Three Different Kinds of Love

Memories of my kid brother Adika, better known as Dikish, are many and varied, and they swim in and out of the mind’s eye like a plucked leaf bopping on a sun-dappled stream surface on a breezy December afternoon.

This time we are in mum’s smoky thatched kitchen that has tendrils of soot hanging from the roof like tarred stalactites, assailed by the mouth-watering aroma of fried chicken wafting from the earthen ruvindi pot kept warming on the hearth.

The meal is ready and mum has gone off to fetch the church elders who are coming to feast at our large unfinished house that has cavernous rooms in which your voice echoes back at you if you take in a lungful of breath and shout, and which has no ceiling.

It was a particularly stubborn cockerel that gave us a lot of trouble to catch as we chased it through the banana grove, and my ribs are aching from the wound a stick inflicted when I slipped in a trench and fell.

We are about to stage our little coup d’etat and Dikish is scared witless, his bright white innocent eyes watching me intently. I am older, and I occasionally bully him into doing things he doesn’t want to. But he is a nice kid who doesn’t speak back at his elder brother.

We are not happy at the fact that the church elders get to eat the choicest part of the chicken when it is slaughtered while us, the chicken minders who are charged with herding them in at the end of the day and watching out for the hawks, get to eat the innards, feet, head and other castoffs.

I take the lid off the sizzling pot and invite Dikish to help himself. He looks inside and hesitates. And so, to goad him on, I dip my hand inside, pick out a choice drumstick, shake the soup off it and put it in my pants pocket, licking my dripping fingers.

“Come on, go on! We don’t have much time!”

Dikish wipes the steam out of the way and peers inside.

“You had better choose wisely. Mum is going to find out, that is for sure; and she is going to whoop us real bad. It is better if the flogging is done on a full belly,” I give him my sagely advice.

I am Satan tempting Jesus with a vision of paradise during his trial in the desert. Dikish tries to resist but it is too much for him, his mouth salivating at the prospect. His hand hovers over the mouth of the pot. He dips in and pulls out a steaming wing and blows on it. I watch him carefully. He seems to remember what I told him. Then he resigns himself to fate and drops the wing back in and instead withdraws the remaining choice drumstick that is meant for the Quaker pastor, the one that was to add an extra layer to his already fat sweaty neck and an inch to his big round belly that threatens to pop his shirt buttons.

He examines it the way God probably did Adam’s rib when he wanted to create for him the woman who would shortly tempt him with an apple and see him expelled from Paradise. Then he decides it is worth the inescapable flogging and blows on it, shakes off the soup, and dumps it in his pants pocket. God might as well keep His paradise.

Then we restore the lid and make our way out of there down into the treed valley to enjoy our feast, kesi baadaye.

Needless to say we were thoroughly flogged that evening by our furious mum.

When I close my eyes again the other vivid memory of Dikish that comes to mind is that of a visit to our aunt in Kilingili before we reported back to Mumias Boys’ Primary after a long Christmas break one January.

So, we arrive at auntie’s place and her dark face explodes in an infectious smile because we are her favourite nephews from her sly world-wise brother. Auntie brews and sells chang’aa, that fiery distilled liquor that doesn’t tolerate a diet of greens, which means a fowl is no doubt going to be slaughtered and fried properly in Kimbo fat for her visiting nephews. And she puts a whole 250-gramme block of Kimbo in the sufuria, this auntie of ours, because she likes the frying meat to glisten.

And so we go through the house chores for auntie, fetching her water from the nearby stream, running errands to the shop, splitting her wood, trimming the hedge and flower bushes in the front yard and raking the leaves off the lawn till her home is spanking clean. Then we sit down to gorge ourselves on the glistening feast.

Eventually the time comes for us to take our leave. Back then, unlike today, when you visited your aunt, you didn’t leave empty-handed.

Meaning when we eventually alighted from the face-me pick-up matatu at Stand Kisa, Dikish and I would be covered in fine murram dust but, more importantly, clutching a fowl each under our arms. And the sly market women could always sniff us out from a distance and from previous dealings, knew well what was on our minds.

The deals were hastily struck and we gladly accepted the first offer they gave us for auntie’s gift chickens that had never been meant to get home. Reason being right then we needed hard cash to top up the little pocket money pops would give us as we headed back to school. As for when auntie eventually came visiting and demanded to know if the gift chickens had started laying we figured we could always cross that bridge when we came to it.

When he was about twelve or thirteen Dikish once asked me what the word ‘masturbation’ meant. He knew that I was going to become a published author, and that I would know a big word like that because I always had my nose tucked in a dictionary.

