Precious Museum Pieces

“Heart of Gold” by Subarna Talukder Bose

2002

That year, in May, my father’s best friend came to our home for supper and stayed the night. He came when the sky was darkening and the evening was filling up with the hysterical clamouring of mosquitoes. He brought two large deep-fried tilapias in a black polythene bag. 

His name was Josiah. My father, dead for two years, had always called him by his childhood nickname, Ajoe. Everyone else called him Wuon Otis. From the kitchen hut behind the main house where I was lighting the three-stone cooking fire for the evening meal – sautéed sukuma wiki and ugali – I heard my mother thank him for the fish, calling him Ajoe, saying, “I cannot remember the last time we ate anything with soup, Ajoe.”

Her affectionate tone irritated me. We bickered constantly, my mother and I, mostly over chores (“You expect me to wash utensils and I have children?” she said when I complained about being the one to do all the housework) and her accusations that I drained the radio batteries listening to reggae, music which, she often added, a girl should not listen to because it was the same music that streamed out of roadside bars.

My mother brought the polythene bag to the kitchen, unwrapped the fish on a chopping board, and asked me to stew them. “God has remembered us. Now we have proper food,” she said as she turned the fish this way and that. She declared them good and joined Wuon Otis inside the house.

I did not go inside to greet Wuon Otis, to tell him, “You have visited us?” or “You have done well to come,” as was polite to do. I resented my mother and since I considered him my mother’s guest, I resented him too. I imagined my mother telling him, “That child has defeated my eyes. She does not talk to people,” to distance herself from my bad manners. 

We were used to having Wuon Otis around. Since my father’s death, he stopped by every other week, often with cuts of beef or fresh fish from the beach close to his carpentry workshop in Kendu Bay town. He often stayed for supper at my mother's insistence, or drank the weak milky tea that my mother made me serve him when he said he couldn't wait for supper. He was the only person who continued checking in on us long after everyone else had moved on and urged us to do the same. 

But there was something nervous about him that night. The way he asked questions he knew the answers to, like if my brother and sister had gone back to boarding school when he knew schools had opened the previous day. The way he ran his hand on the glossy surface of our dark mahogany dining table and marvelled at how well my mother had maintained its smooth surface. The dining table and chairs were the last things my father made before he died, for a client who had paid a thirty-percent deposit and was unable or refused to pay the remaining amount when the order was done. My father said he couldn’t run around after a grown man for his money, and so he kept the furniture. 

My mother complained that the dining set took too much space, that the straight-backed chairs hurt her back, that people would now think we were rich, that my father was too soft, that any other man would have gotten his money and not lugged “things” back into his home. 

“If it was me, that man would have given me the money,” she said. We did not doubt this. My mother was the treasurer of her merry-go-round savings chama and had been since its inception the year I was born. She was good with money, looking after it and demanding it from chama members whose contributions were late.

The dining set was no work of art. It was the standard fare my father made in the workshop he had shared with Wuon Otis, save for its rich wood and elegant curves. Even so, it became the first thing guests remarked upon when they entered our home. Perhaps because its elegance made it seem out of place in our house, with its mud walls and earthen floor. 

One time I found my father staring at the table. We had pushed our five-seater sofa set and small coffee table to one side to make room for the dining table and chairs. Whenever we dined, we had to press through narrow wedges of space to get to the table. I thought he was considering a better way to arrange the room, make it less packed. He turned to me and said, “When all of you have finished school, I will have money to build a bigger house where this table will fit properly.”

I left the room without saying a word. I paid little attention to my father back then. He had broken my heart too many times, promising that I would spend Christmas at his sister’s in Nairobi, a place I had never been and longed to visit, and making excuses every time December came. 

Although my mother hated having the dining set, after my father died, she told guests it was the only thing of his that reminded her of him. Her words stung at first, but then I thought about how every time I walked into the house I too thought of my father when my gaze drifted to that part of the room. 

