Part 1

Esther was home alone. Her mother, as was the daily norm, except on Sundays, was at Nairobi’s chaotic Marikiti Market, hustling along thousands of other Kenyans to eke out a living from vending food, the inevitable product for the living. Esther’s mother was a renowned broker for green vegetables. 

She worked from Monday to Saturday. On Sundays, as the neighbourhood emptied of people who went to various churches for spiritual fulfilment, Esther’s mother did her laundry, then rested, mostly in bed, cashing in on her sleep arrears that she accumulated during a week of waking up too early, and not sleeping early enough.

Not without a pinch of bitterness, Esther was graphically aware that her mother’s hustle was hardly a money-spinner if their living standards were anything to go by. Not that she had ever known any other life, but she always had an unexplained feeling that better standards of living for them were always within reach, yet, somehow, they never reached them. 

Esther had a morbid fear that she would die the death of a thousand shames if she so much as mentioned where she lived. “I live in the South B area,” she lied without giving any specifics. It was part truth, because South B was not too far off from Mukuru Kwa Reuben, a squalid slum that had sprouted along the banks of the murky Nairobi River that tore through the city’s often too hot, and dusty industrial area.

Thinking about her unfortunate birthplace always prompted a wave of melancholy over her, and with remarkable consistency.

***

How Esther hated using the bathrooms and the toilets! A cleaning schedule for all the tenants had been instituted, but it was supremely ignored, and not without a seeming heroism that baffled her. “I have not used that toilet or bathroom for the last six months, so why should I clean it?” she had heard one of her neighbours confess with a note of pride in her voice. 

As a result, Esther never used the toilet unless it was a matter of life and death. The communal toilets had taught her to be a master in holding it in, discovering new limits for both her bladder and rectum in the process. Like her mother, she bathed inside the house from a faded pink plastic basin. 

Esther had been told, now and then, that she had a beautiful smile, but it was not often that she found a reason to smile. As she looked at her passport, she knew that not only had Lady Luck smiled upon her, she had, for good measure, also thrown in a happy giggle. In her little palms, she held her passage to the United Kingdom – wealth and good life were beckoning. She thought about how it would be like to not live in poverty, which had stalked her life like a shadow. It was the same poverty that had stalked generations before her. 

Esther tenderly ran her fingers over the shiny visa paper, shutting her eyes to luxuriate in the ecstasy she felt from the touch. Joy was flowing throughout her very being because, for the second time in her life, she considered herself very happy. 

The first time was when a random stranger had offered to pay for her formal education as long as she could maintain her grades. She was aware that horrible things were said about the Nairobi traffic gridlock, but no one was going to make her hate it. It had once been very good to her and because of it she had met a man who had ensured she got education uninterrupted by lack of school fees.  

Later on as a grown up, whenever she was held up in Nairobi traffic, she loved to imagine that somewhere along the nasty snarl-ups, someone was changing someone else’s life for the better. 

***

The evening of her birthday, instead of cake or a wrapped present, her mother had brought home a bag of njugu karanga. 

“You are now a big girl,” began her mother, “you will be selling njugu karanga to motorists stuck in traffic.”

There were questions in Esther’s young head, but questioning her mother had never been an option. She, as she often did, waited in silence for events to get clearer.

“You are now a big girl,” her mother repeated, and that particular sentence had made her body warm with gladness. Being a big girl meant she would do many grown-up things, although she could not think of any. 

The afternoon of the day after her birthday, which was a Sunday, instead of sleeping in as usual, they had walked to Mombasa Road and joined throngs of hawkers. Esther was fascinated by all the wares being sold – from fruits, vegetables, electronics, water and everything in between. 

She would leave Mombasa Road at seven, buy supper with the proceeds on the way home and cook as she did her homework. Before she was even ten, Esther was skilled enough to make a family meal.  

And so it was that during one of those evenings, when she was ten years old and in class four, she approached a man driving a Mercedes Benz. 

It was a lone man driving. Esther gasped a little at his sheer size that seemed to spread and flow over the driver’s seat. She noticed the kind eyes, and remembered the warm feeling when he rolled down his half-opened window, look at her and actually seem to see her. 

But he smiled at her.

“Very good! Do you like math?” He was now taking money out of his wallet.

“Very much, sir,” she confirmed, her eyes fixated on the countless notes in the man’s wallet.

“And English too…,” she added, eyes still on the wallet.

