A Good Hand

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Creative boundaries. That’s the burden of bearing witness as a writer. You don’t quite know what story is yours to tell and which ones demand your silence. The assumption is that if you are in a room, it’s fair game. But is it? What if you’re trespassing in someone else’s sacred space, in this case a room their father is dying in – the ICU with its grim chorus of wailing machines? What if you are there to witness the desperate and failable courage of someone trying to stand between death and their father – like trying to stop the bleeding of a knife wound with a piece of bread.

You are going to find yourself taking small notes you never asked for; the fluctuation of their blood pressure. The erratic heart rate and oxygen saturation. You will mentally take notes of their vulnerability, the hounding desperation of a daughter gently wiping spittle from her father’s mouth because he’s intubated and dying. You pull the doctor aside, they say that it is “highly unlikely” he would survive the night. You will find yourself very conscious of the decline of a man’s life from the machines and how this reshapes your own reckoning with mortality.

What if you are lingering at the doorway at midnight, at what seems like the end of the tether, when their teary daughter holds her father’s hand and leans in to whisper in his right ear, weeping, “I love you dad, I love you, thanks for everything.” And then he suffers his first heart attack, and there is a code blue and nurses and doctors run into the room and draw the curtains to what is eerily reminiscent of his final act? What if you carry this scene forever, this borrowed grief that was never yours to claim, and it finds itself on a page one day?

That’s the thing with writing: the awareness of raw emotion. The pursuit of life’s frictions, for it’s the friction that creates the heat that reminds us of our humanity. It’s the uncertainties of life. The pain. Fear. Love. When you find yourself in a room like that, to see a daughter beg her father to hang on a little longer. To please hang on. And the doctor comes into the waiting room, Dr. Bosire, you will always remember, and you look up and he says the forbidden with his face before he says it with his mouth, but the daughter and mother don’t quite hear it because nobody wants to lose a husband or a father an hour into a new day.

And at that shattering moment, before life pushes them over the precipice where she will be the girl without a father, and her mother a widow, you suspect that one day you will write about this moment. And simultaneously you wonder if you are callous, a prey of content. You wonder if this is nothing but a great betrayal. And later when she stands gently stroking her dead father’s head, as if lulling him to sleep, his chest still moving up and down from the machine, she asks, “Is he still breathing?” you look at the clock in the room not because you care for the time at that moment but because stories are details.

Is this a breach of trust? A violation of a private moment? Is this even your story to tell?

As you continue grappling with this moral question, you ask Eddie if he can say something small about that. Instead, he says something big about food. But then, isn’t a Luhya just a Luhya?

The first time I almost poisoned my mother was when she was pregnant with my sister, Debrah. She was craving—my mother, not Debrah…or was it Debrah? —strong tea. Mother had an idiosyncratic way of making strong tea: warm the water with freshly cut tangawizi, then drop in a few pinches of majani, one, two, three—enough! Boil it until the devil dies, purging all the vermin, making sure it froths tar black with brown hues on top. Serve hot, never in a cheap CK plastic cup, always in a ceramic mug. “Isipoteze joto,” she would say. To not lose the heat.

This particular day, whether through absentmindedness or doozy brain, I short-circuited the process, because, how would she know right? I boiled the water with the tangawizi and threw in one, two, three, four, five or six or seven pinches of majani. Served hot in a ceramic mug that we had got her for her birthday: “World’s Best Mom.” Of course she was. Anyway, I heard a scream and thought the baby was coming. Why did I think that? She was barely five months pregnant, and besides what I knew about babies is that they come at night. It was 5-something PM, and I was just from school. I don’t know what I remember most, the slap or the words, but it must have been something of, “Wewe! Unataka kunitoa mimba!” Then a slap that must have been felt directly on the face of the gods. I still wince when someone raises their hand. What I learned, through ancient mother wisdom, is that tea leaves can be used to procure abortions, my first lesson in terminus gastronomics.