***

I served the fish in the heavy glass bowl we used when there was a guest to impress. There was no radio that night to distract from the kissing sounds Wuon Otis made when he sucked flesh off the sharp bones of the fish. Droplets of broth fell back on his plate as he lifted the gill to his mouth. He sucked that too before chewing it. “Eating as if the world is ending,” is what my mother would have said had it been someone else, my brother, for instance. Maybe she would say so after he left. We often made fun of guests the moment they turned their backs. Our favourite guest to mock was Min Otis, Wuon Otis’s wife, who was using skin-lightening cream that only seemed to work on her face. She always looked like she had a light brown mask on. As soon as she left our house, my siblings and I would crack each other up by asking who would tell her she missed a spot. 

My mother urged more food on Wuon Otis, and I was relieved when he declined. He mentioned for the third time that night that I was a good cook. I smiled politely at him. He was a naturally cheerful man whose energy sometimes exhausted me. When I held out a basin and a jug of warm water to him, he vigorously soaped his hands and said the fish was the best he had ever eaten. I was sick of the over-the-top flattery and made no effort to respond. It was my mother who filled the silence and said the stew would have been better with more tomatoes and Royco to thicken it. 

“Those things have chemicals. Food is better like this, the way our people cooked it in the past,” he said, his large brown eyes seeking mine, as if it was important to him that I knew he was on my side. 

I rolled out a sleeping mat in the dark, windowless storeroom adjoining my mother’s bedroom. I wasn’t sure of the time. The only clock in the house was the wall clock in the sitting room, next to a wall calendar with a smiling image of Raila Odinga, above the chair Wuon Otis occupied. I felt a flash of annoyance as his laughter drifted around our house, so late in the night. Later, surely, than a guest should stick around, even if he had paid for the food (half of which, I allowed myself to think with mean satisfaction, he had eaten himself). Our three-roomed house–consisting of a sitting room, a storeroom and my mother’s bedroom– was too small to contain his presence at night, couldn’t he see that? 

After some time, before I’d fallen asleep, they stopped talking. I heard my mother close the back door that led to the outdoor kitchen. I heard her muffled steps to the front door and heard her test the latch to check that it was locked properly. A simple routine that she performed every night before bed but this time filled me with foreboding. Then I heard her bedroom door open. I heard more muffled footsteps, then nothing. Even though I didn't hear her say goodbye to Wuon Otis, even though I didn't hear the front door open to let him out into the night, I still managed to convince myself that he had left. 

***

Min Otis worked for a rich man with whom we shared a fence. We assumed he was rich because his bungalow was one of the grandest and his children, all grown, lived in America. Plus if you could kick back on your veranda in your wooded property with the day’s newspaper and Princes Jully on the cassette player, a thermos flask that never ran out of tea on a stool next to you, if you could do this in the middle of planting and weeding season when everyone else was toiling on their farms, as the rich man often did, saying, according to the people who worked for him, his gardener, his cattle herder and Min Otis, he didn’t wish to go back to Nairobi (where he owned a maisonette in Riara, one of the prime estates in the city, we were told) because it was too loud and too polluted and, depending on the season, too cold or too wet, it meant that food was not one of the worries on your mind, and if you didn’t worry about food and had the luxury of moving from one home to another chasing lovely weather, you definitely had a lot of money. 

Min Otis cleaned his bungalow several times a week. She had worked the longest for the rich man, and it made sense. “When it comes to cleanliness, that woman is clean. Her house is as ugly as mine but you wouldn't know it when you go inside,” villagers said, referring to her thatched hut. The whites in her home were never dirty even though she had five children, including a set of three-year-old twins. Not the white afghans with trendy designs that she spread on the thin cushions of her wood-framed sofas, and not the white lace with scalloped edges that she hung across the walls of her sitting room. She was clean, yes. What they said they didn’t understand was why she was bleaching her skin. They wondered what she was trying to be light-skinned for when she was already married. There was speculation that she was trying to bait the rich man. It didn’t help that when the rich man came to the village from Nairobi, where he lived, Min Otis did not easily allow people into his homestead. She spent whole days in his home and when someone called at the main gate, she would open it herself, just a fraction, poke her head out and, unsmiling, ask, “You wanted?” She threatened to report hangers-on to the rich man’s wife who was always away for extended periods in America. She was especially hostile to unmarried women and girls. Min Otis claimed that she was simply carrying out the wishes of the rich man’s wife who, according to her, had instructed her to vet everyone who stepped into her property while she was away, and to keep tabs on who came and for what business. She seemed proud that the rich man's wife trusted her to be her husband's custodian, as if this man of advanced middle age was an endangered species, a precious museum piece that was unsafe around young women. 