“Very good. Now, I do not have three hundred and fifty, I am going to give you five hundred shillings, and you can keep the rest.”

“I can’t!” she squeaked in panic, eyes almost popping out of her sockets. 

“Why not?” 

“Because my mother would want to know why I took money I have not worked for…she will cane me.”

The man smiled and relaxed. “Very good mother you have. Alright, can you get change?”

“Thank you,” she had said as she walked away, but he called for her by name.

“Here…” he said, holding out a small card. She scanned the card suspiciously. She had no way of knowing that it was a business card.

“This card has my name and number. Ask your mother to call me. I want her permission to pay for your school fees. This is child labour, and unacceptable.”

Esther took the card and hopped home, eating so much njugu karanga that by the time she got home, she was feeling sick. 

She did not need to argue her case with her mother, because the minute Esther recounted the experience, leaving out how much njugu karanga she had eaten, her mother raised her hands to the skies in gratitude. Among her persistent pleas to the heavens was that God would send an angel to help her educate her daughter. 

Mr Muthama saw to Esther’s education all the way to college. Over the holidays from the time she met Mr Muthama, and all the way to college, she would work as a domestic worker in his house, on Mombasa Road.  

The house, bigger than she had imagined any house could be, opened a whole new world for her. It was a one-storey house, with two living rooms and two dining rooms, five bedrooms and seven large television sets. Every piece of furniture in the house was big, expensive looking, and unfamiliar. 

Then there was Mrs Muthama and her two daughters. Mrs Muthama, in Esther’s under-exposed eyes, was the epitome of beauty and sophistication.  Before her, Esther had never been in close range with women who looked like they had absolutely nothing to worry about, unlike her own mother whose demeanour spelled worries. 

Before Mr Muthama’s, eating was a way of sustaining life for Esther. Once in a while, someone would hand her a lollipop, or, like when Mr Muthama let her eat too many njugu karanga. 

She was not allowed to taste without permission. Not once or twice, she succumbed to the overwhelming temptation to taste the food when the cook was out of sight. 

Esther loved the cook, an elderly woman with slightly smaller buttocks than Mrs Muthama’s, but her face betrayed her status in society. She was always sweating, always on the verge of frustration, and always talking to herself. Sometimes, she would wrap some chapatis and pieces of chicken for Esther to take home. 

Jakki and Jessie, referred to by the cook as the two brats, were the daughters. They were copy-pastes of their mother, without the pasty face, but Esther imagined them looking like their mother in every way in the future. They laughed a lot with their mother, never their father, and they hated Esther. They hated that Mr Muthama made them give her their clothes, even though they no longer wore them, and they were always too big for Esther. 

Jakki, the older one, was a year older than her, while Jessie was two years younger. That they did not like Esther was not random; they had learned from their mother, who only spoke to Esther, always with a sneer. She never called Esther by name, and soon Esther learned to respond to ‘you’. 

She loved the hand-me-downs she got from Jakki and Jessie. They may have been way bigger than her much smaller frame, but those clothes made her new friends in her hood, because they made her noticeable and the envy of slum girls. 

***

During Esther’s last semester in college, Mr Muthama died in a road accident. 

Esther had been more hurt than surprised when Mrs Muthama announced that her services would not be needed anymore, and that she would no longer receive financial help. It was the timing she would always appreciate, as sad as it was losing her benefactor. 

Keeping her distance, she had attended the burial at Lang’ata Cemetery, alongside her mother, both weeping silently. “Why do good people die more than bad people?” Her mother lamented as she threw an unfriendly glare in Mrs Muthama’s direction. 

In the more than a decade of knowing Mr Muthama, Esther had never freely spoken to him. Their conversations would have him asking questions about school and her mother, and she would answer in monosyllabic answers. When he died, however, Esther would visit the grave and speak her heart out. Like she had wanted to, when he was alive. 

The one-sided, emotionally charged conversations involved her thanking him over and over again for the opportunities he had opened up for her, and because she knew he was not in a position to judge her, she would tell him what was happening in her life. “I just got a boyfriend,” she would say with a shy smile. “I haven’t told my mother because I am sure she would not approve. I have known him most of my life, but we only got romantic recently.” 

She wept over his grave, on her knees, forehead on the expensive gravestone. She ran her fingers over his face, on a photo on the same gravestone.  With more tears rolling down her cheeks, she told him how much she missed him, apologised in case she ever took him for granted. 

“You are the first real person I know who has died. It makes me really sad.” 

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