Ndinda Kioko
At the oceanfront, a man in an embroidered hat stands with his donkey, watching the ocean hit the banks, threatening the land beyond it. Above him, at a balcony in the makuti-thatched guesthouse, a traveller watches the morning arrive.
The traveller’s name is not Anah.
She watches the sun peep its eye into the day, slowly rising from below. The residual darkness that had been lingering on top of the water disappears, and the darkness which had collected in the anchored dhows fritters away. The morning is now the colour of the ocean.
The traveller whose name is not Anah is visiting the Lamu archipelago. She arrived this morning from Nairobi, then Malindi and then Lamu town. She is here for Maulidi, Lamu’s Milad-un-Nabi. She is here to switch off her mind, to get rid of the stain of everyday noise, to shake off the dust that has accumulated over the years, to have a new conversation, to eat new foods, to swear in a different language, to litter another part of the world with pieces of herself, to think of nothing except wonder what it feels like to be a cloud, to dip her feet into the talcum-soft sand, to look at the sea and in the reflection, recognise herself.
At least that’s what she keeps telling herself.
But the traveller whose name is not Anah knows why she is here. She is here because she has just buried her husband. It is where she first met him, during the previous year’s Maulidi festival. She is also here because it is the last place the bus stopped.
As she watches the ocean, she remembers sitting in a coffee shop with her friend Boni two days before. She remembers him congratulating her for a good funeral, as if it were a birthday party. She remembers him telling her that she is still young, that someone else will find her; and then wanting to tell him that his tea is getting cold, and suddenly forgetting, and then getting lost in the crowd below – the life of the street sucking her in. She remembers watching the street as she is watching the ocean now – the street, ominous as the ocean; the ocean, not as seedy as the street.
At the foot of the throng that winds through the city alleys after 5 p.m., she remembers beggars and hawkers laying down their wares, each one of them fighting for a chance to cash in on Nairobi’s rush hour. She remembers the city council van, parked at a hidden pavement, the askaris hawk-eyed, ready to pounce, a woman clutching her handbag, tight under her armpit, a man bumping into another as they cross the street, and then before an insult is hauled, the realization that they know each other from somewhere, an open window, a jump, a scream, ‘My phone!’
She remembers hordes on the street coming and going, crossing and almost crossing, and waiting for a matatu to cross first, and then crossing and skittering for the only bus.
‘Gari ya mwisho! Gari ya mwisho!’ the touts chorusing, beating their hands hard on the body of the bus, calling commuters’ attention to the last bus of the night. Each bus is the last bus.
As she watches the dhows bob in the ocean, she thinks about the people she saw on the street that day. She wonders where they were all going, where they were coming from, and if they were cared for in the places and spaces they belonged to.
As with everyone else she has met and is yet to meet, she wonders if they watched the news the day her husband was murdered on the street, and what they said if they did. She wonders if they clutched their husbands and their children close, and if they know loss by its first name. Then promptly, it hits her how arrogant it is for her to wonder about such things. She reminds herself that it is in the loyalty pledge. One pledges their loyalty, their readiness and duty to endure loss.
‘Suspected gangster killed, two guns and explosives recovered.’
She remembers his fear of guns almost at the same time she remembers the curliness of his hair and how much she hated his overuse of the outmoded Hair Glo.
The traveller whose name is not Anah remembers thinking about all the mothers she had seen on television, clutching old photographs, speaking of sons who never made it home. She wonders how it must have been for them – sitting, waiting, hoping that each knock on the door was from their son’s fist.
Then she remembers the overwhelming urge to be in a moving bus – the hankering to enjoy solitude in motion, and then suddenly asking her friend to take her to the bus station.
‘Isn’t it too early to go home? You should wait out the traffic.’
She remembers how this reminded her of her grandmother:
‘You have come home with darkness.’
‘You should go to church sometime, get a pastor to bury you when you die.’
At the bus, she remembers the man with the receipt book.
‘Where to?’
‘Where is it going?’
‘Lamu.’
‘That’s where I’m going.’
And then her friend pulling her out of the bus, telling her that it is not so good for a girl to do these things by herself. She remembers texting him after eight hours on the bus, in the potent pride of a lone traveller, apologising for her aloneness.
‘I’m learning the world again, alone.’
She is here now, learning how to watch the ocean, alone.
Her attention shifts back to the man in the embroidered hat and his donkey. She watches him watch the fishermen dock their boats and the parade of dhows bobbing in the water. A new crowd of weary visitors, mostly white, alights from the boat that has just docked after the short hop between Manda and Lamu. She watches the awe in their faces at the first sight of the old town – perhaps shocked by the closeness of the town to the ocean, or annoyed by the lack of space.
She remembers Issa’s love for the island.
‘They don’t know our cruel, harried world. Their world has been softened by the ocean and the gentleness of the wind. We should move here’. She remembers him laughing lightly.
‘You’d finally get a chance to finish your book.’ She remembers forgetting to ask him what he’d be doing.