1999

Word was going round that the world would end on New Year’s Eve. No one would see the new millennium. I was determined to be away on the day of the apocalypse, when the whole of the earth would be plunged into a fiery pit, as I imagined it happening were it to happen. It was July. KCSE was three months away. I didn’t plan to stay in the village after my finals. I ached so much for Nairobi, even though I knew nothing of the city apart from what I’d heard from my cousins. They talked about things that were alien to me, things I yearned to experience – indoor bathrooms with hot showers, buttered bread every day for breakfast and twenty-four-hour electricity, which meant uninterrupted viewing of Mexican telenovelas and Nigerian films. At the time my siblings and I went to our neighbour’s house every weekend evening to watch Esmeralda on a black-and-white TV powered by a car battery. Sometimes we would come back home disappointed to be missing an episode because the battery had run out, certain that our neighbour lied about the battery running out just to get rid of us.

When my father first promised that I would go to his sister’s in Nairobi in December (this was when I had just joined secondary school with good grades), I constantly talked about the trip. My brother and sister mocked me as mercilessly as they had done when they came across a composition I wrote for class about wanting to be a news anchor. They joked that my skin was too dark and that the TV crew would have to light torches for extra lighting so that my face, not just my teeth and the whites of my eyes, could be visible on screen. I laughed with them because it was a good joke, and because I was so giddy with expectation they could have said anything and it would not have pierced me.  I was going to Nairobi, and they were not. I would come back speaking only Kiswahili, my tongue unfamiliar with the sounds and shapes of Dholuo, my skin supple from days spent indoors watching TV, not herding cattle, not fetching firewood out in the wild, not taking bucket baths in the roofless, stall-sized reed structure behind our house. For once, I would not have to bend over a bucket to scoop brackish well water in my cupped hands to throw on my body. I would just stand there, water falling down on me. My brother and sister would never know such luxury. They would go through life never knowing what it felt like to stand under a shower and feel the press of hot water on their face. What a tragedy. It seemed to me that life in our farming village was set, as in a photograph. No room for alterations. All that could happen was the fading, the curling of the edges. I refused to submit to that. 

When December came my father said he had used the money he’d been saving for my bus fare on something else, but for sure, the next year I would go to Nairobi. For days, I was inconsolable. My siblings knew not to joke about my pain. My mother tried to get me to eat, to talk, making it seem like I was overreacting. “You are crying as if someone has died,” she said. But when my father came home from work she reproached him where he sat outside in a wicker chair, smoking his last cigarette of the day and listening to BBC's Dira ya Dunia on a transistor radio placed next to his feet. 

“Did I not say she will go next year?” he defended himself in a rough voice. He later tried to bribe me with money. Fifty shillings, a lot of money back then. I turned it down, left it untouched on the coffee table where he had placed it, folded into a tiny square like a secret note. We did not have a verbal language for apologies in my family. My father did not say, “I am sorry I lied to you.” He said, “Here, take this money and buy yourself something.” When that failed he said, “Didn’t I say you will go next year?” and finally, irritated, “Now you are behaving like a child. You are crying as if Nairobi won’t be around next year.”

The following year, his sister spent Christmas upcountry so naturally I couldn’t go. And the year after that my father said, “You know you can’t go and leave your siblings behind. They also want to see Nairobi. But all three of you cannot go at once. That will be a burden on my sister.”

