Our Example
The houses were identical. Each house had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a sitting room, and a dining room. The people who built these houses had put single unit servants’ quarters behind each house. Rectangular units, the size of upright coffins—shelters for the night watchmen—stood beside the gates. Landscapers had planted fruit trees—pawpaw trees, mango trees, loquat trees, and guava trees—in each compound, along with the kei apple hedges and bamboo fences that separated each house from the next so that every household got two varieties of fruit. Every evening, our night watchmen came to work with clubs, and with bows and arrows.
We had potted money plants growing up the walls in our sitting rooms. We believed that our financial statuses could be measured by these plants’ steady growth. The vines wrapped themselves around our framed graduation photographs, our wedding photographs, our dead relatives’ photographs, our calendars, our framed certificates, our plaques with inspirational messages, and everything else we nailed to our walls.
Our children went to school and came home together. Our maids bathed our youngest children at around four o’clock on weekdays. They sipped their porridge or drank tea as they watched our country’s flag fly inside the television. The National Anthem played in the background. They watched Kipindi Cha Watoto and other children’s programs before we returned from our jobs in time to catch Mambo Leo followed by Habari, the news at seven. At midnight, after listening to an invocation by a priest or kadhi, and the National Anthem, we switched off our televisions and went to sleep.
Except for the Litunda family at the corner of our street, we who lived in these houses had not yet become the people that the planners had dreamed of. We had kales, cowpeas, beans, or maize sprouting in places that had been designated for flowers. Some of us bought dog kennels and put the MbwaKali warning on our gates but we used the kennels as chicken coops. Our hens and cocks roamed inside Nyota Court but we taught them to avoid the Litunda compound. Mr. Litunda had no problem with going to the local authorities to report this kind of trespassing.
His green gate had the Mbwa Kali sign even though there was no dog or kennel yet. Mr. Litunda intended to acquire a police-trained dog to replace the watchman. He was also looking to be the first to install an electric fence in Nyota Court. Obed, his gardener, told his upcountry family that he worked as a caretaker at Hotel Litunda. We all called it Hotel Litunda. We served our night watchmen tea and whatever leftovers we had from supper but the Litunda watchman got a plate piled with food enough for a construction worker. Like our watchmen, he’d fight sleep and cold in his shelter and then in the morning wake up and leave promptly at six o’clock.
I found Nyota Court in the bricks and cement stage. I put my kiosk close to the main entrance facing the road and got a place to live, a distance away from the court. I helped the new residents find maids and gardeners, supplied their money plants, and shared with them the news that never got printed in my newspapers. The majority only ever bought the Sunday paper as they stopped to ask me why I did not go to church with them, but Mr. Litunda bought all three newspapers everyday, The Nation, Standard, and Kenya Times. He would roll down his car window and shake my hand, his smile revealing big white teeth. His daughter, Berita, sat like a real boss’s daughter in the back left seat. I always had something for them, sweets for Berita or flowers for Mrs. Rael.
“Mkubwa, support me,” I would say. “You buy, others follow.” Mr. Litunda would feign protest when I referred to him as a boss.
“Rono, you want to finish my money, eh!”
He always paid.
“How much did you charge him for those shears?” other residents of Nyota Court would ask.
“Five hundred.”
“Po!” They turned me away but, given enough time to see Obed trimming the fence with his new tool, they found money to spend.
“Just like Mr. Litunda’s,” I’d say, “and I can give you a better price.” Business was good. I could see my kiosk growing into a supermarket, then me and my wife packing up the shack, sleeping and waking up inside Nyota Court like our rich neighbours. I started saving money to fix my chipped teeth. I knew they made my customers uncomfortable, especially when I laughed. There was so much to laugh about those days.
We enjoyed the parties at Hotel Litunda. We ate and drank without bothering about how much it cost or the cleaning up afterwards. The Ng’ethes and the Pendos also hosted gatherings in their houses that they wanted us to believe were also parties. These were not real parties; their radios did not boom as we expected them to. Their get-together events always turned into lengthy prayer sessions, impromptu fundraisers, and attempts to prove that they were just as well off as the Litunda family. The most recent disaster had been the Pendo’s new pressure cooker that produced pulpy overcooked beef.
At Berita’s birthday party, Mrs. Rael announced that she was going to work abroad. London, she said. Mr. Litunda would visit during his leave before joining them permanently. We shouted congratulations and offered to help with the moving, but we had just arrived at the point where the Litundas were no longer the only Nyota Court residents with a car, and now they were announcing themselves as more special than us by flying in aeroplanes.
“Rono, keep an eye on Mkubwa for me,” Mrs. Rael said.
“But we must do business,” I said.
