When I was a girl, a certain man named Mr. Masese came to live in No. 10, the tenement opposite ours. He was a civil servant who cherished bell-bottom trousers, tucked in dress-shirts, and polka-dotted ties. I thought him fashionable so. That February, the adults suggested he was a runaway from the city. After all, our town had seen its fair share of vagrants—a bank robber had pretended to be a bar-girl months before, and it was said a nun in the parish was once a famous city prostitute. Yet in the days following his arrival it became apparent he was a man of respectable origins: a circular went round saying the Communication Corporation (COCO) had sent him to us in lieu of the late Mr. Nzau, who weeks before, had died of matters related to obesity, and whom we dearly missed.
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Every morning he sped down Uzima Road whistling, dropping parcels and letters on doorsteps. When his rounds were done, he retired to his cubicle in the post office to sort letters and packages. After, he returned to No. 10, parking his bicycle against the banyan tree, disappearing inside without so much as a word to those who sat on the steps. Much later, he brought a chair outside to smoke, rolling the cigarette himself, lighting it with cupped hands. Behind our curtain I watched as he gulped the smoke, as he exhaled round perfect clouds.
I admired him, though, Kala our maid, said one day those things would kill him. “What a pity, to be wifeless, to smoke, to be lonely!” she said, rolling the dough, sweat shining on her skin. Ma—interrupted from her newspaper puzzles or those telephone calls where she gossiped with my aunts—walked to the window to observe the man. She said she loved his hairdo. How fashionable he seemed, she remarked to Kala. In fact, she added, she’d never seen such a fine cut since her college days. By that week’s end she’d detailed the man’s life in letters addressed to Aunty Kavata: he woke up at five to pray, played his record player late into the night, and was not a lover of drink. Those letters she folded into perfect rectangles, slipped them into blue-striped white envelopes, then licked the flaps, before placing them on her desk so Kala could drop them at the post office. It never surprised her that the very person she gossiped about was also responsible for their mailing. No, Ma never cared in the slightest bit. To her, gossip was an ingredient in life.
Mr. Masese became the object of my fascination and I pressed my face against his window once. His tenement was two-roomed, divided into a sleeping alcove, and a sitting room where a stove stood. A wooden desk and chair sat in a corner, while a pale couch leaned on another. It was a sparse place, filled with the furnishings of a lonely person, a person on the verge of moving. He sat in the corner writing. He rested a hand on his chin, and scratched his head once with the tip of a pencil. The record player was on, and each time a song died, I caught the faint sound of static, before a new rumba number came on. I imagined he was writing a book that would change the world.
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One day after Mass, Ma suggested it would not be a bad idea to invite him over for supper. Invite him over, she said with a tone of mischief, as if Kala and I could not comprehend the mere thought of him stepping on our linoleum floor, sitting on our mvule chairs, sipping the same cardamom tea as us. In any case, Ma never sought opinion from anyone but rather presented her intentions to those who cared to listen, meandering around the beauty of her ideas. At the telephone she told her sisters how Mr. Masese was a fine civil servant without a love for drink unlike Pa, who drank Tusker lagers without a care in the world. She said it did not matter that Mr. Masese smoked. No it did not matter, she emphasized when they pointed out that smoking killed faster than drinking. If anything, she said, he was the model of the perfect Uzima man.
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One evening after school as I raced down the road on my bicycle, I saw him seated on a log near the guavas with a newspaper in hand, discussing a certain court case with a group of retired adults, who in those years came to play games of bao on the corridor. It was the first time I’d ever seen him in communion with anyone, and it filled me with an overwhelming sense of adoration, to see him as someone who moved between moods, a person who decided what they could be. When my bicycle hit the pavement he stopped to stare, for a while, then went on with his narration—he knew the minister mentioned in that big court case. In fact, he’d gone to see him speak in those Pro-independence rallies. “A very cultured man, educated in Oxford,” he explained to the men. His voice was deep yet lined with a measuredness I’ll never forget. It seemed as though he’d never raised his tone his entire life. His listeners surrounded him with serious expressions, as if he was a seer, as if a matter of great urgency had been pronounced upon the world and he alone knew what to do. That night I went outside and through the lighted window saw him, head bent over a stove, stirring. I imagined him as a father, yet that picture seemed so distant. It seemed as though he was only cut for a life of singlehood, a life in which no one came and went.
