Mrs. Manga was not my next door neighbor. She was my next
house neighbor. Her house and the house at which I had rented a room were
separated by a foot path which was wide enough to let vehicles go through. As
most of the paths in Shelly Beach - Timbwani, it was rocky, perhaps as a symbol
of the rocky lives we led, and perhaps, more specifically for Mrs. Manga as I
will soon narrate to you.
I don't know when exactly I started talking to Mrs. Manga or
when she started talking to me. What I know is, when we started communicating
with one another, the communication immediately developed into a strong bond.
At least inside me.
Mrs. Manga was short and plump. And should that description
fail to hit the mark let me then add of her that as a product she was well
packed.
Had she been a yam growing in a farm in the land of the Ibo
of Nigeria, she would only have been grown in the farm of one Okonkwo, the
master yam planter, he who would die, not, out of starvation for he had the
strength to feed not only his family but his entire village with the sweat of
his brow, but, out of the conflict between modernity and tradition - his
refusal to reconcile the two and to conform to the changing ways. He who as
Chinua Achebe may have wanted us to pick from Things Fall Apart, refused to
follow the example of Eneke the bird who learnt to fly without perching when man learnt to shoot
without missing.
Now, to say that Mrs. Manga was beautiful is an
understatement. She was beauty itself, a perfect piece of artifact from the
finest of all wood carvers in the land of my maternal ancestors, Wamunyu.
She was not light skinned. She was reddish, and I think my
penchant for yellow yellows started
with her out of the sight she always carved in the dresses she wore or the kangas she always adorned herself.
In a way every piece of clothing she picked for herself
seemed perfect. It was also her tradition to always apply a striking layer of
lip stick that combining with her milky eyes and sparkling teeth made her an
earthly goddess.
One day, one of my friends, having spotted her exclaimed,
"she looks like she usually spends her days in the skies with the gods
only to drop down here in the evening after this coastal sun has chickened
out." Tole, the friend, was wondering how her face was ever spotless, and
she seemed not to be struggling to keep it so, when most of our other women in
Timbwani had their faces eaten up by sun burns and made rough by the slightest spike
of the stench of dead sea turtles that would sweep our village from that part
of the Indian ocean.
With all this description I should hope that you have
understood by now, why, when Mrs. Manga decided I should be helping her with a 'small'
household chore I would have been such a big joke of a 'man' to say no.
If anything I considered it a favor, the fact she would want
to keep cordial relations with me, and me, being in good books with her, even
for that simple wave of a hand that she would extend to me (when she deemed it
necessary) every time I passed by her house. I was thus her's for the asking.
"I want you to take my battery for charging," that
was the golden request that brought me close to Mrs. Manga one day as I passed
by the calcium-bricked structure, of I don't know how may rooms that was her
home and which she also rented to some people including my departed uncle,
Martin. She would use the battery, of exide make, to power her music system.
I had a bicycle. I always rode a bicycle. It belonged to
Consolata House and I would always use it to come to the village to buy
groceries, and bread, and cigarettes - either for one of the missionaries with
whom we worked at the house or for one of the cooks whose daughter I also felt
was good fodder for a girlfriend.
Or I would use it (the
bicycle) having picked some letters from the post office in Likoni, three
kilometers away from Timbwani, to rush to the village to drop other letters
that belonged to some elderly girlfriends that I had who would have been
communicated to by their boyfriends from the United Kingdom. As it is they would
have met with the boyfriends at the shores of Shelly Beach or at Shirloni, a night
club that operated in the midst of our village and which was brought down in
1997 during the Kaya Bombo ethnic cleansing massacre, never to rise again to
its feet.
Such girlfriends were fond of calling me Father, meaning Priest either
to turn me off should I develop some interest in them, or to tell me,
indirectly, that they saw the face of Priesthood in me. Or perhaps they wanted
to tell me that the letters I picked for them from the post office was none of
my business.
In some instances, I would find them high, and suggestively
dressed and seated on the expensive couches that were rare in our village but
only in their houses, and having received that post card saying they have been
send some money, via money gram, they would get so excited they would almost
fart with cheer, and even imagine me a real Priest.
"Bless me Father," they would tell me, bowing down
their heads.
Well...what I am telling you is that, Mrs. Manga was familiar
of that resume of mine, and even her husband would not question my being close
to her had she even chose to visit me at my thingira.