I looked at him sideways and wanted to ask him where he picked up that word, and who he had been speaking to – there was no internet back then. I don’t remember how I resolved that imbroglio, but I guess he was not convinced and impressed at the answer he whittled out of me.

There are many other fond memories of growing up with Dikish, the brother I was closest to in that house of nine kids and countless relatives who popped in and out as we grew up.

There was us sneaking out of home in the company of our cousins and other village boys in the pitch dark of midnight to go see the Safari Rally cars that we had heard on the radio would be passing in Gisambayi market center that night, an hour’s walk from our home. Then there was me giving him my packet of Nyayo milk in the year he was still a day scholar living with a friend of dad’s who worked at Mumias Sugar Company as dad put together the money to pay for his boarding, and where he told me the meals weren’t that great.

Memories of when we came of age and I escaped home and embarked on a journey to see the sea in Mombasa, and how on my return we are lounged at the shops in Munoywa market, me with my fashionable pleated baggy trousers hoisted up at belly-button level with a wide chrome-buckled belt, imitation dark Ray Ban shades and slanting Shabba Ranks box-cut glistening with Hair Glo gel, my Coastal Swahili holding the village boys in a thrall.

Thereafter we pose for a photo with my village girlfriend, and as I treat them to soda and snacks I casually take out a pack of SM cigarettes and light up, blowing the smoke heavenwards like a pro. Dikish tries a drag and coughs. We break out laughing.

When we came of age ready to be circumcised we went into Doctor Mugadili’s clinic in Chavakali together, with me going first because I was older, the old man standing by to make certain we wouldn’t bolt off once we realized what was going on inside because he had raised us and knew us well.

And then we were fully grown and ready to get married, and it was the same Dikish who escorted me on my first visit to my wife’s place. And when his time came, I paid him back.

In short, this guy was always a part of my coming-of-age misadventures, always lurking in the shadows. And then, out of the blue, the subtle changes start happening, the occasional headache and the, “Ah, I don’t feel like a beer today, let me just do soda”; the ordinary things you take for granted.

And then this call comes from Umoja where he was staying saying that someone found him on the street. That he was walking home from the matatu stage when he suddenly collapsed. That the neighbor, who knew him, helped him on his feet and supported him the rest of the way home. Without warning life has done a flip and the nightmare chapter has opened.

It took me the rest of the afternoon to tie up the business I was involved in at the studio at The GoDown and it was only the following morning that I managed to get to Umoja after a restless night. Dikish was in hospital, a private clinic in nearby Donholm, where he had been taken by our other brothers Philip and Dulo, who lived close by.

And he was looking nothing like his former self. A distant look had slipped into his eyes, which had yellowed and seemed to struggle to focus, and he looked very tired, like someone who had come out of a long trek in the desert. He tried to smile, but it came off weak.

My brothers were standing by, quiet, as the ‘doctor’ fussed over him, adjusting an IV tube here and shining a tiny torch in his eyes there. A chilly claw suddenly took hold of my heart. Regardless of the reassurances something – an instinct – told me that this was pretty serious.

A drip had been set up on a stand at the head of the bed and some liquid solution was draining steadily into my brother’s arm like the sand grains of an hourglass. I wondered what they were pumping into him.

It went downhill rather fast, the drips changing every time the pouch ran out. It became a daily occurrence. Some days he would seem to be fine, and even rise and ask to be helped to the washroom or to be assisted to eat his porridge or fruit juice. And then he would relapse again and we would be back to square one. And there clearly was something about his eyes, details that I’d rather leave out. As for the headaches, he told us they were terrible. Could we ask the doctor to give him stronger medication so that he could sleep?

The short of it is that after an interlude in which we took him to an optician in Westlands who fitted him with glasses to rectify his sight it eventually dawned on us that we were dealing with a ‘doctor’ who was Googling stuff on the internet according to the symptoms he was observing.

It is someone else who recommended we take Dikish for specialized tests at a cancer center in Upper Hill, where his condition was eventually properly diagnosed as a tumor in his brain. And the growth was at an advanced stage. In short we were staring at chemo and other sophisticated and expensive procedures. I was jarred, but furious at the same time. I wanted to go buy a gun somewhere and pay that quack in Donholm a visit.

And that is how it all ended up at the ICU in Kenyatta National Hospital. By then I was very much resigned to fate, watching relatives gather in the hall at visiting time and pray. It was too much for me, especially watching his wife shrink into herself like someone on whose shoulders a heavy wet cloak had been draped, the prospect of having to raise two young daughters on her own seeming imminent with every passing day.