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That year Pa grew further apart from Ma, his frequent Saturday visits diminishing to monthly visits, then to random phone calls, then to abrupt letters that, though curt, detailed his life in a small town by the sea once colonized by the Portuguese. In those letters there was a formalness that predicted his falling away, at his disinterest in the family he’d created with us. First, he said the bus rides were long, so it was better to telephone. Then months passed and he said the telephone calls were too expensive, he would write, perhaps come down for Christmas. “What a waste,” Ma cried to Aunty Kavata during our Sunday lunches. Aunty Kavata, who had never married, recommended she visit a certain medicine-man in the district. Pa, like a baby, would come back, she advised, tightening an Ankara headscarf on her head. Her words were met with silent disapproval by Ma, who avoided the matter of Pa’s distance to narrate an encounter she had had with Mr. Masese at the butcher’s that Saturday.
This is what happened: there’d been a kilo of liver remaining at the butcher’s and Ma had ordered that very same quantity, oblivious of the fact that Mr. Masese had placed the same order. The butcher had expressed his apologies, asked if she would take some mutton or beef shank. Mr. Masese had suggested she should take his quantity, that he could do with beef. Besides, he had countered, he had no one else waiting at home to whom a change in menu would cause disappointment. And so Ma had accepted the offer. They had begun to talk about recipes: no, the onions went in before the meat when frying, to parboil rice, or soak first, to chop spinach or wring it by hand. In the end they had discovered a shared love for the kitchen. And did Aunty Kavata know she’d invited him over to cook us what he referred to as an inland meal he’d learned from his late grandmother?
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By the end of that year it became apparent that Pa was gone for good. Ma often cried by herself, dabbing her cheeks with her lace handkerchiefs, even though Kala thought she was going to be OK.
“It’s in the air, everyone seems to have it. They say a certain type of pollen is making people sick. Even Mma Rosa is not speaking to anyone on account of that mysterious flu,” Kala said to me as she stirred a pot of simmering lentil stew, her face fogged in steam. The kitchen smelled of bay leaves and paprika. Through the window I saw that the lamplight in No 10. was off.
Standing there I remembered how on Sunday mornings Mr. Masese tended to the row of potted plants outside his tenement. How he rolled his dress-shirt and changed the soil with his bare hands so that in the end his fingers were smeared in mud. How, afterwards, he watered the pots, then lined them on the veranda like a collection of toys. How, always, he seemed immensely proud of his handiwork.
The week Ma invited him for supper, our founding father, the first president, died in his sleep. All week we watched from the Greatwall as the man lay in state, as long lines of mourners queued to view him. He looked asleep, as though he was dreaming, as though he was enjoying the fact that people had queued to see him. At any rate, Kala said, the man had been a dictator; he’d killed everyone who went against him.
In Uganda we’d seen Amin chase Asians away, and my classmate’s family had owned a supermarket there.
Was our founding father worse than Amin? I asked Kala as I tossed roasted groundnuts into my mouth. Kala stopped to think for a moment then said both men had been evil. Evil was evil it could not be measured on a weight, the way she weighed margarine for her cakes, she added. No, she continued, perhaps our founding father had been worse than Amin, perhaps that was why he was dead.
Still, Kala was a primary school graduate, and did not know a thing about history—I could not believe anything she said. What did she know about presidents anyway?
It was Mr. Masese who knew a great deal about such things. He talked endlessly about the late president: how he admired the fact that he’d endured ten years at that far-flung desert prison, that he’d guided our country through those uncertain times when a young nation is often susceptible to coups; so wise and stoic was he that all those who surrounded him, those generals with shining medals, had never once thought to usurp him. Ma sat in the velvet armchair listening to Mr. Masese talk, and even though the latter had promised her he would cook in this particular visit—if anything it had been the sole purpose of the invitation—Ma, went on to help Kala in the kitchen. There they peeled potatoes and fried rice with mutton. Often, over the soft radio music, she exclaimed at a certain history fact Mr. Masese pointed out, with ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs’, refilling our glasses with fruit sherbet.
