I went down to the town by the hills, Kisii for a meeting
last week. After the meeting I decided to surprise my grandmother. I got there
at 2pm.
The compound was still and quiet and then sun shone
fiercely. The tree I had known since I was a kid stood beside her stone house.
Hens stopped to stare at me with revulsion as I got out of
the car. Hens from the village don’t see cars often and when they see a car it
doesn’t spell good news because it means they might get slaughtered.
The front door was open. The verandah where my grandfather’s
casket was placed on a table during his wake in 1998 was now bare, save a heap
of dry maize cobs in the corner.
I stepped into the cool living room. There was not a sound.
An old clock, they call it a Grandfather clock, ticked on the wall. I stood
there and called out her name. I heard
her say, “Err, Omogaka ? Is that you?” and then I heard her coming, her feet
shuffling slowly, followed by the tapping of a walking stick.
Then there she was, walking through the door, smiling so brightly it lit
everything in the room and filled my heart with love. She is the remaining
matriarch in my family.
She has buried her husband, sons and daughters and grandsons
and friends. She knows loss but she also knows life.
I fell into her embrace. Her skin felt warm against my
cheek.
I could feel the warmth of her smile on her cheeks. She
asked what on earth I was doing there. Why didn’t I call? Have I eaten? Let us
pray and she held my hand and she said a prayer.
When she was done, she hugged me again and laughed and asked
what if I didn’t find her, and I said I would have been happy coming home.
You look great, Bhabha, I said. How old are you now? She
said 85. I said there is no way you are 85, you must be 70. She beamed. Oh boy,
even at 85 they love to hear they look younger than they are.
On the wall were rows
of pictures. Pictures of her when she was only a young lady. Pictures of
my grandfather when he was a strapping man in the 60s wearing thin ties and
black suites.
There were pictures of my dead aunts and dead uncles and
some aunts who are still alive. One that got my attention was that of my aunt on
her graduation in the late 80s, the first to go the university in the village.
That wall was full of dead people, and it gave the living a
certain air, like it was a mausoleum of sort. It was a bit sad for her, I
imagined, to be one the last few waiting for death, living in that house alone,
reading your bible and just, I don’t know, waiting.
We laughed a bit, and this nearly brought me to tears. My
voice shook. I was crumbling. Then she yelled at someone to light the fire then
she asked me very calmly what was wrong. It was the way she asked, the way she
gave it gravity that made me to shed the heavy coat of manhood and in an
instant I felt like a child again. I
confessed to her that I found the silence in that house unsettling. I was
emotional and somewhat embarrassed by those emotions. She mentioned something
about God’s will, that I should leave it all in the hands of the good Lord. She
then struggled to her feet and shuffled off on her walking stick. She prepared
me a meal herself which made me even more sad because she is 85 and I wouldn’t have her for much longer and eventually,
she would one day be gone and I would have no grandmother left in shags
to return to, a place of refuge. I ate quietly as we talked, I could feel
her watching me with concern, probably thinking, this grandson of mine really hurts
and bruises easily. After she went to have her nap, I folded my body on the
sofa that was older than me and great loneliness came over me in big waves and
I wept silently under all those black and white framed photos of some my dead
uncles and aunts.
I had to start heading back, I told her after 2 days and
after eating lots of matoke. She struggled to her feet and, leaning on her wall
stick, she bowed her head and said, “Mbuya mono.” Then she prayed while I
looked at her and felt terrible to be leaving her that quiet.
The truth is every time I leave her I always wonder if it’s
the last time I will see her and I try to make the best of it even though I
have to run and climb back onto the hamster wheels of life.
On my drive back – with a small bag of avocados and bananas
– I thought about growing old and about death and about life and what it means.
We want to live longer and so we try to eat right, exercise and live right by
God and by man. And then God gives us life and we live to 80 and the downside
of living to 80 is that you see many people’s graves, people you loved.
I thought I wouldn’t want to live in a house like that alone
in my old age. I would go crazy. I would beg God to take me away in my sleep.
A life where you wake up and you hang around the house,
reading your Bible and napping and
walking to your cow shed or hen pen to count your hens and cows and hoping that
a visitor walks through the door, any visitor at all, because everybody else,
your kith and kin are away in the city living their lives and chasing their
dreams.
I now know I am not going to wait for death in the village
if God grants me a lot of time on earth. I will want to be here, in this
metropolis, so that I can dip in once in a while to feel its energy and
electricity and feed off its life a little. When I arrived back in Nairobi, I
called her and said I had arrived and she said God is great. She sounded happy
but I suspect her hens were happier.
PS.
This was supposed to run in a newspaper I write for but adulthood didn't allow me to beat the deadline. And I couldn't let it go down to waste.
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