Everyone knew not to trust a carpenter, how did I forget? How did I forget to carry this knowledge with me at all times, like a badge, for safety, for ease of movement? “The only carpenter I trust is Jesus,” my father’s clients often joked when he promised them a date for their orders, because his word meant nothing. Orders were never ready when any carpenter promised that they would be. 

I didn’t need my father, I decided, with his stupid smoker’s cough, his stupid tarred fingers. I would find my own way to Nairobi. 

***

I had turned eighteen earlier in March but it was only when I sat my last KCSE paper in November that I finally felt like an adult. After a month of intense study as I did my finals, I felt a reward was owed to me. I didn’t want to watch Esmeralda on a black-and-white TV at my neighbour’s. I let the small irritations I felt there help sway me, like how their four-year-old, no doubt wanting all the attention for himself, always threw tantrums during intense scenes when we stared, tranced, at the small screen, and how his mother’s whine-like chiding of him was even more irritating. I always smiled foolishly at the child to calm him when what I desperately wished I could do was pull his ear.

No, a black-and-white TV would not do, not when I was already picturing the glamorous life that awaited me. I, as a news anchor, in a straight weave that fell to my shoulders and a face full of makeup. I wanted to celebrate finishing secondary school with high definition and colour. I decided, just this once, to watch an episode at the rich man’s place, on his colour TV. 

Some neighbours already watched TV there. They went through the small back gate to the servants’ quarters at the edge of the property, where his cattle herder lived with his wife and young son. No one watched TV in the huge bungalow. It wasn’t that people were afraid that Min Otis would start rumours about them. (She always had a way of finding out about things that happened after she left for her own place. You would spend time with the rich man and the next thing you knew, people would be coming to you to report what they had heard. “It is being said that you have been going to the rich man’s home to beg for money” or “A group of people were talking somewhere, and I heard them say you went to the rich man’s home last night to ask for food.”) It wasn’t only that. The rich man was not someone with whom most of the villagers enjoyed hanging out. He mostly spoke English, which was hard to keep up with. He'd also want to discuss the global news items he listened to on the BBC English service, which only he found interesting.

I stood out in the cold and knocked at the gate, repeating to myself what I would say if one of his workers came to let me in, although this was unlikely on a weekend night. “I’m returning the newspaper I borrowed.” This was actually true. A few days before, from a clearing in the fence, I watched Min Otis leave for the day and borrowed The Standard from the rich man. He was a member of a local primary school board, and I knew he liked it when people, especially young people, read. He was pleasantly surprised that I chose reading over everything else to pass the time. “It doesn’t matter if it is an old newspaper. I will read anything,” I said, marvelling at how easy it all was when he practically skipped inside to get me something to read. Now, when he came to the gate after my knock and asked who it was, I identified myself and said I was returning the newspaper.

The most baffling thing about the rich man was that he didn't look rich. He was thin and had no befitting pot belly, just a slight paunch that only showed when he wore a tucked-in shirt. “What a waste,” someone would always remark, “to have all that money and still be thin like the rest of us.” But he wasn't thin in an emaciated sort of way that could set off rumours about his health. 

I beamed my torchlight away from his face. He wore a black overcoat that suddenly made me feel stupid and obviously underdressed in my spaghetti-strapped top and hipster trousers. 

“Can I watch TV here? I usually watch at Min Malon’s house but the car battery has refused to work.”

He said of course, but then also gave me a short lecture about how I should read more and watch less TV. I told him I only ever watched one show. “We don’t even have a TV, remember?” I said.

“That’s good,” he said, as if not having a TV was a choice my father had made. He asked me which show I wanted to watch and snorted at my response. He said, “You also watch that nonsense on Nation TV?”

I laughed. “Are you not afraid of these trees at night?” I said, not to change the subject but so he wouldn’t think of pointing me to the curving path that led to the servant’s quarters. I hadn’t gone through everything just so he would have me watch TV with his cattle herder. “Me, I would be so afraid,” I added. The firs and whistling pines did look menacing in the dark, with their deformed shapes and shrieking nightlife. 