“Ah Rono,” she said, “I’m sure there’s a big house that side.” She pointed to the back of her house, further beyond where my neighbours lived in four-walls-and-a-window homes and trekked past Nyota Court twice a day to and from their places of work. I laughed but all I could see was that my big dreams were flying away with Mrs. Rael. Afternoons and weekends, I was at Nyota exchanging and selling plastic buckets, dresses, old irons, shoes, and mirrors. Mrs. Rael often supplied me with some of these items, old things that she had already replaced with newer things. I didn’t always sell everything she gave me, some things I preferred to keep.
Mr. Litunda without his wife and daughter had no need for a maid, so Gertrude left. Obed’s job expanded to both gardener and cook on the same salary. The watchman still had his job and Hotel Litunda was intact, though Mr. Litunda drove off most of the time, hardly ever stopping to buy my newspapers or anything else I had to sell. I had to jump in front of his car to get his attention.
“And the travel plans, Mkubwa?”
“Soon, very soon,” he said, “Madam sends greetings.” He’d then tell me that he was in a hurry before driving off. I couldn’t even sell him my new gadgets—the penknife, the special booster television aerial, and rabbits I had found that might have interested Berita, even if she was in London. I still had newspaper customers and replacing Mr. Litunda was not impossible. Ah, but this was a big setback.
We did not expect Mr. Litunda to greet us at the bus stop but if he remembered to wave at us, we waved back, because we had nothing against him. He had never been the type of person to stop and offer a lift, even on rainy days. We noticed that his “soon” departure date came and left the Christmas, Easter, and Madaraka Day holidays behind. Obed left Hotel Litunda after Christmas. “Eish!” was all he could say about what happened. We imagined him telling his family that Hotel Litunda had shut down. We did not want to press him to share his money problems. We had our own. We monitored our watchmen and when we caught them sleeping, we released them from their jobs. We hired welders to burglarproof our windows and doors. We told ourselves that all we needed to protect ourselves was our former watchmen’s bows and arrows hidden under our beds. Our children played telephone inside the watchmen’s shelters.
Mr. Litunda now received phone calls at the Ng’ethes home because the fools at Kenya Posts and Telecoms had accidentally disrupted his connection and he was fed up waiting for them to come back and fix it. On the Ng’ethe’s phone, he stood next to the front-door cupboard talking to Mrs. Rael. He sometimes put his head in the cupboard for privacy. They heard everything anyway. To keep him from talking for too long, Risper Ng’ethe stopped offering him a chair. To cut short his shouting, the Ng’ethes lied that they were also expecting important phone calls from abroad. He, for a long time now, had not had an office to go to with his briefcase and shiny polished shoes. Still, Mr. Litunda left every morning driving his car, always in a hurry.
Mr. Litunda was denied a visa. We heard that London only had a shortage of nurses. They had everything else, even astute businessmen like Mr. Litunda. Mr. Litunda was not the only one stranded in Nairobi. We saw many husbands, whose wives were also nurses, who had also waved at aeroplanes rising out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, left behind with promises that could not pay for their houses and for their food. These husbands escaped from Nairobi, in breaking down cars and on buses, to upcountry villages to die in houses that they had never intended to live in before reaching their sixties. We did not worry; Mrs. Rael had been the only nurse among us.
We allowed Mr. Litunda to persuade us to pay him to drive our children to school instead of using the school bus. The overcrowded school bus broke down too often and was always late, he reminded us. The school term was not yet even halfway and our children complained everyday: He makes us cover the floor mats with newspapers every Monday. And cover the seats with lesos to keep them clean. Also no talking in the car. He plays that one cassette over and over, they screamed. We did not tell our children that Mr. Litunda’s taxi was cheaper than the school bus.
It was not yet August, not yet a year since Mrs. Rael travelled when Mr. Litunda stopped his car, now a taxi, beside my kiosk. The same white car Obed had cleaned every morning, now old and dusty like a farm car. Mr. Litunda’s gleaming white teeth popped out as he smiled like a politician. “Brother, how is business?” he asked.
“I can’t complain.” I said.
“We need to talk seriously.”
“Mkubwa,” I said, “when do we meet?”
“The shopping center, today?” he said.
That evening, he waited until my bottle was half empty before he started to explain things. “I will be frank with you, things have been a little rough,” he said.
“Oh!” I said. I acted impressed while he presented his plan. His house needed a fresh coat of paint on the walls, a new sofa set, and some new electronics. All these improvements for Mrs. Rael and Berita’s Christmas visit.
“First.” He leaned forward, before saying why I mattered. He needed to get rid of the old things. These things complicated his plan.