Mr. Masese sat on the cream couch opposite me, the closest he’d ever been, regarding me with his spectacled eyes. All evening I’d listened to him and Ma, their talking ever-flowing like tap-water, and here I was, alone with him, as Kala and Ma laughed at something he’d said. I’d not said a word since his arrival. Suddenly he called me by my name, Ndila, pointing to the deck of cards that lay on the floor.
Did I wish to play a hand? He wanted to know.
Yes, I did, I said slurping on my sherbet so my lips were covered in a blob. Often, Kala and I had played the card games, and each time, Kala said I was cheating. Ma would say I might become a gambler, to which I resisted, saying I’d never loved Math, and didn’t one need to love Math to plan their chess moves?
No, no, she would say, laughing, or twisting her hair into dainty cornrows. I was a born-gambler, she would add. How then did I defeat Kala in those games of hearts and spades?
Shuffling the deck between his nicotine-stained fingers, Mr. Masese said he’d worked in a Hilton casino once; he knew all the tricks people used to cheat a house. And did I know that the carpeting in casinos was made especially ugly so patrons would concentrate on the table, and thus avoid the thought of walking out in the middle of a game?
All those facts fascinated me, and I played against him that night, winning and losing, until Ma said, “Supper is served.”
As we washed our hands I thought he’d let me get off easily, that he’d seen me for a weak opponent and had pretended it was nothing. I remembered how each time he won he shuffled the deck furiously, keen to escape praise from Kala and Ma. He would say, “Let’s try again”, with the ease of a person used to winning, a person never satisfied with enjoying victory. When I won he paused to describe this or that opponent that he’d played against in his youth, his voice filled with a tender wistfulness that caused a deep silence to wash the sitting room, before he praised me and said to Ma: “You truly have an ambitious child.” There was a smirk on his face.
That night we ate together. It felt ordinary that Mr. Masese and Ma should speak about the Oduor’s, those tenants with the colourful breed of chickens, or compliment Mma Rosa’s flower-selling business. That through those conversations Kala should interject asking, “More soup?” It felt ordinary and complete that they should laugh at the comedy special on Voice of Kenya, even though once it had been Pa’s place and only his place to watch that comedy special seated on that cream couch which the man now sat on. It felt as though the tenement was suddenly contained outside time and space. I wondered what Pa would say if he arrived at that moment, if he chanced upon Ma and Mr. Masese talking as if they’d always known each other.
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Mr. Masese’s presence at our house became common in the year before I joined secondary school. In this time Pa had disappeared, and when Kala mentioned him, Ma outrightly recoiled, or took her coat and left the house. She walked away into the town, alone, into alleys she’d never taken. Once I watched her leave the house, her hair blowing in the wind. She came back at dusk. I saw her shadow lengthen in the lamplight as she came in. In those days I thought about Pa, precious Pa, who’d taken me out for ice-cream at the shop with the frilled tarpaulin, where the big owner tickled my cheeks. Pa who’d given me to Christ at my confirmation, my face laced in that tulle veil, my hands holding that burning candle, the wax hot on my palms.
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On Jamhuri Day, Mr. Masese brought flowers wrapped in newspaper—roses, chrysanthemums, and lavenders which Kala sniffed before transferring into a water-filled glass jug. From his leather briefcase he produced a chessboard. As the tea brewed in the kitchen, he spelled out the rules. The king and queen were the strongest pieces. If anything, I should keep those pieces for last, when I would surprise him. He warned me about the horizon problem, when a player, excited with the closeness of a win, moves too fast and is thus short-changed; in this way the opponent gains an upper-hand. Afterwards, I followed as he moved the pieces on the black and white board, pawns weaker than bishops, bishops than knights, kings than rooks… In the end the sun had shifted on the walls. The entire time Ma and Kala stood beside us, watching us play even though in the smallest sense they couldn’t understand the comings-and-goings of the game.