He led me inside his startlingly bright sitting room. I was used to the wan lighting of kerosene lamps and lanterns. Not bright fluorescents. I tried to make as little noise as possible as I sank into a beige leather sofa. There was a clear mug of something hot on a low stool beside his armchair. A slice of lemon floated in the drink, and the air smelled faintly of ginger. He turned the TV on, sought the channel and sat back in his chair. 

It was silent here, save for the drone of the generator. I should have had a nice watching experience – no brat to block the view and no lost signal, which was often the case at my neighbour’s on windy nights and her husband had to go outside to fiddle with the aerial tied up above the roof on a long, slender pole, all the while yelling, “Clear? Clear?” and we, from inside, chanted, “Not yet,” until the signal came back. It should have been a great experience but it was not. The rich man said nothing the whole time I was there. He only looked up from his book to watch the news briefs during the half-hour break and when dramatic background music played during my show. 

At nine o’clock, I thanked him and left. As I walked in the dark back home, my arms wrapped around me to brace against the cold, I knew I would never go back.

Soon after, on my way to the posho mill at the market centre, a basket of maize and millet grains balanced on my head, I passed right in front of Min Otis’s compound. She sat on a low stool outside her kitchen hut, scaling a large Nile perch and shooing away flies and hens that pecked at the innards she threw on the grass. I shouted hello but she did not answer. Thinking she had not heard me, my voice perhaps caught in the hedge or blocked by the loud, clucking hens and buzzing flies, I called louder.

 She remained quiet, but her slender arms moved in a conscious way that made me know she was deliberately ignoring me. It surprised me how much the snub hurt. I cut through her compound on my way back to give her a chance to take away the snub. No one seemed to be home. Her front door was padlocked. 

I didn’t know why I imagined no one would see me enter or leave the rich man’s home. Or maybe he had casually mentioned my visit to Min Otis. “Owuor’s daughter was here last night to watch TV,” he might have said as she polished the glass-fronted wall unit in his sitting room, and she was able to register the threat that lurked in those words. 

My mother called me aside the next day after we'd had breakfast, in the way of mothers when you were past beating age and had to be levelled with like a grown-up. She patted a spot next to her on the straw mat spread under a mango tree in our front yard. She said in a placating voice, “I have heard something that frightened my blood. Some people are saying you are the rich man’s girlfriend.”

I burst into laughter. My reaction seemed to put my mother at ease. “Who is ‘some people?’ Is it Min Otis? She is always saying that about all the girls in this area. The other day she said Lucy is the old man’s girlfriend, and today it is me who is his girlfriend. Surely.”

“She is a fool. But why would she decide to just wake up and start saying things about you?” my mother said. 

“Why don’t you ask her what she wants from me? She thinks I will stay quiet like the other girls. Me, if she spoils my name, she will see me. She thinks I will play with her.”

I tried not to glance at my mother. After a while, she told me not to draw attention to the rumours by confronting Min Otis.

2000

The world did end as was predicted, for me and my family. My father died, knocked down by a lorry that lost control and crashed into a line of kiosks at the Kendu Bay junction, killing four other people. 

“I don't know which devil made him smoke the way he did,” my mother said. “I told him many times to stop smoking, but you couldn't separate him from his cigarettes even when he was coughing out his intestines.”

She was convinced my father had been at one of the kiosks to buy cigarettes. But maybe he wanted something else, the quarter-kilo sugar packets he often brought home, or the unsliced white bread my mother loved but the rest of us loathed. Or maybe he had stopped to say hello to a shopkeeper he was fond of. Well, none of it mattered. He was dead, and his death softened things about him that my mother hated. He was no longer a weak man who couldn’t harass another man for his money but a man “who did not have problems with anyone.”