The waiting bit was maddening; the fact that there was nothing you could do but just watch the machines beep-beeping, fluids flowing through clear plastic tubes, cursors tracking jig-jagging electronic paths on computer screens, and silent uncommunicative eyes that occasionally rewarded you with a flicker at the nonsense blubber you were struggling to say.

I wondered how deeply religious people like my mum and sisters waiting outside managed to hold onto this amorphous thing called faith. I was a tactile being. I liked for my hands and fingers to hold onto things they could see and feel. There was only one thing that could save me now. It has never disappointed me.

As a student at Kenya Poly I came to know the watering holes in the service lane behind Tuskys, Tom Mboya Street intimately; it is the lane where I lost my Nairobi virginity. They are the places we went to Saturday afternoons after classes because that is where you could find keg and the cheapest liquor brands on the market – that is, if you were not the type who took a keen interest in where what you were drinking had been manufactured.

The narrow urine-soaked alleys issuing off the lane were often lined with used condoms and dirty syringes, leaving little to the imagination of what went on there after darkness descended. They were also convenient crapping places for the street chokoras.

You could buy weed, coke and meth on that lane together with a myriad other illegal stuff, depending on what business you were engaged in, and how trustworthy you looked to the street.

And the wild girls we dated didn’t mind accompanying us there either, after a treat of chips mwitu on the front side of the street whenever our lean student budgets could allow. As for the even wilder Eastlando types Monte Carlo Club across Accra Street was the place to go for a healthy dose of reggae, the dub pulsing like an insatiable anaconda in the background of the fugue of stale cigarette smoke, sweat and cheap liquor, nodding along to the chants of Papa Charlie’s proteges . . . inua mguu moja juu, kidole juu ya hewa . . . as the bouncers kept you jumping on your feet till you were thirsty as a camel, giving you no space to sit down to catch your breath.

But ‘Monte’ was not for altar boys. It was strictly for the street-hardened because you were likely to be relieved of your wallet and phone by those shifty-eyed jaba-chewing boys who crowded the narrow corridor leading to the washrooms.

Other than those, whenever my pocket could afford bottled beer I ambled further down to Tsavo Road and popped into an old haunt called Reke Marie – I am told it translates to “let them mind their own business” in Gikuyu; or, put more succinctly, simply “sod off”.

Reke Marie, before it was dismantled to pave way for the “stall” menace that took over downtown Nairobi, was an interesting place. It was the place where I first ate a soft-boiled goat’s head garnished with hot “phiri-phiri” chillies and kachumbari. It was delicious, and quickly became addictive.

The lazy cats in there that had fattened off the castoffs of the establishment’s butchery didn’t budge off the seats when shooed off, and if you kicked them off to allow you to sit they gave you an acid look as they ambled off majestically. Almost always they were heavily pregnant, indicating their love for the hedonistic indulgences that went on in this tiny Sodom and Gomorrah that probably didn’t blink on the radar of the city’s health authorities.

If you went for a leak at a late hour you were bound to surprise a plague of the fattest sewer rats and roaches you had ever seen exploring the ancient drains for their supper, often cleaning up the puke that a drunk had splashed on the floor and walls. Just like the cats upfront those too didn’t give way, and instead eyeballed you and warned you wordlessly to mind your own business or have a taste of their fangs.

The first time I mentioned to a writer-friend, an old Nairobi backstreet hack, that I drank at Reke Marie, he gave me a strange sharp look and laughed but said nothing.

And so, next time I was there I kept my eyes open and it all started piecing together. Those old Kikuyu landlord-types who drank White Cap, and who favoured the front part of the old pub that had a view of the street and the younger crossdressed guys who sat in the shadows at the back nursing a soda as they played with their phones, girlish bangles dangling on their slim wrists, fake diamond studs flashing in one ear whenever the light of the bare yellow bulbs glinted off them started to weave together the pieces of a pattern.

It was a gay pick-up joint where intimate deals were struck in silent signals, the tired waiters and barmaids acting as mute conveyor belts. Sometimes a couple disappeared discretely upstairs, or sometimes they staggered out at a late hour and got into a dilapidated cab that had pulled up at the kerb outside.

I liked to sit at the back. Which, in hindsight, probably means I was on the radar of the old moneyed landlords, who probably found me undesirable; otherwise a waiter would have approached and whispered something like “Umenunuliwa hii chupa pale mbele” in my ear. Or maybe they thought I was there to fish like they were; a silent flesh vulture in the epicurean haunts of K. Selo Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams.

