A chapter in my life I would give up for a dollar

Last night they cut my power

Just one fast forward dusk like all the power outages Kenyans are accustomed to but this time it was only my one roomed flat. The rest of the single rooms in the opposite tenement flickered like fireflies now that I was plunged in darkness. My thoughts fraught enough to compliment between the words in the novel I was reading and the reality that had just struck.

I only had train fare left, you know. So the first reaction was acclimatising to the fact that this blackout would really last for long. Two, that this writing under a yellow candle flame with a blue arse like monkeys would become household. Three, that maybe I will finally break. It is the third thought that scared me most.

I had tried not to notice things, you know. The fact that I lived in a crappy one room who sewage pipes were burst and collected in foul pool that bred vicious mosquitoes. The fact that I lived next to neighbours who thought I was a teacher because I read so thick novels. Neighbours who drunk cheap alcohol illicit alcohol or smoked bhang in constant intervals just to avoid noticing the squalor. Neighbours who managed to fit in these one rooms with four to six children, one bed (How did they even make love in that crowd?) I had feigned indifference maybe because I hope soon enough I would leave these derelicts behind. But every waking day was serving a reminder that my desire to leave would not be quenched soon.

At least the caretaker was holding me in higher esteem smiling or brandishing her yellow teeth a little more whenever I paid rent in full. She had placed a notice on the landing just beneath the stairs warning of eviction if the tenants could not pay by 10^th of each month. After some obscenities were slewed on the piece of handwritten notice someone tore it through the spine obviously irritated by either the notice or obscenities.

But just that silent instant in a square swimming pool of black suffocating air I desired home. Home where we had never had our lights disconnected. Where my father would somehow always manage to pay earlier than expected.

But I quickly fought that lethargic thought. I would not fail in my quest to cut out a life for myself. I would not fail in this town of unequal opportunity. Yes unequal opportunity because while I was going to a children’s home in Karen yesterday staring at humongous real estates and knowing my idea of making it in this city would never win me one of those. This naivety to work hard would only land me in mid-life crisis. Here I needed either pure luck ingenious deceit a corrupt patron or mooting voodoo.

And this restlessness made me start seeing and coming to terms with my reality instead of fleeting to the desired future I had painted in my mind like canvas murals. I now noticed the ragged men who used the trains that made me feel out of place when I took the train home yesterday evening. Heir ripped up collars and browning clothes who would squeeze up into you in the crammed up spaces. Where men’s limp members were pressed against your thighs and women’s warm breasts on your shoulder blades. Where fat women selling groundnuts would wedge through the crowded boogie and one would feel his wallet moving out of the pocket. Where peoples breath with mint or menthol from chewing PK would merge with haughty pronouncement of hunger stale alcohol and fading perfume would merge and float like low clouds on mountain tops. I had effectively ignored the hoarse rheumatic breathing and minions of dashing spittle making rainbow kaleidoscopes whenever they sneezed. All I did was keep my head high to avoid drowning in my hypersensitivity that no one else could afford to notice.

But that afternoon at the children’s home I jumped at the offer of a free meal. In my calculations I had saved a lot of money, sixty shillings to be precise. I was pleased with myself shrewd. A pale white lady who was seating at my table decided it was her business to keep the conversation going. She decide everyone should say what they did. How was I supposed to tell her I they had sent an intern to cover the event. I told her I was a correspondent, a get paid a retainer and a commission for every story. And that self-deceiving instant I realized I was no longer comfortable in my skin. That freckled woman whose pork white skin was speckled with browns spots and her freckled white hair was tidy behind her head in perfect streaks made my castle in the wind crumble. All the time that I introduced myself to my friends answering that I worked in a big media company without giving the details of the nature of my position no longer stood. I was an intern; I had been so for some time. I was paid a stipend and that was all that there was. So when the white old lady who had been in Kenya long enough to make deductions of local dailies who could tell my tribe by my name (Otiato, you are Lou? She said in a knowing Kenyan way) made me face my reality I stated seeing things for what they were and felt pitiable.

I realized from then on it would be difficult to pretend not to see the thick coalesced fat of unhealthy muturas (stuffed goat or cow intestines) that I sometimes ate for supper. Or the sickening rush of acidic cheap liquor, Meakins vodka to be precise, that I drink in Nairobi backstreets. In those dingy unlit bars with urinals that could scald eyes with urea as if pissing was peeling onions. I realized I could no longer use those who were below me as reference point and see myself as just a little haughtier than them and the thin veil of self-absorption that comparison availed me. I had opened up eyes my alter ego thought was long overdue. A restless soul like mine needed heavier blankets of self-deceit to live the life I was living. But the fear of failing was the greatest conviction that would not allow me to throw in the towel. I had to cultivate a belief that some good will come of it. It was like an atheists belief in God.

So today evening with barely anything left for the rest of this disdainful period I will go to Québec wines and spirits. I will buy a half a bottle of Meakins vodka. While standing with a bunch of casual labourers and small time business men I will hope it will deliver a quick blackout to  face the harrowing darkness that awaits me like the uncertainties in my life. And in the carefree nature that only my college buddies could relate to, I will whisper after cringing my face to allow saliva to calcine the woeful taste of cheap vodka, ‘Money Commeth’