She pretends he is here. There is a way her heart feels – like the residual warmth on a seat when someone who has been there for a while stands up from it, or the warmth left in your hand after a long, firm handshake, the sudden feeling of contentment, loss and indigestion.
The traveller whose name is not Anah tries to remember why she loved Lamu in the first place. She knows it wasn’t for the same reasons Issa loved it, but she cannot recall exactly why at first. But then she remembers being struck by how the fishermen named their boats – Kipendacho Moyo, the one the heart loves. Lamu si Kenya, Lamu is not Kenya. Nipe Nikupe, give me, I’ll give you. Wape Vidonge Vyao, give them their medicine. She also remembers loving how in the afternoon, the smell of biryani and old spices wafted its way from people’s kitchens through the thickly coral stone walls into the tiny streets that squeezed their way through the old buildings.
She loved the silence in Lamu.
She hated how everyone knew everyone new. She hated the idea of not being in a moving bus for days, not losing herself into the busy streets in the city. She hated the sight of the arrogant ocean, how it took up all the space, squeezing the people into a tiny strip of land.
Now, the traveller whose name is not Anah is here, learning to love the things he loved that she didn’t.
For a brief moment, she wonders what day of the week it is, not sure if it is Thursday or Monday. She might have forgotten, but she remembers one thing; that today is her father’s birthday. He chose it one day many years ago when she asked him about his birthday and, unable to remember, he decided it was the expiry date on the insecticide tin he was holding.
She wonders if she should call him, and what she would say if she were to call him. She wants to tell him that she loves him, but between her and her father, such incoherence is known, not uttered. These words are strangers to her father’s lips. She wouldn’t even recognise them if he uttered them.
But she knows her father loves her. He tells her all the time when it is raining or when he is planting.
‘It’s raining.’
‘We are planting.’
There is a way he says these words – as if the rain carries a message in it from him to her, and each time it falls, she should be listening.
She stops thinking about her father and goes downstairs for breakfast. She sits at a table that allows her the view of the ocean. The waiters watch her watch the ocean. When she eventually goes to the counter to ask about the holdup, the man in blue uniform apologises.
‘Most girls who come here do not buy. They smoke cigarettes and wait.’
He brings her masala chai, and she holds out her small cup, no paying attention to him. She continues to watch the ocean, responding in a slight gasp each time the waves slap the land with force. She finds it threatening; how the water hits the seawall with force, rising to form an ephemeral wall. She wonders about the language of the ocean; the language between the ocean and the land and the language between the ocean and those it has swallowed. What things do they say to each other when no one is listening?
‘You learn to love the ocean,’ the man in the blue uniform says. She smiles and sips her masala chai.
When she is done drinking, she takes a walk through the maze of narrow, shady streets squeezing their way between the coral stone walls. It is almost high noon, but some of the alleys are dark, too dark to see. The further she goes, the darker and more deserted it becomes. As she makes her way through the alleys whose walls threaten to hug each other, she remembers what the guide said about the slab above some of the narrow streets; it connects the two families once their children get married.
In one of the shadowy corners, she finds a man in his kanzu, rubbing his donkey’s back. It is the same man she watched in the morning, sitting at the daka porch outside one of the intricately carved wooden front doors. She extends her hand in greeting and he ignores it nonchalantly.
‘Are you a journalist?’
‘No.’
‘I was hoping you were.’
Before he continues, the muezzin calls the town to prayer. The shadowy alleys that were empty a few minutes before are now filled with men in full length kanzus and embroidered caps, hurrying past her. The man who was rubbing the donkey jumps on its back and hits it lightly on its stomach and riding away, without another word to her.
Later that evening, while having a drink at the floating bar, she meets the man in the embroidered hat again. He stares at her, and in his eyes, they meet, as if for the first time.
‘Why are you sitting alone.’ It doesn’t sound like a question.
She joins him and his friends, and amidst trivial conversations and tremulous laughter that ripples the water at their feet, they ask her who she is here with. She wants to tell them that she is not alone. That she is here with Issa.
She makes an excuse for her solitude, again, explaining that her husband was working. He couldn’t get time off.
At some point, when the bar is full and everyone is drunk except her, the man in the embroidered hat invites her for a dance. Even though she is shy at first, she puts down her drink and joins him. Together, they are lost in the slow Taarab dance.
Later that same evening, the man in the hat invites her outside for a smoke. She follows him. He leans on the rails separating the floating bar from the water and they listen to the ocean slapping against the tanks that hold the bar above the water. There is something even more threatening about the calmness of the ocean in the dark. In the near distance, she can see Lamu town, numerous dots of light emanating from the high windows.
He hands her a cigarette. She accepts it.
‘You don’t look like a smoker.’
‘I don’t smoke,’ she says, holding it up for him to light.
Then she holds the lit cigarette between her fingers, watching the stick burn into ash, and then eventually the ash giving up, falling into the ocean. She asks him to light another one, and they sit in silence, both of them inhaling.
