“I recently spoke to a former classmate for the first time since 1991, just after finishing primary school.”
“You finished primary school in 1991!” He gasped.
“Yeah, I’m 47.”
“You are 47!”
“Yeah.”
“I was two years old when you sat for your KCPE!” He chuckled.
“That’s really cute. But this isn’t about age,” I said. “This is about the passing of time.”
“OK. He must have changed a lot.”
“This guy? I don’t know. We just spoke on the phone; 32 years later. It was surreal.” I said. “He’s now a Muslim, he converted. New name and all that.”
“Where did you find him, Facebook?”
I knew what he was doing with that Facebook comment. But I chose to be the bigger (and wiser) man. He had wanted to meet for the interview at the carwash along Peponi Road because he’s those men who like to sit and watch their cars get cleaned. Turns them on. I was going somewhere with that story of my old classmate but he wasn’t going to get it, not with his fixation with age, so I dropped it.
He was in those tight shorts men wear nowadays, sunglasses. He sat two phones next to his latte. [He’s in procurement].
“So, about your hardest things last year…” I said.
***
Last year on Valentine’s Day I wore a new black shirt I had bought at Woolworths for too much money and took my fiancé for dinner. Linda likes Italian. We got a nice table for two in a corner of La Salumeria. A candle danced silently between us. Linda is a doctor, she just finished her Masters. Smart. Hot. Leggy. Halfway through my grilled chops with vegetables my phone, which was lying on its belly near my beer, started trembling. I picked it up and stared at it. Linda stared at me with an arched eyebrow. “My bro,” I said, putting down the phone. I suspected he was calling me to ask for money again. If apples and tuberculosis were similar, that would be me and my brother. I hadn’t heard from him in two months.
He lives in Busia. He’s a bit of a pain in the ass, my brother. Drinks copiously. Doesn’t keep jobs or his word. I heard from my cousin that he was in his second marriage.
After dinner I took Linda to have a drink at Oyster Bay. I don’t drink. My father drank a lot when we were growing up and when he was drunk he would call me stupid. Most times he just belted me. One time – when I was in class five – he punched me in the mouth. My incisors came loose. I bled a lot on my mother’s lap on my way to the hospital. It was after 8pm and I had not even had my supper. He’d occasionally beat up my mother. I hated him. I wanted to grow up to be big and strong so that I could punch him back in the mouth. It’s all I dreamt of. I would look at him seated there reading a newspaper after work and picture myself holding him on the floor, bringing down my fist in his face.
But then he died abruptly, or gradually depending on how you look at it, and instead of being relieved the monster was no more, I discovered that he had turned me into a cliché; angry. I was angry because he had robbed me the opportunity to beat him up. Now I’m big and strong, but I can’t beat him up. I don’t know what to do with my strength.
Oyster Bar was packed so we lingered at the bar counter while Linda nursed a Cosmopolitan. She’s teetering elegantly in her high heels, and occasionally when she shifted to one leg, I’d see a flash of her legs through the long murderous slit. My phone trilled again in my pocket, I retrieved it and showed Linda; my brother again. “I better take this,” I said over the music then walked out as it rang out before I could pick it.
A woman answered when I called back. Our conversation was brief and went something like this.
“Naitwa Miriam, Fred na mimi ni marafiki.”
“Jambo,” I said unnecessarily, like a tourist.
“Fred ni mgonjwa.”
“Nini mbaya?”
“Ni mgonjwa. Fanya hima uje umone tafadhali.”
“Hebu mpe simu nimuongeleshe.”
“Kuja saa haraka, tuko Busia County Referral.”
“Sawa.” I said.
For those who don’t understand Kiswahili, a strange woman called Miriam was calling to say my brother was hospitalised at the referral hospital in Busia. I thought he was crying wolf again, an extortion prank that he would pull occasionally.
When I went back inside some guy with an afro and a face that was stuck in the 70s was talking to Linda. You can’t leave your woman unattended for a second in this town, there is always some gorilla ready to carry her on his back. I’m a pretty intimidating guy with a solid Luhya frame. I stood close to her and placed my hand on the small of her back and resumed conversation like the guy was made purely of hydrogen. She turned and said, “Oh, this is my friend….” I didn’t catch his name. I wasn’t interested in a name I’d never remember again. We shook hands, he made his excuses and fled. Good.
I recounted the phone conversation with Miriam and Linda said, “you should probably investigate it, it could be serious.” Investigate it. That’s such a phrase only Linda would use. Investigate it. Like it was a bacterial infection.
The following day, Fred’s number called me and this time it was a doctor on the line. He said Fred was very sick, that he looked bad. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“Organ complications’, he said.
That night I set off to western Kenya after dinner. I drove the whole night. By dawn I was in sleepy and grey Kisumu, waiting for Java to open for my coffee. By 9am I was in Busia Referral Hospital. Fred was bad. He couldn’t talk. He looked small under the white sheets, like a pre-teen boy. He was plugged into a noisy machine.