If this were a different kind of story, I’d tell you about how I despised tea from that time on, but I am nothing if not corrigible. Mother taught me that there was a difference between good food and bad food, and that good food was worthy, even that it was expected, even of me. Long before I was capable, I wanted to cook, to cook well, and be a good hand. And none was more capable than mother. Her meal plans were intricate, if not ornate: biriani, biriganya, iliki, mbaazi, dhania, masalas, nyama, kuku and food colours. Pure royal excess, the spirit of which would make a dictator of a small South American country proud.

She’d task me with menial jobs: chop the onions, wash the potatoes, toka mbele yangu. I felt useful and needed, a good hand. By the age of 15, I could tell exactly how to drain salt in salty food—use potatoes! —or how to bake a cake using sand. My mother cooked with soul. She put heart. No measuring ladles or recipes. With a shake, she knew the right amount of spices to add. She’d mpf! Mpfh! and know exactly what was burnt in the food. In those days, I simply lived in it and loved it without premonition. Eventually, seeing it as it would become, I would remember with sorrow how it had been. My mother could make mean chapatis, and it is a shame the evidence of it is yet to show on my gut.

I grew up cooking for my mother and siblings because my father couldn’t cook. That’s not quite right. The man could cook; he just couldn’t cook anything worth eating. My father would regale you with legends about his days as a bachelor when he could come home and make ugali and eggs, or ugali and beans, or ugali and something. He made us ugali once that’s for sure, and this is why people say, We live by faith. This is what happened. Mother was away, I was coming in late, and the man, shaking with hunger, couldn’t find a mwiko so he used a fork. A fork! I’ll spare you the details, but know this, at least: my father is the sort of man who will cook with whatever is in sight, while offering expert advice on how to cook with whatever is in sight, namechecking spoons, sticks, and knives to lend his argument extra authority.

From mother, I learned to cook not just selflessly but also selfishly. On campus, I would use this not just as a weapon but as a trap. It’s how I got my first girlfriend, some pretty young thing with black curly hair, a warm pearly smile that conjured thawed milk, the eyes a bewitchingly intelligent brown. But the ass she had, black Jesus, callipygian. It was like scooping ice cream delicately with your bare hands, like solving the Mathematical equation that shape is greater than size, which is to say she couldn’t walk past a group of gay men without them considering their sexuality. So, you can see, I had to have her. This, I decided, is what the gods intended for me.

Our first night together, I made her ugali, eggs, spinach, avocado—an elaborate showboating meal by public university standards—and for drinks, we would have fresh mala, milked from “real, authentic Kalenjin cows and aged in charcoal.” That cost me just about 200 shillings, a small fortune in campus, proving my status even then as a man of means. A different man would have bought meat, but she was SDA you see, which suited my budget just fine. The method was straightforward but required a good hand: glaze the onions till they are golden brown, no tomatoes, fry the spinach until they are just about crunchy, almost, but not quite raw. I was cooking with an electric coil, simultaneously bankrupting Kenya Power, but hey, who cares? Then comes the eggs, slow-cooked to perfection: onions, blanched tomatoes, chilies, and one, two, three! pinches of salt. Crack and whisk the eggs until the yolk disappears. Reduce the heat by removing the sufuria from the coil. That’s not from science, that’s from experience. Throw the whisked eggs into the sufuria while stirring gently so they don’t lump together. Cook for less than three minutes, leaving it just wet enough to slide down the throat. Garnish with dhania, SDA style. Serve with hot, hot ugali and chop up the avocado in a spiral shape. It’s a Jedi mind trick—if it looks good, it should taste good, even if it doesn’t. I’ve learned this from the best, and I’ve never gone wrong so far.

And so, the first, the most continuous, and the dearest fabric of my consciousness was provided by the sufuria, at the dinner table, by what was on the plate. Without intending to do so, I learned how food could build and destroy. From my mother, I learned how welcoming food is, that no matter who is visiting, before you say hello and get down to the business of adults, you offer them something to eat—whatever little you have—and the economy of the household, the keeping and care of the home, and all the arts and refinements by which food made its passage from the ground to the plate. From my father, I learned how food can be ammunition, by refusing to eat what mother prepared, this was not only a rejection of her food, but the very essence of her womanhood, of her.