I occasionally forced my brothers to come to Reke Marie, but they were clearly uncomfortable. They preferred the more decent Signature Club further up the street where Philip drank his Guinness and Coke, and Dulo burned his throat with Richot.

These were the kind of spaces I was floating in as I dragged my feet and prevaricated over taking a Kenya Bus and going to Kenyatta Hospital to see Dikish hooked to those blinking machines, staring sightlessly in the frightening silent world that he had slipped into. It was the dirty armpit of the city in whose embrace I found succor at a time when I was scared of stepping out into the light to face the business that awaited me. My tiny womb of familiar faces that gave me comfort – even if momentary – and the Dutch courage that enabled me to confront reality.

It is Dikish who taught our last-born Dulo to drive properly Nairobi-style out of the staid lessons offered in driving school. He likewise offered to take me to the newly opened Thika Road to confront my fears. But I gently declined and told him I am more of a bush driver than a highway one; and, even worse, I am not much of a speed freak. Trundling along a country road in a beat-up truck laden with thaara for the cows with the windows open and soft rumba playing on the stereo was the kind of thing that gave me orgasms. That if you put me behind the wheel in downtown Nairobi traffic you would be adding another layer of stress to my already messed up life.

Meantime, as I weighed the options and watched the hospital bill climb steadily, the Donholm quacks, who had all our phone numbers, were bombarding us with threatening calls and sms-es to clear the remainder of their bill when they realized we were not coming back to their facility. They told us that they knew where we were and had the means of catching us. We ignored them. And they were relentless, those guys, the phone threats continuing even long after we had buried Dikish.

We brought Dikish to Kenyatta Hospital with him believing we were going to see the doctor who would diagnose him, write a prescription and send us on our way to buy him drugs at the pharmacy on the way home. But it was not to be. The doctors took their time, before they informed us that this one was not going back home with us.

It was not the first time. We had brought pops here earlier when he was battling prostate cancer. For his case he was given a prescription and we left to buy him the drugs at a chemist’s shop downtown. Thereafter we shared a meal of ugali and fish.

It was the first time I was sitting face-to-face with the old man. We had an on-and-off relationship throughout my troublesome childhood and adulthood years. It was awkward.

Dikish was seated opposite Philip in those cramped face-me kienyeji food restaurants. As he picked at his fish the old man kept asking if we had confirmed the booking of his night bus. For someone who used to adore his choma and Tusker the drugs they made him take messed up his appetite badly. He was insistent that he was not going to spend another night in the city. He was missing his cows and his boma.

Dikish didn’t get off so lightly. He was now locataire at the hospital, as Franco sang in one of his songs.

At one point I got so hopeless and distressed at what I was seeing of my formerly bubbly kid brother with whom I had explored my boyhood. I plucked up the courage to ask the young Somali doctor who was tending to him to show me how to switch off the machines. I could read it in the eyes of the medics. It was only a matter of time.

We were alone in the ward, and I remember reassuring the young doctor that it was a personal decision, and that his professional conscience needn’t bother him. That if there was a pitchfork waiting to turn someone in the flames in the afterlife then it was meant for me and not him, because I would readily admit to having turned off the machines with my hand when I got to the pearly gates.

He took a long hard look at me and calmly told me that if I touched anything on those machines I would trigger a wailing siren that would ring through the corridors of the ward like a jailbreak siren; that I should wipe the idea out of my mind. I’ve never found out if he was lying or not.

Dikish slipped away quietly two days later.

***

At the edge of my compound upcountry stands a tiny gazebo roofed with rusty mabati where I like to entertain my village friends with a drink; my Ezeudu’s reception hall with lines drawn on the walls in chalk representing the people he owes money and yams. It is a convenient place for man-banter (or to ‘break cola’ in Achebespeak), out of the earshot of the missus. You can smoke weed there if you like, it won’t bother anyone.

The Kikuyu call this useful structure thingira. The Luo abila. We call it kidunda. It is a cozy man-place that is even more appealing if it is thatched the traditional way.

This is where we went to sit after we finally muscled the hearse down the muddy village road and brought Dikish home. I had earlier ordered my rider to fetch five litres of the finest chang’aa in Isukha, to drown our sorrows in.

As I stared into my glass listening to friends and family talk it suddenly hit me fully. That I would never see Dikish again. Without warning the tears welled out of me like a gush. It was the first time I had cried at a funeral. The guys I was with watched in silence and said nothing.

Later, before they closed the lid, someone produced an Arsenal badge and we pinned it to the lapel of Dikish’s black suit. He might as well go out in style.