The traveller does not smoke. She however loves the smell of nicotine and the dark that grows on the hands of smokers from many years of cigarette burns. As she watches the ash drop into the sea, she thinks about her father, and wonders again if she should call him. She pictures him sitting somewhere in the dark outside his house, smoking one cigarette after another. She can hear his cough.
When they are done smoking, the man in the hat asks his friend for the keys. His friend looks at her and smiles. He then calls the man in the embroidered hat aside, whispers something to him, and then gives him a key. The traveller whose name is not Anah follows the man in the embroidered hat to a speedboat.
In no time, they are back in Lamu town. He leads her to a hotel with a carved teakwood front door. She follows him up the stairs to the rooftop, where she can see almost all of Lamu town sleeping below her. The man tries to kiss her, but her lips are cold, too cold to kiss. He then removes a handful of leaves from his pockets. He smiles at her. She smiles back. He places a pinch of the leaves on a piece of paper and rolls them into a stick. Then he lights it and puffs. He hands her the roll and she smokes it, without a question. From the rooftop, they watch the old town orbit around the building. The more they smoke, the faster the town revolves. They laugh at nothing in particular and at such things as the wind.
He comes to stand next to her, and when he touches her, it is as if thousands of hands have touched her face. She wants to ask him if he knows Issa. He pushes her to the wall and kisses her, without removing his hat and he begins to walk back to the building. She follows him down the stairs, and when they get to the room, she demands that they take a shower first.
‘You first,’ he says.
She goes first.
When he is done, without wiping the beads of shower water off his skin, he pulls her to him and kisses her gracelessly, and then he asks her to close her eyes.
‘I have something to show you.’
After two seconds, he asks her to open her eyes. His embroidered hat is off. He is bald, with just small bushes of curly white hair at the back of his head. Without his hat, he looks thirty years older.
‘Please don’t leave.’
There is a way he fucks: in chunks, like he is about to give up, and then going back to the beginning and starting again, like a generator that is running out of fuel.
‘You have beautiful eyes.’
She kisses him angrily and shuts him up.
She wants to ask how old his daughter is, but instead, she thinks about how changing the position of your reading table or reducing the distance between your bed and your window can suddenly change your life completely.
He seems to have forgotten that she is there with him, and as she watches him in the dim light she feels like she is watching a man masturbate inside her. She drifts off again and begins to think about the man she once dated – and how her dreams were as big as the space between the four walls he paid rent for.
When he is done, he collapses next to her. A few minutes later, he lights a cigarette and offers her one. Then he kisses her. There is a way his kiss tastes; one can tell that it is the last one.
‘You never told me your name.’
‘It used to be Anah.’
‘Why is it not Anah now?’
She is tempted to tell him about the man who gave her that name, but by the time she decides, he is already asleep. She rests on the bed for a bit. As she watches the ceiling, a strange feeling of incompleteness engulfs her. She feels like she is part of a circle that is broken and she doesn’t know what to do with herself outside this circle. She dresses and leaves.
The man in whose boat she rides to Shela Beach later that morning has long curly locks, all dyed brown. He does not remember her from before. She asks him if he enjoys what he does, just like Issa asked him when they were riding in his boat a year ago.
They talk about Nairobi, and he refers to it as if it is another country. He tells her that in his thirty-two years, he has never taken the bus. She has heard this story before.
‘I have no need for the bus. I don’t want to know what’s beyond the bus.’
‘They hate us there,’ he says, after a long silence. As he says this, he cuts through the water with his speedboat, angrily.
She knows what he means. She wants to contribute to this conversation somewhat, to tell him about the pool of blood that day on the street. Before she speaks, he points at another island across the lagoon where mansions and luxurious guest houses stand, their oppressive and clean white almost swallowing the blue in the ocean.
‘Two years ago, those used to be our wells.’
He cuts through the water angrier this time.
‘A woman was killed there, and then the others started to leave. No one lives there now.’
He asks her what she would do if a man walked into her house and started bringing down the walls. She does not answer.
Later, she walks on a thin pavement at the edge of the ocean, walking back to where schoolgirls seem to be coming from, where everyone else seems to be coming from.
She spots more writings on walls, more writings on docked boats and others that bob in the ocean. MRC (Mombasa Republican Council), Lamu sio Kenya. Pwani sio Kenya. Lamu is not Kenya. A flag here, and a sketch of a currency there.
She comes back to a restaurant and looks for somewhere to sit. She asks the waitress if she can get a table for one. They offer her a table for two. The binaries of the world refuse to leave her alone.
In the evening, the sun sinks and the lights come up. In the darkness, the shacks in Lamu town and the private guest houses on Manda beach become equal, reduced to light bulbs, each one of them a mote in the oppressive darkness, squeezed into size by the pompous ocean.
Beyond the shack under which she listens to the ocean and watches a Swahili pre-wedding celebration on the street, the water is a few inches away from her, but quiet in the dark. The man wearing the embroidered hat from the night before is leading the dance procession of men. He is the groom’s father.
She thinks about the previous year’s Maulidi festival.
She wants another cigarette.
She should call her father.