I met him at his house to collect the first item. The sofas, though intact, were covered with over-washed fading covers. The usual photographs in glossy frames hung on the wall. The new additions, one of Mrs. Rael in her nurse’s uniform and another of Berita in a class photograph, stood out in their wooden frame. The money plant was dying. With few leaves to cover the vine that extended from the pot in the corner and up what had once been a bare white wall, I could see the yellowed cello tape and nails that had been used to keep it on it’s path. Brown leaves drooped over the curtain boxes. When he went to his bedroom to retrieve something, I stepped into his kitchen, filled a cup with water, and fed it to the plant. Mr. Litunda returned with the big radio that I had always admired. We packed it in a carton box and fastened it with sisal ropes on the bicycle and then he led me to the back gate instead of the front one I had come through.
Mr. Litunda was excited about the money I gave him for the radio a few days later. He pushed a note on my palm before folding and pushing it away. “Very good, very good my brother!” I stopped calling him Mkubwa after that, he was just Joseph. Not a boss. He was not happy with the returns on the sofas and the suits and after that he had nothing big to sell and nothing new to tell me. My house was now fully furnished with an excellent radio, good sofas, and my money plant was still growing green and strong.
We heard from Mr. Pendo, who worked at the bank where Mr. Litunda kept his money, that nothing had come from London. We were told that Mr. Litunda had recently caused a scene at Post Bank insisting that his name was on the Western Union money transfer list. The tellers at the Post Bank branch on Banda Street were quite familiar with the man in a brown suit, Mr. Litunda. Our children’s schools closed for the long holiday. Mr. Litunda’s taxi also went on holiday.
We went to Risper Ng’ethe’s special prayer meeting for the Litunda family. We planned to share all our concerns about his situation. We were surprised and disappointed when Mr. Litunda joined us in his brown suit. We were uneasy when he called us “my sister” and “my brother.” We feared that he expected to depend on us as if we were his relatives and not just his neighbours. Risper Ng’ethe reminded us that she had forgiven him for making those long distance calls on the phone without permission. He had after all originally only asked for permission to receive calls, not to make them. Mr. Litunda accepted the forgiveness he was offered. This Mr. Litunda, whose humility denied us the pleasure of sneering at him, embarrassed us all. We were there to pray for the return of a neighbour who planted flowers, and never considered cooking with charcoal or kerosene. The Ng’ethes and the Pendos had certainly failed to come close and we knew that without him, our vision of ourselves as residents of Nyota Court was lost forever. We prayed.
We watched the auctioneers pick through what was left of Hotel Litunda. We collected enough money to put Mr. Litunda in a bus with his remaining possessions. We wanted him to go like other husbands and start a new life, get a new wife, have children, and find new ways to be important upcountry. We promised to visit him. We encouraged him to call us and tell us how he was settling, but we were relieved when he never called. We would not have known what to tell him if he asked about our lives.
A new family moved into the former Litunda house. This family did not care for dogs, flowers, or chickens. They found a tenant for their servant’s quarter. They added an extension to the servant’s quarter so that they could have two additional rooms to rent out. They did not host parties. We believed Mrs. Pendo and Mr. Pendo when they murmured about the banks stealing money. We were in that time when nobody had a car except that new neighbour.
Mr. Litunda found his way back to Nairobi. He stood at the junction near our bus stop. He had replaced his brown suit with green trousers and a red shirt—the colours of our flag. We heard him shout, “Attention! Jogoo! Attention! Fuata Nyayo!” “The Cock”and “follow the footprints” were slogans that we heard every day from our radios and our televisions and in the songs that our children were taught in school. Mr. Litunda never talked politics so we who remembered him could not draw any connections to his past. From the bus stop we watched him direct traffic like a policeman but drivers learnt to ignore him because of his incoherent signals. We greeted him and he greeted us, but we did not encourage him to keep talking to us.
“Is that you, Joseph?” I asked him. “When did you come back?” I asked him again just like yesterday and every day since he returned.
“Rono!” he shouted. “Nairobi is in my blood!” He saluted this time and then continued to chant his slogan, “Nyayo! Jogoo!” His answer did not satisfy me but I wasn’t going to ask him to explain himself. His teeth were still that brilliant white; they hid his embarrassing problems when he smiled, while I still used my tongue to cover my cracked teeth even though my troubles were far less than his. I had newspapers to sell. I waved my newspapers at the fast approaching cars.
A blue car slowed down to a stop.
“Mkubwa, how are you doing?” I greeted the driver in the car.
“Nation and Standard, please,” he said.
“Left right left right,” Joseph chanted as he marched away.
I glanced at Joseph Litunda returning to his self-appointed task. I shrugged as I passed this new Mkubwa his papers. He paid, rolled up his window, and drove away.
Lutivini Majanja‘s fiction has been published in Down River Road, Flash Frontier, Best Microfiction 2019, New Orleans Review, McSweeney’s and The Golden Key. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Lutivini lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