In fact they had a girl, one of their three children, who was
sprouting up just like her mother, but who unfortunately would never talk to me,
partly because she was young at that time I was getting acquainted with her
mother. It was this girl, that Mrs. Manga would promise me, when she felt
elated of my service, once in a while, and when she was not calling me a
Priest, like the girlfriends I have just told you about.
What I don't know is whether Mrs. Manga had the same feelings
for me, and whether specifically, she coveted me, as I did her.
But perhaps as I continue with her story I should tell you of
this girl I found at one of the houses of my elderly girlfriends and who was
the one who ever wrote me a love letter, the most sincere one that a man can
ever receive and the only one I have ever received from a girl in my entire
life.
Latifah - the girl, was from Nairobi. Those days, and I am
talking of the period between mid 2000 and August 2001 just before I joined
University, Nairobi was a mystery among boys of my age in Timbwani. We always
heard about it in the radio. And for that we looked with awe every Nairobian
who came visiting in our small village.
We loved these visitors and we were attracted to them by
their uncomely Sheng language of unakaanga wapi..., ni mgani huyo..., sipendi
odijo wa mao kama vile napenda wa ingo...
So then Just like I would say of being talked to by Mrs.
Manga so was it to be talked to by Latifah, who struck up a thing with me even
though she was expectant when I met her. In fact she had run away from Nairobi,
perhaps, to escape scorn form her peers or perhaps to come and have a
recollection of her next move in life. As it is, the man who had made her
heavy, was a student at the college I was to join and who I would later meet
through the introduction by Latifah.
As a girl Latifah was reserved and too young to have been put
in the family way at that time. She just seemed to like me for reasons best
known to her and had I suggested to be the foster father of her would be child,
I have no doubt that she would have accepted.
But again I was also too young. Too young to tell the
difference between the cry of a child who wants me to nestle her, from that of its
mother wanting similar services from me. So it was she, who would later on
trace my whereabouts, even after we had lost touch and I had progressed with my
undergraduate studies. It was she who later wrote me a letter I received as a
resident of Ruwensori hostels at the Njoro campus of Egerton University, the
hostels that some girls we flirted with at the campus would call slums when
they were disinterested in us and when they wanted to indirectly put us off in
an offensive manner.
The only part of that letter that I would want to stress as I
tell you of how I used to covet Mrs. Manga was the fact that she was in love
with me.
"I have a crush on you," the deadening sentence
read.
Yet, I did not know what it meant for a girl to say she has a
crush on you and I had to ask one of my roommates who seemed familiar with
these issues. He first laughed at me then explained the whole thing.
Well, I think it ended there, for I have never heard from
Latifah since. What I can't recall, unfortunately, is whether I replied her
letter in the first place, although I often mimed a song by a certain Tanzanian
popular artist that was a hit at the time every time I wanted to remember her.
"Maneno mengi
wanasema juu yako eti kuna kitu ambacho umenifanyia...mganga sio sababu mi
nikuje kwako, ila mi mwenyewe moyoni nimekuchagua...nakutamani...nione sura yako...ooh...nakutamani...niwekaribu
yako..." The
song is titled Latifah.
So then, you can see the parameters within which I was
operating even with Mrs. Manga. I coveted her, yes, but it stopped at that.
Just the simple weird...crazy...imaginations of an adolescent boy who had opted
out of joining the Senior Seminary to study at the University.
Of course there were times my imaginations with Mrs. Manga
went as far as wishing that I had been born before her, that I had grown with
her in the same village as a child and that I had spotted her earlier way
before Manga imagined of her.
Because of this I killed Manga many times in my dreams and
having emerged both victor and villain in the murders I would run away with her
to the dusty dog kennel that my room was.
Such a murder happened one night a few months before Mrs.
Manga collapsed and died.
Earlier in the day, Mrs. Manga had sent me to Likoni, as
usual, to charge her battery. It happened that as I picked it, she had
forgotten to properly tighten the nuts that close the partitions in a car
battery in which sulphuric acid is usually filled. For her mistake, the acid,
unknowingly to me, had eaten my pair of shorts as I took it to Likoni for
charging from the back of the bicycle where I had tied it with a rubber band.