There was a woman next to his bed. A perfectly round woman. Her thick hand held a handkerchief which she used to wipe her forehead with occasionally. She introduced herself; “Mimi ndio nimekuwa na Fred tukisaidiana.” I know I need help because not only did I read a lot of sexual innuendos in that introduction, I found it funny, even as my brother lay there at death’s door.
We are only two siblings. My brother and I. When my dad’s first wife couldn’t give him boys, he married a second wife, my mother. I have five step sisters and another brother who came out of the woodwork to bury my father. He looked exactly like my brother, Fred, nobody questioned him. After the funeral he disappeared back into the woodwork. Nobody looked for him. We buried this man quickly- like roadkill, and went back to our lives. We were finally free. All of us. My step sisters didn’t like my mother and so when none of them came for her funeral, I also cut them out of my life. Which means, apart from this auntie with big arms, I had nobody at the hospital. Plus my uncles and aunts are not people who bother to look out for one.
That evening, as we left the hospital she said, “Kuna jambo moja hapa nataka tusaidiane mawazo.”
She told me that Fred has a daughter. I didn’t know that.
The girl was five years old. I didn’t know where this was going so I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to follow it wherever it was going. We stopped near my car which was a bad idea because I figured she would look at it and think I had a lot of money to take care of her and her daughter, now that Fred was out of the count.
“Lakini huyu mtoto sio wangu,” she told me. The child was by another woman, Fred’s ex, it turned out. And she didn’t know where the woman was because she had dumped the girl with Fred and fled after the relationship ended. My Luhya sisters.
I stood there, not knowing what to say. What she wanted me to say.
“Hio ndio changamoto hapa,” she said. I told her we would figure it out the next day. I was tired from the long drive and I needed to find a hotel to eat, shower, and sleep for two days. I gave her some money for food, and said we’d meet again at the hospital the next day.
The next day Fred died.
And while his body was still warm, the woman with the big arms showed up with the baby and said, “Huyu mtoto anaitwa Sandra. Huyu ni wenyu sasa.” Then she took off. She literally left me at the hospital with this child, and I never saw her again. Ever.
I can’t forget this day; 17th February 2024.
I was so confused. I remember going back to the hotel that night holding the small hand of a five year old girl. The reception and staff looked at me, but never said a word! Nobody came to knock on my door to demand why the hell I was with a five year old girl in a hotel room when I had checked in alone the previous day. There was no curiosity, no outrage. It was all so normal. Just another day in a hotel in Busia. And I don’t want to mention names, but this is a decent hotel, because I wasn’t staying in some motel with mismatched sandals. It was a decent establishment that should have known better.
“I’m with Fred’s daughter,” I told Linda over the phone that evening. I omitted giving her the details. In fact, being with Fred’s daughter meant we were just chilling.
“Poor thing,” Linda said. “How is she?”
“Little.” I said. “Very little.”
Sandra was eating chips and sausages. She was so small, we had to get a cushion for her to sit on. She gulped her Fanta from the water glass which she held tightly with her two small hands. I’m no expert but she didn’t look well taken care of; I could tell from her skin and eyes. After she had eaten, and true to the Luhya saying ‘whatever is happening in your life, eat first” she asked where her dad was, and I didn’t know what to tell her. So I told her I was her uncle and her dad had taken a long trip. She could only speak a bit of Kiswahili and Luhya. I felt sorry for her. At night, we shared my double bed. I thought I’d bathe her first but I didn’t know how to do that. I’d never bathed a baby in my life. It also felt inappropriate to undress a little girl in a hotel room. So I gave her a toothbrush and helped brush her teeth, then I tucked her in bed and we slept.
The next morning she couldn’t wake up early because I was setting off at 3am, so I carried her to the car as she slept and settled her in the back seat. I pushed the passenger seat all the way back so she couldn’t fall off the chair. Then we set off to Nairobi. We drove in pitch darkness. Nothing in the world had woken up except us.
It felt surreal. I just turned 36, with a thriving career and plans to wed the love of my life, and here I was with a five year old baby driving back to Nairobi in darkness. It felt like someone else had taken over my life. Someone impulsive, and reckless. This was not supposed to pan out this way. I knew nothing about children. I had no plans to have children in the near future. I wasn’t ready for a child. What was I doing? But even more importantly; what could I do?
She woke up just before we got to Kericho, and started crying. She wanted her father. I couldn’t tell her that her father was dead, now, could I? I wanted to only, to stop the crying. Don’t they process bad news better when they are young? I told her her father would be gone for a while. It’s a very long safari, I told her in our language. She sat there sulking, looking out the window at the passing clouds and the top of trees for she was too short to see out the window properly. I felt sorry for her. Her life had changed, but so had mine. At Java Kericho, she ignored the cutlery, ate sausages and bread and drank hot chocolate that I had cooled down for her. She had quite the appetite, Sandra.
When we got home she was so tired, I put her on my bed where she immediately fell asleep, tucked into herself like a comma.
