Читать книгу SOUTH B'S FINEST - MAKENA MAGANJO - Страница 6

New neighbours in Malaba Estate were treated like curios, their lives, prior to Malaba, a puzzle that the incumbent residents enjoyed assembling until it was as complete as possible. Seldom did a stranger move into the estate. Perhaps Mama Sally referred one of her friends, or maybe the referral came from the Shahs who’d already bought three houses next to each other, knocked down the walls in between the houses and built hallways connecting them.

A neighbour would hear that so-and-so’s friend had moved into house thirty-two and from this, one could reasonably deduce that if the new resident was so-and-so’s friend and it was clear so-and-so was of questionable character, then it only stood to reason that the new resident was also highly suspect. A judgment that held until such a time as such and such proved they were not.

There were allies and enemies and peace treaties over tea, intermarriages, deaths and divorces, playground fights, tribal wars, harambees, all-night prayer meetings, dowry celebrations. In short, Malaba was a city unto its own. A fine one at that. It was a clean little estate on twenty acres that housed fifty-seven, three-bedroom maisonettes.

To get there you’d take the number eleven matatu at the Gill House bus-stop in town. At the time, they were the loudest matatus. The graffiti on their bodies (political satire meets pop culture meets animated cartoon characters), the most elaborate, and their makangas, the politest on any route in Nairobi. Malaba Estate was within the South B area, a twenty shilling ride from Gill House.

Each of the Malaba houses sat in the middle of an eighth-of-an-acre plot with squat identical black gates. At the centre of the estate was a community centre cum shopping complex that never quite took off, and a large ovalish field with a balding brown spot in the middle where grass refused to grow.

At the shopping centre, there were at different times, a hair salon, a video store with a Sega and Nintendo you could rent for an hour at a time; a supermarket; a gym; a restaurant, and one or two other entrepreneurial ventures (most of which were owned, operated and bankrupted by Mrs. Mutiso). Within the estate walls it felt as if time moved irresponsibly slow until, of course, it sped up and moved recklessly fast.

~

The Mathais came by way of Annabel Oluoch. The beautiful Annie, the Annie who studied English Literature at University of Nairobi and later went on to Oxford for a masters in History of Art. In the second year of undergraduates, Beatrice and Annie lived across from each other in Hall Twelve. In their third, they were roommates.

‘When you know the history of the art then what?’ Beatrice had asked Annie when, in the space of the first few hours of their meeting each other, Annie had given her a thorough rundown of her past, present and future. The English degree sounded ridiculous in the first place. Beatrice couldn’t think of a career, other than teaching, for a person who studied English and teaching was a wholly underwhelming existence as far as she was concerned. She grew up the daughter of two teachers. Her friends’ parents had experienced upward mobility in a way her teacher-parents simply would never experience.

Her family went from being among the wealthiest in her neighborhood to being a lower-middle income home as inflation surged and teacher incomes stagnated. Even after her father was promoted to Headmaster of the high school he taught at, it made little difference to their financial situation. Beatrice grew up with the conviction that there must be more to life than the mediocrity of just making it, just meeting an income-class threshold, just about putting food on the table.

Annie studying English made no sense in Beatrice’s world because according to her, wealthy people (for Annie was the kind of wealthy you wrote home about), only applied themselves to activities that would increase their wealth. As far as she could see, there was nothing about English Literature that was wealth-creating and, certainly, the same could be said of History of Art.

‘You know most of our art is in foreign museums, and we just keep letting it go because we don’t understand its importance. Those works of art are our history and it just breaks my heart that we don’t care and worse still, we are forgetting.’

‘If it’s our history you want to learn, why do you need to go to Oxford to do that?’ Beatrice asked.

‘It’s the best department.’

‘For our history?’

‘No! No, to learn how to understand art in the context of history or the other way round as well, actually.’

‘So you need to go to a white man to learn how to interpret your ancestors’ art?’

‘No, it’s not like that. You don’t get it.’ Annie was irked by Beatrice’s disregard of a topic that was her life’s passion.

‘Me I think it doesn’t make sense but it’s your life,’ Beatrice capitulated after the taut exchange. It wasn’t the kind of conversation that one would imagine a friendship would sprout from, but as luck would have it, they got on with each other better than they did with the other girls on their floor and as it often the case is in youth, that was enough incentive for them to conduct a friendship.

