He told men what to do. To tell men what to do you have to either have a gun, a position or a uniform. He had the uniform, which had four epaulettes. A captain. A leader of men. The general, the emperor, the conqueror, the champion.
Until men showed up in his house on a quiet night.
The type of silent night that makes even dogs restless.
It was a Friday night and they had just come back from India to do his wife’s IVF. Their bags and suitcases were still largely unpacked. “Bhavesh and his wife Kamini lived at the end of a quiet street in Karen, where they had just finished construction of their lavish home—a floor-to-ceiling windowed abode that was half architectural swagger and half social statement. A house that proclaimed: ‘This is where the captain lives.’ Because if you are a captain, you live like a captain.”
A heavy sleeper, he recalls his wife nudging him awake, whispering, “Do you hear that?” “No,” he said, trying not to wake up. “That!” she insisted. He thought, “oh for f*k’s sake” But then Daru started barking. They have five dogs and Daru, their beloved German shepherd, was the most loyal of them all. The top dog. When Daru starts barking, shit is not right with the world. His wife got up and walked to the window to peek outside. They had a floodlight at the back that could turn night into day but before his wife could switch it on, he heard glass shatter downstairs. He jumped out of bed and pulled on his shorts. At the window downstairs he saw torches in the darkness. Men. There were men in his compound. His wife gasped. Then he heard footsteps downstairs. More men were in the house. They had shattered the glass wall to gain entrance. Yeah, no use using the door.
“The balcony, now!” he told Kamini, herding her toward the back. For some reason, the sliding balcony door couldn’t open because balcony doors choose the most inopportune times not to open. They never switch on the alarm on the motion sensor downstairs but for some weird reason he had before going to bed, and now it had gone off, and the KK guys were calling him.
“I don’t remember why I was holding the phone in my left hand talking to KK guys, because I’m right-handed,” Bhavesh says, “but suddenly a man, face covered in a balaclava mask, had smashed through the door and was slapping the hand holding the phone with a panga and saying in a gruff voice, ‘Toka kwa simu!'”
Wham!
The phone was sent flying off into the darkness, sliding to the furthest end of the room, the person on the other end left talking to himself. You don’t feel pain. Not then. The pain comes later. At that moment the adrenaline is pumping in his head like a geyser. And he’s bleeding because a panga isn’t a ruler.
It’s surreal to have a bunch of strange men in your house at night. It’s downright grotesque to have strange men in your bedroom at night. Men in boots. In masks. Walking around your bedroom, barking instructions at you.
He also isn’t used to men telling him what to do because he’s a captain but now the boot was on the other foot and the captain was the man with the gun. Epaulettes don’t stop bullets.
“He asked one question and it was a terrible question because I had the wrong answer for it,” Bhavesh says. “He asked ‘Where is the safe?’ I thought, who does this guy think I am, Dangote? I don’t have a safe! Who keeps safes? But then before I could answer, he asked an even worse question: ‘Where is the gun?’ I told them we didn’t have a gun, or a safe. And it was true, we had neither. But he kept demanding these things. And it was terrifying because this man had a panga and a gun and he was going to use it if I didn’t magically produce a gun or a safe.”
“Let’s go downstairs, I will give you guys something,” he heard his wife tell one of them. She was referring to his new camera and Go-Pro that he had recently purchased from Dubai.
Panga Man grabbed him and pushed him inside his wife’s walk-in closet, because probably from their experience that’s where you keep a gun and a safe. Inside, he shone his torch around, parted her clothes, pulled out drawers. No gun, no safe. Frustrated, he turned around and hit him with something. Wham, across the face. He felt his brain move in his skull. “I don’t know what he hit me with but I was out cold for a bit,” Bhavesh said. He doesn’t know how long he was out, maybe a minute or two. “When I came to, I thought, ‘Oh God, my wife is downstairs alone with the men.'”
There was a lot of shooting now. So much so that their neighbours later said they thought that it was fireworks. Unbeknownst to him, the gang of armed thugs (what newspapers like to report as “heavily armed”) were shooting at the KK security guys and trying to keep the barking dogs at bay.