The acid had also eaten my inner wear, also from behind. Luckily
it did not eat my sitting supplements and I don't even recall feeling an itch.
Or maybe I felt it but the thought of serving Mrs. Manga was too heavily sweet
on me it etherized my pains. So then even when I was handing over the fully
charged battery to Mrs. Manga, and I felt my pants go something like...prrrrr...and I felt some air hit my
behind directly on its skin, I knew something awful had happened but I would
not tell Mrs. Manga.
That was actually the incident that ate the pair of the
second hand yellow pair of shorts that I had bought at Kongowea market and that
had become my Sunday best of late. And symbolically, unknown to me at the time,
its untimely death under the poison of sulphuric acid signaled the death of
Mrs. Manga.
It was in the middle of the night and Timbwani, save for a
streak of the do you really believe in
life after love track that was stealing its way from the Shelly Beach Hotel
discotheque, was all quiet.
It was one of those nights when even the stray dogs in the
village would go silent and decide not to stir us with their sickening growls
as they decided which bitch would be picked by whom. One of those nights when
even the owls from the then thickly Waitiki farm would wait for a signal before
they started their sirens of death.
I was asleep. Then I heard an eerie scream of some girlish
voice cut the night as the circumciser cuts the foreskins of would be men among
the Abukusu of Western Kenya.
It was Mrs. Manga, heaving under the thunder of her husband
and pleading with him not to kill her.
"Why do you keep on talking to men behind my back?"
Manga questioned at the top of his voice, and for once I felt guilty of 'falling
in love' with Mrs. Manga.
"They are only our customers at the grocery," she
pleaded followed with a thud, and another and another, all falling on her as I
could hear with the continuing fall and further fall of her voice perhaps as
she learnt to keep up with the pain that they brought, this happening in some
scary slow motion until Mrs. Manga was all but faint.
I knew it was wrong to covet Mrs. Manga and the Bible is
clear about it and I told myself I should repent and I later repented...sincerely.
I repent even now and God knows I would never go for anyone's wife just as I
wouldn't want anyone to come for mine.
"You can...can...can...kill...me...if you want...for all
I care..."she struggled moments before the scuffle stopped.
Those were the last words I heard of her that night and those
were the last of the words I would hear of her.
That night, I struggled to sleep. I honestly cried in my bed,
shedding tears uncontrollably for my love, Mrs. Manga. I promised to hate Manga
and said if he were to send me to charge the battery in Likoni as he was
picking of late from his wife, I would refuse.
Then I got out of my room and went to nurse Mrs. Manga. I
broke the padlock to their house and getting in found her bleeding from the
nose. She said she was feeling some sharp pain inside her cranium. I called an
ambulance and I took her to the nearest health center, all by myself. By the
time we got there she was gasping for breath and I started shouting. But even
in that last moment she was calling my name thanking me for how I had been
helpful to her in her life.
I was also gasping for breath, when I woke up to hear someone
knocking at my door asking why I had not gone to work and whether I was okay.
What a nightmare had this last part of Mrs. Manga's beating turned out to be.
Some months passed. Mrs. Manga would never be the same
again - health wise. I never saw her by
the balcony of their house anymore so she was not sending me to charge her
battery. And one day while I was at the Consolata House, watering the grape
fruits that we grew there, word came that she had gone to be with the Lord.
The messenger who had come to inform the priest in charge had
also come to book a requiem mass saying she had died of a cerebral kind of
attack, that many whispered may have come with the earlier thrashing from
Manga.
On the day of her the requiem mass, I accompanied the priest
who said the mass for her and who preached about good families. I was
responsible for translating his English homily into Kiswahili and I got the
challenge of translating the word 'matrimony' which came in a sentence
explaining the sacrament of matrimony that the priest was keen about.
Anyway with the lifeless body of Mrs. Manga lying before me
that day, I confirmed the death of one of the girls I had been stupidly in love with yet one to whom I had never
said anything to that effect, just like I never did to many other girls I would
later meet in life.
Yet in the case of Mrs. Manga, I had no permission to try
such a thing, whether on earth or in heaven, for, as a girl, Mrs. Manga was
already taken.
Still Though I pray that she may rest in peace.
Dear Mrs. Manga, to you I say, "I loved you but God
loved you the most...till we meet again...huruka
thayu..."
