latrine, but we can’t ask such questions about cats because cats are feminists. The girl, who loves animals, has cats and birds in her house. She grew up on a farm in Nakuru amongst trees and animals in the bush. She touched the horns of goats, patted the thighs of cows and whispered small things into the ears of sheep. The story will make sense if you know this background.
I interviewed this girl but the interview wasn’t about animals. This story came up during the small talk that happens after the recorder is off and the interview is done. I stuck around a little for fresh juice, while she went back to her real self around her home. Anyway, she told me this story about how one time one of her cats was dying, literally at death’s door, and she fed her milk using a little syringe and at night she spread a blanket on the carpet and for two days she slept next to her. She talked to her in low soothing voices under the low orange glow of the lamp. She stared into her dying eyes and she told this cat that she loved her and that the world would be a really sad place if she died. She stroked her head. Sometimes she cried and begged her not to die. She did nothing for three days, not her work, she ignored her other pets, she played music, a playlist with artists you have never heard of; Maovete, Kitu Sewer, Proteje, Koffee, and Bob Marley’s grandson, whose name I can’t recall. She played music to this dying feline that her friends thought silently, won’t survive. She uses weed as a nutrition like you would use baby spinach in your smoothie. I don’t know why this is important, but somehow I think you need to smoke weed to feel for animals in this fashion. (She started using it when she had a life-threatening condition that she survived)
Anyway, in the morning of day four when she stirred awake, the cat was roaming around the house, like someone who had just moved into a new house would. She cried with joy and scooped her in her arms and for the whole day, she carried her everywhere. The cat lived to give birth to kittens who gave birth to more kittens. A grandmother of cats. “I save dying animals,” she told me. “There is something in me that saves dying animals. I can’t explain it. I once saved an owl that I found on its side by the roadside.” If I was walking and I stumbled upon an owl lying on its side by the roadside, I’d get the hell out of there fast. Owls have an energy I don’t like. I also don’t like their eyes. How they try to see if you will blink first. Their general countenance is suspect.
“How does one save an owl?” I asked.
She carried the owl home (gasp) gave it water and nursed the wound on its body. She fed it pieces of fish and minced meat. The owl got strong and left. Imagine visiting someone and seeing an owl walking past the doorway heading to the loo. You can never predict what you will see in someone’s house. She’s also good with dogs. She believes no breed of dog can harm her.
I was telling you about the kitten in the latrine.
So this kitten falls into the latrine and she isn’t aware of this fact immediately. In the morning, after her breakfast, she senses immediately that one of the kittens is missing because cat people have that supernatural power. They will be able to tell if they are missing one cat but the same powers won’t lead them to where they forgot their car keys.
So she starts looking for her kitten around the house. She calls out her name. She opens closets. She looks inside shoes. She stands in the middle of the room, deep in thought; ‘hmm, where could she be?’ She searches outside, behind the house where there are piles of timber. She walks to their garden tool storage shed and opens the door knowing full well that the cat can’t have walked through a locked door because cats aren’t Jesus, who performs miracles like walking on water. She walks around the compound, looking up trees, and calling out her name. She was called ‘Spotty’ because she was spotted. Funny she couldn’t spot her now.
Finally, she hears a very faraway meow. A faded cry. A hallucination. She follows it and with great shock, it leads her to this old disused pit latrine at the very corner of their compound. It’s not a shallow latrine. It smells of old shit – and old shit smells bad. “Spotty!” She cries down the dark latrine. Spotty meows back. Everybody who comes and looks down at the darkness of the latrines tells her that it would be impossible to get that kitten out of there. Impossible. “Just let the kitten die,” they seem to say. “No way I was letting that kitten die alone there, abandoned.”
“So, I found a really long stick,” she says. “Luckily my mom makes firewood so that was easy to find. Then I tied a wire to the end and made a flat surface using a kifuniko for those paint cans. That way when I lower the stick, the kitten would have a platform to stand on then I could lift her. Now, a pit latrine is deep and this little fucker didn’t know me that well so it took me hours to get her to trust me enough to climb on the platform. She was also very tired at this point, I think she’d been there for most of the night. So, I put a piece of chicken on the platform so that she could climb on it. Needless to say, I lost a couple of pieces because they just fell into the loo. It was a task to keep the stick upright while still using my phone torch to see into the latrine. At some point, I even forgot I was dealing with a toilet, my entire arm (all the way to my shoulder) was inside the hole. Eventually, she realised I was only there to help and she climbed onto the platform and I managed to lift her enough to grab her.”