I, too, reappraised him. A liar suddenly seemed too harsh. He was a man who didn’t know how to say no to his children. But I was still bitter. He should have told me I couldn’t go to his sister’s because they did not get along. I only allowed myself to think about this after he was gone. My father and his sister were not siblings from the same womb. Their fathers were half-brothers who accused each other of witchcraft. As it happened, parents passed down feuds and animosities. My father and his sister were always suspicious of each other. Even their mothers sometimes played out the hostility with petty arguments. Maybe my father was afraid that a month for me at her place was too risky, enough for her to bring my underwear or a piece of paper bearing my handwriting to an evil charmsman to wreck my future. Already, there were whispers among the mourners, especially those from my mother’s village, that my father’s sister and her father were not crying like truly sad people. 

She had travelled on the night bus from Nairobi a day after news of my father’s passing. She arrived at dawn, came straight to our compound on the rear rack of a bicycle taxi. She didn't straddle the seat but sat sideways, one plump hand on the carry-on in her lap and the other gripping the edge of the seat. She started keening well before she got to our compound, her voice wobbling as the bicycle went over ruts on the dirt road that led to our home. She paced our front yard, wailing and chastising my father. “How can you leave without telling us goodbye?” She recited the names of our family's dead and asked my father to pass her regards. She wailed with her hands on her head, hands limp at her sides, hands limply waving goodbye, like windscreen wipers in a half-hearted rain. 

Some of my father's extended siblings joined her. Their voices joined together and formed an ear-splitting tide, and separated again so you could hear each one's distinct expressions of sorrow. By the time she was done her voice was gone. She croaked greetings as she shook hands. But no, the watching mourners said, that was all for show, to deflect attention from her and her father. “She cried well, but we know they know where that lorry came from,” they murmured.

When my mother’s father spoke at the burial ceremony, he said, in the general direction of my father’s sister, “Whoever sent that lorry and orphaned my grandchildren and made my daughter the wife of a grave, God will deal with you. And so will I.” My mother’s relatives, gathered under their own tarp opposite the massive one under which everyone else sat in blue and white plastic chairs, cheered. “Say it!” they yelled. The way they cheered, you had a sense that they had discussed this moment. I imagined someone, a clan elder, telling my mother’s father, “When you stand to speak, this is what you will say.” And now they cheered the delivery of the threat rather than the threat itself. 

As my father’s coffin was lowered into the ground, I started weeping afresh, standing dangerously close to the hole. Min Otis locked me tightly to her bosom, like she was afraid I would do something stupid. Our misfortune was all it took to get her to start talking to me again. 

2002

Min Otis, of course, stopped speaking to all of us when her husband started spending nights at our place. She did not exchange greetings with my siblings. And maybe she and my mother were tactful not to be at the same place at the same time because they did not run into each other during that time. Wuon Otis came once or twice a week that first month. He did not show up the weekend my siblings were home for half-term break. The next month, he came twice. Then schools closed and he did not come again. Around the same time, village women brought my mother news of what Min Otis was saying about her. My mother was a witch who had used charms on her husband, and that was why he bought his own family a single kilo of beef while my mother got two or three kilos. My mother was a whore. She claimed that I was not my father’s biological child because of my skin color. I was darker than my siblings, who had my father’s light brown complexion. She resurfaced old gossip about me and said that my mother had taught me her ways, letting me be “friends” with the rich man who was my grandfather’s age mate. They told my mother, “That woman has hard eyes to talk about you like that. She's playing with you.” It was easy to imagine them telling Min Otis the same thing: “She is playing with you.” They were in it for the drama, those women. Maybe not Min Aeso, herself a widow, who, a few months after my father died, had asked my mother if she was already receiving love letters from men. 

“Ah-uh, my husband is still fresh in the grave,” my mother had said, an expression she liked to use in those months. Around that time my grandfather sold some of my father’s carpentry tools from the workshop, saying he had a right to them as they had belonged to his son. 