~

Annie met her husband on the first day of her master’s program at Oxford. She was the kind of person who believed in the importance of serendipity. She had spent the last three years examining minute details in literature, say for example how a word, or a tone or even an eyebrow raised at the wrong time could change the course of a character’s life. Such a microscopic study of human nature, fate and language, rendered Annie unable to think rationally in the real world where she applied the same skills she used to analyse a text to analyse the events of her life. Where there was only a commonplace occurrence, she saw poetry, where a person mistakenly brushed her hand, she read intent in the way a writer can alliterate to draw an attentive reader’s attention to a particular idea.

They slammed into each other just outside her college gate. He was the first Kenyan she’d met since arriving at Oxford weeks earlier, he told her she was also the first Kenyan he’d met. She was lost, he showed her to her first lecture. A master’s degree and a child later, they were married. Lucas Oluoch was half Congolese, half Kenyan and fully godlike, except for the little matter that he was a degenerate and a womaniser, but he had high cheekbones and dark smooth skin you see, so it was inevitable that Annie fell for the spell wrought by that firm jaw which she had encountered so many times before in Jane Austen’s romance novels.

They separated three days before Christmas. By New Year’s Day, Lucas had officially moved out and Annie, whose house was a wedding present from her parents, found it difficult to live in it any longer.

~

The Mathais came to see Annie’s house together. Upon arrival, Mr. Mathai did not waste time in asking for a cup of tea. He kept Annie busy in the living room, regaling her with story after story, her cooperation in the conversation irrelevant in ensuring his enthusiasm. Beatrice went through each room cataloguing its size, attributes, issues, weighing them up against her vision of what they should have at this stage of their lives. Three bedrooms, master en-suite. No visible signs of mould. Electricity and water were dependent on greater powers, there was only so much one could do about those. The house would come with the furniture.

Beatrice’s pleasure in Annie’s home was derived from what it meant for their lives. The house was a symbol of a principle she lived by: forward motion. Every decision Beatrice made was influenced by her desire to keep moving forward. Without forward motion, she would be her siblings who’d never left Nakuru, she would be her parents who were still teaching and furnishing their home with crocheted seat sleeves.

Back downstairs, Mr. Mathai had moved on from general gossip to recounting the newspaper’s main articles of the day. Tension simmered just under the smooth shin of a growing economy. The country’s prismatic state, suited Mr. Mathai’s personality to the hilt. You could watch the news with him and he’d still choose to recite it to you again and you’d prefer his version of events no matter the lack of veracity in his accounts.

‘What do you think Betty? Is it nice? I did a fresh coat of paint for you. You can move in as early as tomorrow. I’m ready to go.’ Annie looked tired but still ethereal, as if even pain suited her.

‘Are you sure about the furniture? What will you use?’ Beatrice never answered questions directly. Do you like your job? It puts food on the table. Was the pregnancy difficult for you? She is healthy, we thank God…

‘So,’ Annie clapped once signalling the end of the tour. ‘When do you want to move in? You know, I’m just so happy that it’s my best-friend renting the house not a stranger. Can you imagine someone you don’t know using the same toilet as you?’

Beatrice was about to speak but Mr. Mathai, who didn’t do well at the periphery of conversations interrupted and changed the topic:

‘Annie, can I just ask you, where did you get those knives in the kitchen from? They look first rate!’ The women turned around, one surprised by the turn in conversation and the other irritated by it. Beatrice knew Mr. Mathai had no real interest in the house itself or the matter of how they were going to afford it. He took it for granted that they would because there had always been this forward motion with Beatrice. Who was doing the pushing was not his concern. He did not wait for Annie to respond to his question.

‘I was reading the other day about these knives from…where was it?’ he snapped his fingers trying to recall. ‘It must have been Germany. Si-they are the ones who make good cars?’

Beatrice squinted wondering what knives had to do with cars, but this was Mr. Mathai, ladies and gentlemen.

‘They are so sharp they can slice through a wooden board. In fact, I was telling my wife,’ this was the first Beatrice was hearing of this, ‘I was telling her that we should start importing them and selling, we can make a killing in the business and…’

The moving date was agreed upon. In two weeks, the Mathais would be the newest residents of Malaba Estate. Annie saw them off, standing shoeless in the heat of January’s unyielding sunshine, her feet getting burnt by the hot concrete of her verandah, as if this early disappointment in life had somehow dulled her other senses.