I was impressed.
“Why was it important to save this cat?” I inquired.
“Because the cat was drowning in shit.” She said, “And it felt familiar.”
That hit me on the chest, like a hammer.
“And because I couldn’t give up on her when she wasn’t giving up on herself.”
I sat there and thought, damn, this is a better story than everything she had earlier told me on record.
“Why don’t we have these little bits in the interview,” I urged her, “these bits about owls and cats in shit.”
She refused. She said it might make her look and sound “woo woo.” She didn’t want to sound woo-woo because she’s a professional. Of course, because “professionals” don’t want the world to know about their vulnerabilities, about all the pets they have buried since they were eight years old, and how each burial bruised their hearts and made them see life and process their sense of mortality. God forbid.
I remembered her story because I remember most stories about mortality. I remember it now, perhaps because today is the day my mother died. Of course, I’m writing this today but you are reading it today but your today is not my today, your today was my yesterday which was 6th May. Your today is the 7th, Tuesday.
My mom died twelve years ago today. It’s 9:21 am as I write this sentence, which means she had about three and a half hours to live before phones started ringing and six worlds collapsed right in the middle. The funny thing is that life moves on; trees grow, children join new schools, you buy new trousers, you get potted plants (some die, others don’t), you walk on a beach barefoot, you cut an apple in half, you shave with an old razor…life goes on, months turn into years, into a decade, and soon nobody, but you, remembers that your mother doesn’t live anymore.
And on a day like this, you linger in bed a little longer when you wake up, weighted by sadness. Your day is already blighted by grief before it begins. You say a prayer for her soul then you get up and step on shaky ground because that’s what your world feels like when you remember your mother is not around anymore. Suddenly it feels like you are walking on a trampoline. You don’t have any meetings on that day because you know your state will be fragile and your emotions frayed. You are like porcelain with a crack on it. It helps that it’s cold outside so you mostly stay in the house. You light a candle on your desk and stare at the flame for an extended period.
You think of how “wasteful” her life must have been. All she seemed to have done was raise children and take loans to send them to school. That all she did was defined by the endless sacrifice of domesticity. You wonder if she would have liked to devote her life to other pursuits: See another country. Walk on snow. Go on a cruise. Lie on a dhow. Try out a cocktail. Read a book that’s not the Bible. Drive a car. Hold a menu with foods she can’t pronounce. Dye her hair a colour that would make the church gasp. Generally, be selfish; and make self-serving decisions, choose herself, not her children and husband and family….Rebel, and revel in the brief madness of it. Was she curious about the things that lived beyond the orbit of family? You carry these questions with you throughout the day.
At some point during the day, a most mundane thought occurs to you as you pick lemons from a supermarket: That your mother never wore lipstick. That she died without knowing what it felt like to rummage in her purse to look for lipstick. And of all the things that can make you cry that day, that’s the thing that brings tears welling in your eyes right there in the supermarket. Through the hazy glass of tears, you stare hard into your trolley as you wait for this wave of grief to pass. Someone looking at you would think; my I thought onions made people tear, that man is tearing over lemons.
You feel sad that she sacrificed her life for her children, that the sum total of her existence was to raise children. How bloody unfair; marry, have children, send them to school, die. Of course, it’s not as limited as that, surely. She had a great childhood, loving parents, a decent education, a marriage that seemed as okay as marriages go. There were joys, no doubt but you can’t help wondering if there should have been more for her. And that makes you sad. You feel like you robbed her. And as you walk through the aisle, looking for bloody Harpic (why can’t they ever put Harpic in a place you can find them?) you miss her so much and you hope she is at peace and she is as happy as dead people can be.
Happy Mother’s Day to the living and departed moms.
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On to chippier matters, I would love to say a big thank you to Nosim Natasha (@yours4lyf) for her hilarious TikTok book review of my first book DRUNK.
In her own words, “GERRIT!” Buy your copy HERE and have it autographed.