When Linda passed by my house after work she found us seated watching cartoons. Sandra barely looked up from the television. Linda was shocked to see her. She sat next to her and spoke to her in that gentle voice that paediatricians use. Good paediatricians. Then she summoned me to the bedroom. “What’s going on back there?” She asked with a smile that wasn’t a smile.
I told her the situation.
“You took a baby away from her people, that must be illegal in some way.” She whispered, as if Sandra would understand English.
“I’m her people.” I said. “Besides. She has no one.”
“You don’t think you should have warned me about this development?”
“I told you!”
“You told me you were with her!” She cried. “You didn’t say you had taken her.”
I sighed and said, “I never took her. She was given to me. Look, there will probably be a relative who can take her.”
“Which relative?” She inquired. “Are you ready for this?”
I told her I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything; my brother was still lying in a morgue.
“What if he has more children,” she asked, “are you going to take care of them too?”
“I just got here Linda. I don’t know anything. I have no answers for you or for myself or for that little girl out there.”
We buried Fred a week later at my father’s dilapidated boma. It featured a pit latrine, a mud standalone kitchen and a small miserable mud-house that keeled on its side like a doomed ship. Only a handful of his friends and my relatives came. None of my sister’s showed up. I footed the whole bill, of course, why would I not, I have lots of money. When I drove out of the boma after the burial, I knew I’d not set foot on that land again.
My life changed intensely in such a short time. Now I was the primary caregiver to a five year old child. And a lover. I had work, thankfully I work from home from Wednesdays. I had to find a bigger house, hire a house help, buy baby clothes, and look for school. When it was clear that she had nobody, I had to start making plans for adoption. Linda was reluctantly supportive at the beginning but soon the cracks started showing. “It’s all too much,” she said. “Things, everything is moving on too fast. This was not the plan.”
“But this is the plan now.” I said. “What should I do, drop off the baby in a children’s home? She has nobody but me. This is my blood.”
“I know. I know. And I don’t want to come across as selfish, or insensitive. I would do the same but this is so much for me. It changes everything.”
It changed everything. With Linda working crazy doctor hours (and staying away in her house when she was free) I was left alone with the baby most times. I was drowning. I had nobody to ask how to deal with a five year old. I simply Googled things;
‘What do five year olds like to eat?’
‘What time should a five year old sleep?’
‘How do you discipline a five year old baby?’
‘How do you discipline a five year old African baby?’
‘Fun things to do with a five year old.’
‘Fun things to do with a five year old and a woman you are dating?’
‘Can a woman you are dating accept the five year old you have adopted?’
‘Signs that the woman you are engaged to hates the idea of the five year old you just adopted.’
In August, Linda threw in the towel. August 13th 2024, it was on a Tuesday. I also remember it because it’s the same day Ukraine military seized hundreds of square miles of Russian territory in a surprise offensive.
We were at the Daily Cafe at Nairobi Hospital. It had rained and stopped, and traffic had built up outside the main gates, spilling onto the road leading out of the hospital. Linda was calling off the engagement to “think things through.” She said it was “too much for her to bear.”
“What do you expect me to do, choose you over a helpless child?” I asked, trying not to sound as panicked, angry and as helpless as I felt.
“Oh God, no! No!” She pleaded, “I would never. I would never do such a thing! God, never. But I can’t do this, everything has changed. You have changed.”
“Things change, but you don’t run off at the first onset of a challenge.”
“This is not a challenge that will pass, this is a lifetime commitment!” She said, “This child will be under your care for the next 18 years!”
A part of me wanted to hate her for it. A part of me loved her. Another part understood how much this must have been for her. When she walked out of the cafe I sat there until the street lights started coming on and the traffic thinned out. Then I drove home with such heartache, I thought I’d die. I felt abandoned. Alone. I nursed a baby, and a devastating heartbreak the whole of 2024. It was so difficult that if I didn’t have a nanny, I think I’d have gone crazy.
December was the hardest month. The bad icing on this ruined cake. I have always spent Christmas and all holidays with Linda and for the first time in four years I spent Christmas alone, rather with Sandra. We sat at a Java and I watched her try to fork the little rolls of sausage I had cut for her. They kept slipping away on her plate. I found it endlessly amusing watching her but mostly I felt the deepest loneliness ever invented by mankind. I had no family to speak of except this little baby who couldn’t even use a damn fork. I wondered how I’d have to start all over again, meet someone, go on dates and tell them before dessert that I have a five year old baby, and watch them touch their hair and talk about an early morning the next day. Bad date after bad date until I turn 50. I wanted to feel what people say babies bring them; selflessness, great joy, purpose. I felt disoriented. And lonely.
Linda sent me a holiday wishes message which I read a million times. I still read it to this day sometimes. It said, “I hope you never think of me as a bad person. I might be selfish, but I’m not a bad person. I admire the nobility, your great heart. You are a blessing to Sandra, and you will make a great father to her. You will be glad you have her one day. I still wish you well. Merry Christmas.”
It was a very tough year, the hardest year I have had; I went through heartbreak, and then, unexpectedly, found love again. Even if I can’t understand this love now. A friend said that God was teaching me something.
I think God was teaching me how to wash a baby.
***
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