“They have started snatching my property and my husband is still fresh in the grave,” my mother yelled outside my grandparents' wooden gate when she found out. By the time a clan meeting was convened that night, my grandfather had already used the money on who knew what. He said he wanted a larger share of his son’s property, the dining furniture actually, which was too big for our small sitting room. In front of all the grizzled men who gave my grandfather a limp talking-to, my mother, perhaps knowing she was on her own and none of the men at the meeting would protect her, vowed that if my grandfather dared touch the dining furniture, if he dared, one God, then he would know she was the daughter of Omollo Ouya. She invoked her father’s praise name, “the jaw of a crocodile.” That was the stock from which she descended and one God they would know it. Word of my mother’s threat at the meeting went round, and the women who still came round regularly applauded her. “We are tired of men stealing from widows. He thinks he can play with you just because you don’t have a husband to protect you,” they said.

That afternoon when Min Aeso asked my mother whether she was already getting interest from men for the widow care custom, she advised her to choose a man she knew well. Someone with children who understood what real responsibility was. Someone with a clean heart and a good reputation. Someone who “did not like women.” “These men who like women can give you That Disease. These days you can't trust what you see. You might see that a man is fat and think he is healthy but maybe he has That Disease and is only taking medication,” she said. “And some men take advantage. They only want a second home to eat at.”

“Owada,” my mother agreed. But she said she was also tired and would be happy to be alone for the rest of her life. “I will only do it because I have a son. I am afraid that if I don’t do all these rituals he will die.” She said this loud enough for me to hear, as if to include me in the conversation. Maybe it was her way of preparing me for what was to come, but when Wuon Otis started dropping by I was surprised by how much I hated the idea of him being the man of the house. And I was glad that my mother wasn’t making any effort with him. My mother had stopped wearing lipstick after my father died (my father had hated the lipstick, often saying, “I don’t want to see those things that you have smeared on your lips,” and my mother would reply, “Then close your eyes.”), and sometimes she skipped baths. She had cut her long, chemical-straightened hair to a one-inch afro and always covered it with a white headscarf, like a pious church lady. None of this changed with the arrival of Wuon Otis. 

When he stopped coming after two months I assumed they had an agreement that it would last no more than two months, this practice that my mother had described as a chore she couldn’t wait to get over with. Or maybe my mother was sick of Min Otis and her gossip. She reacted to the gossip with a resignation that I resented, especially since I was included in the smear campaign. Why wasn’t she protecting me, the way she protected my brother by following customs she didn't want to? The way she protected both my siblings from the complicated feelings I was experiencing by making sure Wuon Otis never came around when they were home? Even the dining furniture she protected. What about me? I especially hated how she was just taking the insults from Min Otis. All she said was, “Min Otis is my junior, and now she is treating me like one of those girl-children she quarrels with. Let her continue looking for me. She will find me.”

***

In late November, the upcoming general elections were all we could talk about. Moi’s twenty-four-year presidential rule was coming to an end. The song Unbwogable played constantly on the radio. It became the opposition party’s anthem. Moi’s time was up and we all felt the spirit of the song, unshakable and unafraid. We talked openly about things one never uttered in public. The torture chambers, the suspected murders, the prejudice against us Luos in public appointments. Even I who didn't know what I was talking about joined in. I would be voting for the first time and I was excited. I couldn’t get enough of Unbwogable, and then I ran into Min Otis one evening. She was ahead of me on the footpath. She turned around (she still wasn’t speaking to us) then stared back ahead, only this time she started singing Unbwogable. To call me a whore and get away with it, then spoil this song, this moment, for me? I would show her who was unbwogable. 

I lunged at her. We staggered and fell, but she recovered first. She was on top of me, her weight smothering me. I feared, for a moment, that I would die under the ass we had made fun of countless times for how small it was. But someone pulled her off me. She managed to throw a few punches at me as I caught my breath. Then came the insults. They came at me from every angle. Whore, dog, Satan, monkey. It was all I could do not to cry. “I am going to tell my mother,” I managed, like a child at a playground. 

“Run,” she yelled, “or do you want me to escort you? Run. I am waiting for her.”

My mother, when she saw me, when she heard what had happened, snapped off a green branch from a eucalyptus tree outside our gate. Not the kind you would use to scare a small child into behaving, but one you would use on a dangerous snake. 