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As the month ended I wrote to Pa. I wrote neatly, licking my graphite pencil so my letters came out thick and black. I said I missed him, and would he come over for Christmas? The days were never the same, I wrote. The air was stifling, and the first jacaranda flowers had spilled on Uzima Road so girls cupped handfuls and flung them at each other. I said I missed our ice-cream days, that I no longer cycled past that shop with the frilled tarpaulin because it reminded me of him, of when I was young and he carried me between his shoulders. “Little woman, climb,” he would say. I did not say that I’d begun to like the girl whose mother owned the salon opposite the florist’s. I’d seen her in school, a short stocky girl who spoke in inter-school debates and carried those Mills and Boons paperbacks everywhere. I did not write about the short stocky girl for reasons I do not know. Yet I felt complete that the letter contained only what it should contain. It did not need anything more.
Mr. Masese brought more games during the weekends. Over moments of cooking—him chopping the spring onions, as Ma and Kala argued if bouillon cubes were better than curry powder—we discussed chess moves, debating on which would lead to a quick defeat and which to a win.
In September the sunlight flitted tenderly on our faces; all through the month a certain carefreeness marked our days, days suspended in a sense of lightness before things began to change. Before Ma found the letter to Pa in my trunk.
At supper she said things were complicated between her and Pa. “It’s no good writing to him,” she said. She didn’t explain more and I didn’t ask.
Kala, absent from the sitting room, must have been listening in, for the next day she asked if I could help her beat the eggs. As I broke the yolk into a glass bowl she said Pa had been doing it all along, even before he left us he’d betrayed Ma—it was alright that Ma should require me to never write him letters.
“Tell me more,” I said. She patted her cornrows, stared through the window for a moment, then with a particular dreaming in her eyes, said, “All those women, and your Ma never said a word, all that humiliation…”
She stopped as if she’d said too much then asked me to pass her the garlic from the shelf. I whisked the eggs faster. High on the kitchen wall a portrait of the Madonna stared at me, lips pressed, face dignified. I wished to be like her.
I pictured Pa in the company of other women, tall slender women with thin necks, kohl-lined eyes. I pictured him in back rooms where the stay was charged by the hour. In that moment I pitied Ma.
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Pa came back on a windy day in January. He had a full moustache, and told stories of the coast. From his backpack he produced sachets of coconut candy, cashew nuts, and lime sweets. His eyes were the same, with that youthful glint that had once made me imagine him as an older brother rather than a parent. Upon his arrival Ma locked herself in her room, refused to see him. He knocked and she didn’t respond.
“Nina,” he pleaded, “please open up.”
I imagined Ma behind the door, busy with her evening routine: first she would wipe her face with a cotton pad soaked in ethanol, then with a pair of tweezers pluck out the hairs on her chin, wash her face with neem soap, then afterward, powder herself with Johnson’s talcum. Later she would lie in bed flipping through Grazia or Marie Claire. Perhaps she would call Aunty Kavata.
Pa walked away from that door, past me, to the storeroom at the end of the corridor and returned with the record-player. All year Ma had condemned the machine to a dusty cupboard. Now Pa produced it with an immense sense of pride, wiped it with a tablecloth and placed it on the floor. From his travelling bag he produced a set of vinyl records.
“You’ll love. Utazipenda,” he said. He held his hand out, offering me a dance. A part of me resented him, yet another longed for his devotion. I took his hand, and he took mine. Slowly we danced, the night wearing on. Through the parted muslin curtains I watched Mr. Masese’s tenement. His window spilled a pool of orange light into the veranda. I imagined him in his corner, writing a book that would change the world.
About the Author:
Kabubu Mutua (b. 2000) is a writer and translator who grew up in Machakos, Kenya, and spent most of his childhood in boarding school. His writing has appeared in adda, Exposition Review, A Long House, Short Story Day Africa, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Nairobi.
Isele Magazine 