But dinnertime was also a time for interrogation, seven siblings cross-examined at the same time, no time to get your stories straight: school grades, who is in what class, and who talked back at mother. We were never allowed to eat in silence, unless the 9 PM news was on and Catherine Kasavuli or Njoroge Mwaura read that the president of that time had said something my father took exception with, and he, father, would erupt in diatribe, screaming and shouting and cursing at the TV, “Who elected this clown? Bure kabisa!” We would laugh silently, but mother never said a word, just offering a tender hand by adding him more meat, which almost always shut him up before Njoroge Mwaura or Catherine Kasavuli said something else that pissed him off and he launched into another verbal Molotov.

It was only once I left home that I grasped the metaphysics of family meals and understood that the food was prepared over the low but steady fire of love. Cooking for myself became a chore. The Quickmart chapatis were a purple patch, a keyhole surgery when I needed an open-heart operation. I ate food for survival, not pleasure.

Back in high school, that woman would pull no stops. She’d start cooking the previous night—a fact she would always remind me of when my grades dropped. Mother would bring along a suitcase full of food, laid on a Maasai shuka: honey-glazed chicken, beef stew, rice (which, as an unrepentant carnivore, I did not touch), soda, minji and potatoes, and chapatis, copious amounts of chapati. I think that is what it must have been to be a guest at the court of Mansa Musa or Sundiata Keita: sauces dribbling out of the corners of the mouth like a lion after devouring a particularly fat gazelle, advice about studying hard in between mouthfuls of chapati and chicken, sheer greed, audible mastication, slurping and eructation.

The kitchen is basic now. Mother recently got diagnosed with cancer, and the diet had to change: less fatty foods, less indulgence, more conservative. Chapati doesn’t taste the same anymore. She told me she had cancer abruptly, just like I have told you, at the same time I was calling to ask about something I can’t even remember now, no time for me to prepare a response, to get my story straight. She told me this a year ago, and our relationship morphed. I never really looked at her as a woman before; I always saw her as a mother, as the chapati queen, the one with a good hand. It’s amazing, isn’t it? How one little update can transubstantiate the scope of a relationship, the way simple details can function as cracks through which feeling leaks, first as a trickle, then all at once, as a flood. That’s how cancer works: first, gradually, and then all at once. You will never be able to eradicate. You can only hope to contain.

And contain we have. She’s better now. Stronger. You can see this from the scars of chemotherapy: the hair loss, the needles, the harsh brown tar of the fluids from the IV. She’s shorter, too, but hasn’t lost her trademark sharp tongue, that’s for sure. I know this because I recently made her strong tea—she is off milk—and I remember one, two, three! pinches of tea leaves. How could I forget when she was on my shoulder, shouting instructions? Only this time, the pinches are more, three, four, five, six. That’s because she can no longer taste food, so the flavours have to be stronger. Funny, wouldn’t you say? As the first sip scalded my tongue, I couldn’t help but wonder, was she the one craving…or was it just me trying to rewind time, to be a child once more?

Isn’t it amazing what stays with you, in the end? What remains? The mother I knew juxtaposed against the mother I know now? Like pilferage giving way to pillage. Yet, many things you promise yourself you won’t get used to. And then you do. Given enough time, a person can get used to almost anything. Personality tends to grow around adversity the way tree roots will grow around a rock, shaping itself in response to the immovable—an autocratic government, land in Kamulu, a cancer diagnosis. Maybe I am just telling myself things. What is hope but an elaborate lie to yourself? Life dealt its hand, and it isn’t looking good. In the rising steam of the hot strungi tea, we pretend that everything’s fine and nothing’s wrong. Pushed, but we pretend to have jumped. We pretend not to know what we know.