Downstairs his wife had handed out everything she could. She was unharmed but terrified. There were so many of them, fanning around the living room, ransacking, rummaging, putting their filthy hands on their belongings, invading their intimate objects, leaving their dark souls on things. One even opened the fridge and peered inside because everybody needs a light snack in between terrorising a family. “I have some money,” Kamini told them before she led them upstairs again to her closet. “My closet is a shoe-box closet because I own three clothes,” he said. “In my wife’s closet we had some demonetised rupees in small bills; ten, 20 or even 50 rupees in big stacks. They were excited to see the money. They thought it was a lot, but it wasn’t. It was nothing. Then there were some dollars that we had received as a wedding gift seven years ago from some relatives from the UK. They took all that.”
They kept barking questions, making demands and threats. He felt terrorised and violated and the worst feeling of all, he felt helpless not just as a human being, but as a man. He wasn’t used to violence, to subjugation, taking instructions or being pushed around. He particularly wasn’t used to being slapped by a panga.
It was not only an assault to him physically, but also something that shook who he was. After all, he is a man who is accustomed to commanding not being commanded.
He piloted (still does) Kenya Airways’ crown jewel: the 787 Dreamliner—a technological marvel worth 2.5 billion shillings. To be the captain of the Boeing 787 is to be almost invisible. Now he was in the hands of brutes who strip you of everything you are and everything you think you are. This was their game. In this terrifying theater of power, they wore the epaulettes now. They were the captains.
The house was dark but noisy. The gunshots seemed to be coming from right inside their bodies. There were flashlights all over the house. Which they shone into their eyes.
Panga Man told them to lie down. He said, what are you Indians even doing here? You should go back to your country. His wife, though, was the fierce type whose impulse is not to take things lying down. “She started arguing with them, telling them that we were Kenyans, we were born and raised here, where should we go? I remember thinking, Oh God, stop arguing with these men, they will shoot us. I also thought, “What irony that this man is telling us to go back to India, if we weren’t here, who would they be robbing tonight?”
The man said “Laleni chini!”
His wife lay down and he laid on top of her. “Everything felt like a classic movie up to this point and in the movies does the husband not protect the wife from harm? Does he not take the bullet for her? They were not going to shoot my wife in the back. They will have to shoot her through me,” Bhavesh said.
“I told them not to kill us. Apana ua sisi.”
This part of his narration made me chuckle. Apana ua sisi? Really? Do they not teach Swahili at Visa Oshwal? Why stop at Apana ua sisi, Bhavesh, why didn’t you also add, “Jambo bwana, hakuna matata”?
As he lay on top of his wife he wondered if this was how it all ended; shot in the back. A sandwich tragedy. They would never get the child they were desperately looking for. They would never sit at the table to eat together. He would never fly another plane. Go on another safari. Or go for another run at dawn. He loved running. Running kept him fit and healthy to fly, to command. He ate right. He worked hard. He wondered how fickle all that seemed now, to be at the mercy of another man. He had plans for his career. He had worked so hard to become captain. It takes a lot; you have to start from the bottom as a second officer, work your way up as first officer to the 787, then go back down and start all over. It took him 20 years. A boy who grew up on top of a shop along Kijabe street. Who washed toilets to get through aviation school. Then flew small caravans out at Wilson. Then lady luck smiled at him and he got into Kenya Airways starting from the bottom rung, Boeing 737-300 and working his way up to the Dreamliner, like everybody else. Keeping his nose clean, as he calls it, doing what he is supposed to do. Twenty years was going to end with him on top of his wife, the mouth of a gun on his spine.
He wondered if it would be swift. Or it would be painful and they would lie there bleeding before they died. Who would die first? Would they hold hands?
Then the men walked out.
They slowly got up, like people waking up from a nightmare. And went downstairs to witness the aftermath. Nobody had died. A KK guard had his helmet grazed by a bullet. They never shot his dogs, thank goodness, because that would have inspired a John Wick movie, the Bollywood version. “That night, after the neighbours and the cops had gone, we slept in a bedroom with shattered glass.”