“That stupid woman thought the lion could not roar anymore because it had been asleep for a long time,” my mother said when she got back. She seemed annoyed at me though, like I was at fault for something. When she mentioned that the next year I’d be going to study early childhood education at a technical college one hour's bus ride away from home, it felt like she was getting rid of me. The plan, her plan, had initially been that I wait until my brother and sister both finished secondary school before she thought about my going to college. That would have been at least a three-year wait. She didn’t want to risk sending me to college and not having money for my siblings' secondary education, she explained. The most important thing for her was that we all finished secondary school. When she first told me this, I cried and gave her the silent treatment for days. I wanted to go to college, to study journalism, to get away, not wait three years, a lifetime. 

When she saw my tears, my mother said, “Do you think your father left me any money? Just the other day your brother and sister were sent home because I have been struggling to pay school fees and here you are thinking I am sitting on money. How much do you think I make selling clothes? I am trying like a human being and if that is not enough, go and ask your father for money.” She pointed to the side of the house where my father had been buried, the mound long gone flat so that you couldn't tell exactly where it was his bones lay. “He is right there next to the house. Go and tell him to take you to college. I am tired.” Her comment had made me cry harder, feeling fresh grief over all that was lost. 

And now here she was sending me to college. I was going to be a nursery school teacher. Not what I wanted, but I felt I owed it to my mother to capitulate, who soon after beating Min Otis left the chama she had been a member of for two decades. She said she was sick of the gossip, but I knew she had been struggling to keep up with payments. 

“I am tired of this village,” she said in that strange way she had taken to doing when it was just us two at home, as if she was addressing me but not really. She was talking to herself but needed an audience, and the walls and empty air were not enough. She’d wait until I was within earshot and start talking while staring at nothing. “I wish I could sell these little things that I own and move. But I am the wife of a grave. I can’t leave.”

Many years later, when I was a lower primary school teacher not far away from home and married to a man who taught maths to upper primary pupils at the same school, I told my students that I once wanted to be a news anchor. They found this amusing, picturing their dowdy English teacher on screen. 

“Can you even swallow English like they do on television?” one asked. 

I did my best imitation of a news anchor’s accent and they screamed with laughter. 

“What happened?” my smartest student asked. 

“I changed my mind,” I said. 

Later, I remembered the time I had gone to the rich man’s home in my tight hipster trousers, how oblivious he had been of me and how humiliated I was by his obliviousness that I never went back. What happened was I didn’t have extra lighting, as my siblings had once joked. Maybe then he would have seen me, seen what I was offering and taken me to Nairobi with him. But that wasn't it, was it? Not all of it, anyway. He had commented on my outfit as he led me to his bungalow, an outfit I had specially chosen for him. “This thing that you're wearing, what is it called?” He was pointing at my trousers. I told him we called it hipster, the fashion of the day, pleased that he had noticed, pleased that my plan was in motion, hoping, too, that he had noticed my butt. 

“So this is how girls dress these days?” he asked. I detected a tone of distaste in his voice and felt chastened. I would have gone back home, at least so he wouldn't see how misty with shame my eyes suddenly were. But he had already moved on, asking me why we loved the TV show so much as he pointed me to a seat. 

About the Author

Caroline Okello is a Kenyan writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work interrogates how the legacies of colonialism complicates the lives of women and girls in rural and urban settings in Kenya. Her journalism and short stories have been published in The East African, The Standard, Daily Nation, Lolwe, Down River Road, and elsewhere. She was recently awarded a scholarship to attend Seventh Wave’s Narrative Shifts Digital Residency. She lives in Nairobi.

about the artist

Subarna Talukder Bose is an artist, writer, and educator living in California. Her work has been curated by Blake Shell of Oregon Contemporary and Bruce Burris, a Hallie Ford Fellow. Her work was included in the 2019 and 2021 Around Oregon Annual and won the Juror's Award in 2021. She was part of Pacific Coast Review, Zevitas Marcus Gallery in Los Angeles. She was also the cover artist of New American Paintings 2019, Pacific Coast Issue 139. Her artwork has been exhibited widely in the Pacific Coast.