Life will ask you questions to which the answers are irrelevant.
You start dying immediately after you are born. While that is no way to start an article on a Saturday, I can, and I just did. Now that I have established dominance, I kept thinking of that particular phrase because I recently held a newborn baby. Ngai. Why do babies smell so good? This particular one was not exactly mine — she belongs to a friend, K, or so the mother says (my sociology lecturer Professor Bigambo loved to tell us maternity is fact, paternity is a matter of opinion).
Hereticism aside, this child will be 18 in 2042, and I shall be well in my 40s, a proper mubaba with a colossus ego and a kitambi from here to there. Be that as it may, I saw the anxiety on the daddy’s face, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the moral indignation of it all. Everyone gets exactly what they deserve.
K is distraught, mostly because back in his heyday, in his prime — as children these days would say, he could compete with the government when it came to women census. Choice cuts included baddies and slay queens. In his wake, he left a harem of harams heartbroken, some even changing their sexual orientation (Wallahi, I swear!) which was about right. When he heard he was getting a daughter, the realisiation hit him like a slightly trained, brutish GSU rungu to the ribs. Life had come full circle.
A month or so back, life had dealt our friend group another blow. M, who has a mouth sharper than my grandmother’s chicken knife and words that can hit you with blunt force trauma, also got a baby. Another girl too. We were excited as this would be the first official baby of our group, and we already had plans for it. We decided she would be the next Serena Williams. Project Mbappé if you will.
As life would have it, she was born, and a day later, passed away. It was devastating. We had lost jobs before, some of us had “experiences” with the law, some too had got and lost scholarships but nothing can prepare you for the loss of a child. I’m not sure it is possible to describe just how much life-shaping pain can be. Grief can cause scars that will never heal, it is a strange, cold feeling to think of how grief can be shared but still personal. Nobody else remembers this. Nobody else on earth.
Though they deny it, these two experiences have led to a slight tremor in the group. There has been a fracture in the bone of our friendship. The die has been cast. Once you turn a certain age, certain things and laws of existence cease to exist. Kurt Vonnegut says that true terror is waking up and realising that your friends are running the country. Be it at 25, but usually, it’s at 30 that you realise that all bets are off. Anything that can happen usually happens. You start saying goodbye to the dreams you had and start making compromises with life. God, if you give me this job, I will never shout or honk the car in traffic or overlap. Okay, I will overlap but only on days that end with “y”.
S, a long-suffering writer, tells me that two unlikely people may end up married. Your friend can come out as gay. Your life can turn on you, for better or for worse. Your calmest friend can end up in the news having done the unthinkable. I can no longer put anything past anyone. For a man especially, nothing will ever hit as hard as life, and while there is no joy in suffering, there is plenty of honour in realising that you just have to take it. Let’s face it, this is how these things work.
I visited a certain ghetto recently, and it was there that I saw them: first one, then another, then another young man walking by, a little hangdog and sad, like a long‑suffering dad at sports day, meek, oblivious to the fact that they were entering into a catalogue in my mind. They huddled together, like a lump of dust from the Mathare Valley, because a single man walking alone was courting either theft or police brutality — the police who seemed to always have enough bullets to shoot stray ones.
An armed man killed by cops at night could turn out, in fact, to be an unarmed man. A marauding gang rounded up in Kibera is not a gang after all, but a group of teenagers on the way to play a football game. The witness said it was a robbery where he had stolen a sufuria and a knife but the police wrote the chargesheet as robbery with violence: He stole a sufuria using a knife. Things are not what they seem is what I am telling you, and I am telling you this because to be a young man in Kenya is to see your country betray you.
Contentment, I have decided, is all about narrowing the gap between fantasy and reality. When you’re younger, head full of dreams, and a heart filled with hope, the gap can seem like a gulf. Everyone seems like they are having it better, especially in this social media age where privacy is always toggled off. The disconnect can get you down. It’s up to you to make concessions within yourself.
I accept that I will never represent Kenya in any sport. I probably won’t marry the next Miss World Kenya and parade myself as the trophy husband to a trophy wife and have cute little babies who will start making money in the womb and become brand ambassadors thus securing my early retirement where I can travel the world as a dilettante gentleman of leisure. No one will ever come up to me and ask, “Ah, Mr Ash we have a courtesy jet for you as yours gets recoated. We are deeply sorry and have fired and initiated criminal prosecution for the hangar for the delay.” Not least because I have never been in a private jet before. Or a hangar.
You can never fully prepare for life. When they leak the exam answers, they also change the questions. Life will ask you questions to which the answers are irrelevant. It’s enough to test the resolve of any man. A friend can lose a baby in the same hospital another gets a set of twins. Life does a job for all of us. As fortunes ebb and flow, one day you are cock of the walk, the next a feather duster. Can you as a man take it in grace and realise that things are not always what they seem?
