Each time before we moved, Mother would say, “This world is not our own. We’re visitors just passing through.”
Then a month later we would pack and leave. Each house, smaller and colder than the other. I was about three years old the first time we moved from the double room I was born into, to a one-bedroom and then almost immediately to a single room in Eastleigh.
Eastleigh estate during the day is very busy with traders exchanging all sorts of goods from cheap imported clothes, to cutlery, bedding, foodstuff, and in the night, ammunition. Most of the buildings are suffocated storied buildings with stores and shops on the first floor. The other floors are flats and cheap rented apartments. Our house was on the fifth floor of such a building owned by the nephew of a former general.
I remember that two weeks before we moved, Father came home for the first time in a long time. Mother was so angry and I could have sworn father would not survive a day. Two days later, however, they were following each other around the house, teasing and laughing. Mother turned to me for the first time since he arrived and asked, pushing me towards him.
“Have you greeted your father?”
When he left, we moved to the one-bedroom, with the promise that he would pay rent. He did pay for the first month and then he was out of touch. Since Mother could not afford it, we eventually moved out to a single room just a couple of blocks away. From then on, we hopped from one house to another. There was always a reason to move. Half the time, it was because Mother had defaulted in paying the rent. The other half was split between nosy neighbours who were picking on me ─it was hard to resist a fatherless black child with Indian features, and Mother trying to get a new job. So, the cycle went ─dad, money, job, neighbours, and then dad again with his promises.
When Tonia was born, we moved one last time. Tonia came with a lot of problems. She was born a few months after Mother’s third reconciliation with dad failed. It had lasted about three months. She was underweight and Mother was retained in the hospital for a few weeks before they were allowed to go home. We could not afford the bill and rent at the same time so, Mother made me move in with them at the hospital for those five weeks. Initially, I shared the bed with her as Tonia was in the nursery, and mother split half the food she was served with me. The nurses were generally nice to us and never seemed to mind my presence. Sometimes, they would stop by our bed to offer their sympathy to her for her situation or to express their displeasure with men such as my father who were deadbeats, and sometimes just to express their general dislike for Indian men.
Later, after Tonia was released from the nursery, we were moved to the general ward which had a smaller bed. We still could not leave because we had not paid the bill. Mother reached out to everyone she had in her phonebook for help. Most of these people she already owed huge amounts of money so they either ignored her or promised to send her something and once they got off the phone, they blocked her. Mother grew more and more desperate the longer we stayed and eventually, by the third week, she was so aggressive towards everyone ─including the staff that the free food we had been receiving stopped coming. Before then it had been easy for us. We were not the only family waiting to be released. The cooks served all of us a meal per day. It was not a formal arrangement, and no one was entitled to it. However, the hospital must have understood their duty to provide for us food at the very least, on moral grounds, especially because most of these women were breastfeeding.
After the food was withdrawn, Mother would time when the nurses were serving other patients, then she would push me forward with our bowl in my hand.
“Ero, dhi.” Go.
The nurses would first pretend not to notice me then eventually when they could no longer ignore me, they hesitantly filled the bowl. It would have been a lot easier if Mother apologized to them, but she would not bring herself to it.
Eventually, it was Aunty Pam ─the only one she had not called because they were not on good terms who bailed us out.
***
For a few minutes, the two women stood there, facing each other for the first time in a long time. Mother, a towering figure with her chest heaving up and down with burning rage, and Aunty Pam, adequately submissive, yet defiant and determined.
“Ok obadha. It’s your problem.” Mother said eventually. Then she picked Tonia and left.
I watched her as she walked away with Tonia in her arm; her skirt dancing gently to the light afternoon breeze.
When we realized she wasn’t coming back we took a taxi and left.
Perhaps deep down Mother knew Aunty was right. We didn’t have a house to return to, and if she took me with her, I was going to suffer. Nevertheless, her ego would not let her come.
Aunty Pam is my mother’s youngest sister. She is skinny and a little athletic. Her skin is deep black and shiny, her legs are long like a model’s. Once, she appeared in a local magazine modelling traditional wear for a friend’s project. She has that picture framed and hung on the wall of the living room.