                                                               ***

But it is not just Dikish who had to go down that slippery path of no return. In the course of his ailment and treatment someone else who was very close to me was following his progress, asking pointed questions that should have rightly raised the red flag, if only I had paid close attention; giving suggestions on what we needed to try out. Dikish was well known to her because he used to service both our laptops whenever they crashed or needed a software upgrade.

I don’t know if she knew what was coming, but I sense that my long-time editor Susan Linneé had a premonition of sorts, only that she didn’t want to alarm people as was her style. I remember when I was gardening for her there was a day when she was clearly very ill but wouldn’t admit it. Hard as nuts, that lady was.

The house help, Anna, and I were debating on forcing her into her old Peugeot and driving her to Nairobi Hospital, apende asipende – as President Ruto likes to say – and thereafter inform her people. We could be damned with the consequences later. Fortunately, the following day she turned around and took a stroll on the lawn. Thereafter she got into her old Peugeot and drove herself to work.

A short two years after we buried Dikish, Susan also succumbed to the same cerebral cancer that killed my brother. It was a cruel twist of fate. These were two of the three people who had a huge influence on my life, going out just like that, utterly without warning, fluffing out like a flame on the wave of a hand.

I recall a mutual friend coming round to the GoDown where I was working then with a small hand recorder. She was recording encouraging messages from Susan’s friends and acquaintances that would be played for her in a hospital far away in Minneapolis, to give her some comfort and help her ride out the storm.

They said she was still conscious, acknowledging everything by the movements of her eyes, even if she could not speak. I took a long while in front of that recorder, thinking of what to say. I knew that it was imminent. I had been there before. It was only a matter of time.

I don’t remember exactly what I said into that recorder. While confronting her imminent departure – the doctors had admitted there was little else they could do – I was reminded of the petty arguments we had when she was teaching me to feed the sheet into her classic Olivetti manual typewriter after convincing me to learn to type my own manuscripts instead of relying on commercial typists to prepare the scripts for me.

I remembered the countless enriching discussions we had on her front verandah over coffee and crunchy biscuits as we discussed the latest books we had read. I remembered her red pen, which I dreaded everytime I sent a script to her to read through and edit and critique. The carefully thought-out sentences almost always came back thoroughly mutilated in red ink.

But I also remembered the petty arguments she had with her mother when she came visiting as she tried to force her to cut down on cake and steaks and instead eat some of the fresh lettuce that I grew in the garden. Her mother often retorted, rather loudly, that she hadn’t flown all the way from America to come eat leaves like a rabbit. That the steak and cakes were bought with her own money. It was very amusing for us to watch and listen in on these fights, which left us wondering who was the mother and who was the daughter.

These were the people who had suddenly been fluffed out of my life.

For the first time in my life I truly experienced what they mean by the phrase ‘being orphaned’. I was exposed and vulnerable, a chick plucked out of the nest on a wintry rainy afternoon; a rudderless ship on the high seas. Cruel fate had forced me out of my accustomed comfort zone and rendered me empty-handed: natikali maboko pamba, as they say in the rumba songs. In the blink of an eye I had lost it all, the trusted pillars upon which I always leaned for support. I wanted to curse God, but I could not see His face. I was utterly devastated.

For Dikish I had envisioned us growing into grumpy old men, sharing a whiskey that the kids had dispatched from Nairobi on the courier service on either his porch or mine as we watched the sunset. For Susan I was yet to tickle her ribs in retirement in America as she read in my memoirs about how we brewed busaa in the yard behind her servants’ quarters in Lavington, and how we knocked down her gate when a rattly Congo taxi laden full of chang’aa lost its brakes at midnight and came crashing into it, almost taking out the night guard.

I’m certain knowing the details of the mysterious incidents that had been going on in her Lavington home while she was away on assignment for the Associated Press in the Congo or somewhere else in the Great Lakes would have been of great interest to her. But it wasn’t going to be. Two of the stones were now out. The balance had tipped.

                                                                      ***

And now there was only one left; albeit an unattainable, elusive one that only resided in the vestiges of the imagination. A childhood enchantress who came into my life, lit a slow-burning fire in the back of her father’s Volkswagen Beetle and left the scent of her perfume behind to torment me with her storybook mysticism. An enchanting horse you could not put a harness on. An unrideable horse who would throw you and break your limb if you attempted to saddle her.

She was constantly there, watching in silence, mocking with her bewitching half-smile, reading my torment with her midnight eyes, and yet saying nothing. Unreachable like a Greek goddess. A slow poison that kills pleasurably.

It was three different kinds of love and the octopus tentacle of cancer extended its lethal touch to all three.