They slept in the chaos of violence. He was to fly to Johannesburg the following day or was it London, but he couldn’t. “I couldn’t.” He says. “I got compassionate leave, then I later took my leave. I wasn’t fit in the mind and heart to fly a plane. My world wasn’t right.” He says. The men had shaken something in him. “I realised we had been living in a cocoon. That no harm would ever come to us if we didn’t harm anyone. If we did our thing. But it did. Nobody died, but that level of violence kills other things in you but also births other things.”
He went back to running in the mornings to find healing.
“My job as a pilot depends on my ability to hold a licence that requires me to pass a medical test. I do 70 hours a month in flying, you need to be fit, mentally and physically. Running does that for me. I like doing hard things.” He says. “Running also made me feel better about myself. You are less of an ass to other people when you feel good about yourself. And when your mind is balanced you perform at your optimum. You are responsible for a multi-billion aircraft and hundreds of souls from the moment the doors close to the moment they open several hours later. You have to be at your best mentally. You prepare way before you leave the house for your flight. You look at the weather hundreds, thousands of miles away and you have plan A and B and C should that change, what route to take. You can’t do that when you are foggy in the mind, distracted. It’s too costly. There is a saying that pilots are like a corpse at a funeral; they’re expected to be there, but not much is expected of them. You’re there but no one really knows you’re there until something goes sideways. You also have to be disciplined. You are the captain, people look up to you. You lead by example. You don’t embarrass the airline and yourself. The airline is very generous to us, you can’t dishonour that.”
He eventually went back to work after the incident. Each morning, as he buttoned his uniform he would sometimes look at himself in the mirror and wonder who he was. What it meant to be a Kenyan. If other people saw him as a Kenyan. “This robbery incident created an identity crisis for me. The robbers said we should go back to our home. There are fellow Indians who think we aren’t one of them. They call us NRI, non resident indians. Who am I then?” One of his best friends at work noticed that he was unhappy. How could be he happy when his wife had to spend nights at a relative’s house when he was out of the country on duty because she couldn’t sleep in her own home? The men had uprooted their lives.
“I remember that for the longest time after that incident my wife didn’t smile. For a very long time, I never saw her smile. So she went to a yoga retreat in India to rewire her head and when I picked her up from the airport and we were driving home, just past those rumble strips before Galleria, I don’t know what I said and she smiled for the first time. That’s the point I knew things would be okay.”
He thinks he’s a good captain because of not just that incident but many other things that he learned along the way. Like humility…” because it’s very easy to get arrogant when you’re a captain because everyone keeps calling you Captain. You think you’re the king of the world, but they’re probably calling you captain just because of your rank, not because of you being a leader. You know, there’s a difference between getting people’s respect because of your title, and because they respect your leadership skills. So you need to be really humble and be willing to just learn all the time. Learn from people younger than you, older than you. I think you need to be a good listener as well. I realized this much later. I think I was probably a bit arrogant early in my career, which I feel stupid about. I think I have mellowed down a bit now. You find humility in many things, in incidents, in listening, in reading, in discovering that you know less and less, in patience with yourself and with other people.”
He admits to having had two life changing events in his life; the robbery and the birth of their son. “I can’t imagine what would have happened had my son been born, and was in that house that night. We’d have sold the house and moved away from that memory.”
I asked him what he does now more (after the incident) that he never used to do as much.
“During flights? I stare out the window more,” he says. “You take things for granted; that there will always be a window to look out of tomorrow. Those challenging long-haul night flights? I now see them as precious opportunities to truly witness the world below, the earth, all of creation. From 35,000 feet, you witness how landforms sculpt themselves across vast expanses. You absorb the beautiful monstrosity of our planet against your own insignificance. It cultivates both humility and gratitude. And now, I pray with genuine urgency that I’ll return to my family again. Because I’ve learned firsthand that reunion isn’t guaranteed.”
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