She lived in a one-bedroomed house in Donholm estate. Her house was warm and soft like the sweaters she knitted. Unlike our house, hers had a clean bathroom and a small flushable toilet inside. At home, we shared our toilet with our neighbours and everyone had a day to clean it. Her kitchen and the living room were separated and her house did not smell like paraffin.
She has no child of her own. Her husband, Uncle Mike is also tall. He did not say much for the period I stayed there, but when he spoke, he had a heavy accent.
When he was angry, he would call Aunty Pam with her full name.
“Pamela!” he would bark, in a low voice.
Then Aunty would come running to send away the noisy children playing on the veranda or to tell me to go sleep if I stayed long after dinner watching TV. One night, he called her from the kitchen. When Aunty left the bedroom half an hour later, she couldn’t look me in the eye. The following day, a cousin came to take me back to my mother. Before I left, Aunty Pam gave me five hundred shillings and her phone number on a piece of paper.
She said, “Call me if you need anything.”
***
When she left the hospital, Mother went to dad’s house. He was just out of his second relationship in the five months after his split with Mother. He was fragile and needed attention which he unbelievably hoped he would get from her despite not having visited us in the hospital. So, he did not object to their moving in. After all, she was still his wife. However, soon enough, mother’s anxiety, together with the mood swings and the baby’s cries drove him out of the one-room which he had shared equally with all kinds of rodents. At first, Mother was calm and she would soothe Tonia throughout the night as she cried endlessly. Then one day, she could not take it anymore and she yelled at her. For a second, I watched Tonia’s tiny face turn red with surprise then confusion and eventually bitterness. Then she screamed the loudest she ever had.
When she couldn’t stand it anymore, Mother yelled, “Kik aduog ayud nyathino ka pod ywak!”
Then she stormed out.
***
On the other hand, I am soft-spoken. Unlike Tonia, I am short and lean. I am often mistaken for the youngest. I don’t resemble any of my parents. I am darker than my mother and I missed my father’s big ears. My hair is short and wavy and I look like a boy. My deep brown eyes make me look a little bit more Indian than my sister. In school, I was nicknamed ‘Muhindi Mweusi’ the black Indian, and Tonia was simply Tonia, or ‘Sista ya Muhindi Mweusi.’
Aunty Pam once told me that I did not speak until I was three. By then, everyone was convinced that I was disabled and Mother had planned to enrol me in a special school. Then one day when we had visitors over, their child was crying over my toys, and I walked over to her mother and whispered.
“Tell her to give me back my things.”
Everyone heard what I said because they had stopped speaking when I started talking. They all broke down in tears.
I did not speak much after that incident, but Mother told the story to everyone who came to our house after that just so that they would know I was not deaf. If they did not look convinced, she would call me from the corner I was sitting in ─unbothered by the visitor’s presence and demand I tell the visitor my name.
“Jaaziyah,” I often answered, without looking at the visitors’ faces. Then I would go back to my corner and Mother would look so pleased.
At 16, I went to a boarding school. Tonia was 12 and she screamed when I left.
Mother could not afford to have both of us in a boarding school.
At 15, she was a flower in spring oozing beauty and charm.
A year later, she was pregnant.
When she calls to tell me, I am in a lecture hall and they are in the middle of a murderous fight.
She screams, “If you don’t get me out of here now, I will kill her, wallahi!”
After Tonia’s pregnancy, Mother tried to pregnancy-proof her home. She banned the wearing of trousers, introduced mandatory church attendance and curfews, which were unnecessary because where else could we have slept? We did not know many relatives. She banned bringing friends over and even tried unsuccessfully to have us shave our heads. Most of these new rules ─indirectly meant for Tonia were being enforced on me. Mother would ask me every morning as I set off for school, where I was going, and every evening when I came back where I was from. It was always the same answer of course, and I often got irritated until I realized the questions were not meant for me. She and Tonia were not speaking to each other, at least not directly.