~

On their way out, Mr. Mathai kept up a steady stream of one sided conversation. He noted the potholes on the road that looked like they’d been filled up quickly awaiting a proper date to fix the road that, as yet, had not arrived. The bitumen holding the road together like a bandage had cracked in on itself, the friction worsening the original potholes. The handsome maisonettes were gently wrapped around with a riot of colour in the form of bougainvillea fences of all varieties; white, red, lilac, orange. The colours, intertwined or in block formation, looked as if an artist had sprayed the petals onto the shrubs creating a visual masterpiece.

On their way to Annie’s house, they had driven straight down from the gate taking the long route round to the house. From Annie’s house they continued straight on to complete their tour of the oval-shaped estate and it’s homes. At the other end of the estate, just before the main exit, the bougainvillea fences came to an abrupt halt for three houses on the right hand side of the road. The fences had been replaced with stone walls and the black gates guarding the houses had metal carvings on them, painted in gold. Each stone wall had broken soda bottles and glass jutting out at the top, the glass pieces so close together you couldn’t find a surface to place the palm of one hand flat.

When he noticed these homes, so different from the others, Mr. Mathai slowed down, peering into the verandahs. He noticed the long corridor connecting each of the three houses together. Just outside the last house, two boys and a girl played a game of hopscotch, further ahead of them on a red velvet sofa, sat two grandmothers and not far from them were two house-helps peeling potatoes as they balanced their bottoms on overturned buckets.

‘We’ve made it! We’re sharing an estate with people that rich?’ Mr. Mathai pointed a thumb backwards as he drove off, shaking his head in disbelief. According to him, all Kenyan Indians were wealthy and the idea that he would be living in the same estate as them was titillating.

~

Just outside Malaba’s gate stood several kiosks garishly painted red with Coca-Cola scrawled on their bodies. Whilst the estate had been quiet and serene, the kiosks were an industry of activity. At once, you were overtaken by loud conversation, the sight of people lying idly on the grassy knolls leading up to the kiosks, chewing miraa and dozing off in the midday sun, house-helps strolling from one kiosk to the other in search of garlic and gossip, bicycles piled high with crates of soda stopping to unload here, cycling a little further to unload there.

The Kiosk directly across the estate gate looked to be the busiest. Whilst several people stood at the window of The Kiosk to make purchases, others sat around it’s direct vicinity on tiny wooden stools or plastic chairs people watching, talking amongst themselves, shouting down from time to time to someone walking past (a greeting, a rebuke, a reminder then laughter again). It was as if they had been transported to the markets in their respective home villages by this sight, so uncharacteristic of the Nairobi they’d come to know. Nairobi was already becoming the type of city where conversation was a luxury and time a finite resource, but here across from Malaba Estate stood a world that was far removed from the city that stretched beyond.

Though they had driven passed the kiosks on the way in, they’d both been preoccupied with the impending tour of Annie’s house (for different reasons as you can imagine by now). This time, they watched with fascination, Mr. Mathai trying to picture himself inserted into the on-going narrative before them.

‘I think we need to buy some water,’ Mr. Mathai said. Before Beatrice could protest the decision, he’d parked the car on the side of the knoll and jumped out to begin his ascent to The Kiosk. Though the people around The Kiosk kept up their conversations, their attention was drawn to the stranger who was presently making a show of greeting everyone as if they were long time friends.

Ng’ang’a, The Kiosk owner and unofficial arbitrator of conversation around his Kiosk, asked the question on everyone’s mind: Who are you and where are you from?

Now, it must never be forgotten that Nairobi was, as capital cities go, brand-spanking new, an afterthought of a city, a miracle if you will allow. Unlike other African Capital Cities, Nairobi had no rich deposits of minerals to speak off, no sea or ocean to flow out of. In short it had no obvious advantage save for its national park, and lions do not bring in the same revenue as diamonds or oil. Nairobi was a city anchored on luck and the Great British Experiment: The Lunatic Express.

And yet!

My to have seen it then. It was as if they spun money out of air, industrialisation out of a vast nothing. Nairobi’s beauty was in its alchemy, how it conjured riches from what had always been a swamp.

In the 1990s, most of the city’s inhabitants could not trace back their roots in Nairobi beyond one generation. The overwhelming majority were new. Some came running down from the highlands, afraid of a life of endless farming. Others came by way of the Great Rift Valley, hungry for a chance to become Nation Builders. Others still, crossed borders, desirous of a new life in the metropolitan heart of East Africa. Then there were those who came carried along the Tradewinds of the Indian Ocean, singing that here, in this city they were destined to find Love and Wealth. To be a Nairobian was to be struck with the ravenous lunacy that plagues only the alchemist.