They both had a deep un-seeming love for each other, and soon enough, they were exhausted from all the fighting and we were back to what it was before. Like nothing ever happened.
That too was short-lived.
Two years later, Tonia was glowing with a second pregnancy. Her face fat and smooth, her breasts full, and her ass soft and round.
Mother lost it.
She dragged the baby’s father ─an attractive, hood, young man, and possibly a drug peddler across the estate harassing him and calling him all manner of names. The poor guy was so embarrassed he could not even fight back. Neither could he deny it. Everyone had gossiped about them, plus the baby was his exact copy. Meanwhile, Tonia, who had been locked inside the house, managed to break free with a neighbour’s help and left with both her babies, leaving behind a mess in the house and a mother who had lost her mind. For weeks, the whole estate was talking.
For several months following the incident, Mother was a fiery ball of rage flying into a fit of anger at the slightest provocation or sometimes none at all. I could have moved out. I was out of campus then and had a job with a small advertising company. I could have afforded to rent a small apartment near my workplace. I did not. Partly because I had grown immune to Mother’s temper and partly because I was secretly paying for the upkeep of my nieces because as expected, the peddler was never home.
When Mother finally found out about the upkeep, she quit talking to me, and I finally decided to leave.
A year and a half after I moved out, during which Tonia had twice moved in and out with mother, I brought Ken home to show to Mother.
***
I met Ken at a charity concert at Alliance Francaise on an unseasonably chilly Tuesday evening in January. He is a content creator and works with a media company that was part of the event. When he approached our table to ask for space to leave some of their equipment, his voice was soft, almost a whisper, and I wondered how he ended up with dreadlocks. All in all, he is an adequately attractive man and he oozes charm, good breeding, and affable manners. He is tall and has a deep rich skin tone. Although he often had the locks tied into a huge ponytail, his hair is still an untidy mess.
His story is hilarious.
He first enrolled in a medical school and it was going so well that he had already had a job offer by his third year- courtesy of his well-connected father. But then he dropped out the following year and stayed out of school for a year. When he went back, his father enrolled him in a law school. There, he unsuccessfully tried to stay but also eventually dropped out after barely managing half a year. From there, he tried his hand at all sorts of things boy bands, wedding MC, DJ, poetry ─before he eventually founded a talent company with a friend that flopped heavily before it could even stand on its feet. To cut the long agonizing story short, he went back to his big man on his knees and a few months later, landed a job as one of the writers in a media company. His father had a little something to do with it, of course. He is a super nice guy and as it turned out, super blind without his contacts. He was rarely angry, and even when he was, he went quiet and his blind eyes became tiny. He could neither shout nor sustain a quarrel, because he easily ran out of breath and confidence.
We found Mother alone. Although it was midday, the curtains had not been drawn and the room was barely lit. She had been sitting in the dark with her back towards the door. She did not move when we entered. I explained to her that Ken and I were living together and that we wanted to start a family together. She did not say anything. To give them time alone, I offered to cook. Mother was cold and curt and did not even ask his name or where he came from. Nevertheless, Ken offered and tried to make small-talk over random things, most of which were met with a short final answer until I signalled him to stop. He was relieved. We ate the food in silence. The air was tense with a mixture of expectations and anxieties and an unbending ego. A dark cloud of unsaid words and gloom hung over the room.
“Tonia,” she said, “what happened to that boy, and where are my grandchildren?”
For the moment, her voice was soft and warm. And then she recognized me and in less than a second, her face lost its radiance the spontaneous glow replaced with cold hostility.
I could see now that Ken was frightened of her, although he tried to hide it.
When we stood to leave, she looked him in the eye for the first time with disbelief and said:
“This is the one you chose? Si umuweze basi tuone.”
Later when I asked him how it was, he said, “Fine,” but exactly six months later, Ken was standing at the door of our bedroom as if ready to run out in case of anything. He was looking me in the eye when he declared that he was leaving. He did not run out of breath nor did his eyes dim.