It was 2 PM. The sun was rolling across the sky like a severed head. It was warm but not uncomfortably so. Not yet anyway—all that still lay ahead. We were at the Gikambura-Southern Bypass interchange, in E—’s car. So was the whole of Nairobi.
Politicians would kill for a crowd like this, and they have. They—not the politicians, the crowd—were wearing the same thing they all seem to wear nowadays: baggy sweatpants and tumbo cuts, the men in studs and nascent dreadlocks. They all have one thing in their hands: a tumbler that either had a brown liquid or a clear liquid, which must have been whiskey, or gin, or God knows what.
A Toyota Crown the size of a small ranch edges itself next to us. Compared to our car, that beast is a battleship. “Mercedes for poor people,” E— says, in the general direction of the Crown. I don’t know anything about Toyotas (or poor people), so I shut it.
A stout guy, short like Guinness baridi , walks out carrying, what else, a tumbler. I’d say he is around thirty or thirty-five, maybe younger, with kind of wild, sticky-looking hair. He surveys the environment like a tin god, and, pleased with his conquest, gets in and starts blasting Dude by Beenie Man, the voice of a generation. Ah. This is the type for whom owning a car like this meant they had accomplished something with their lives. I hadn’t noticed, but next to him is a pretty young thing, proper Nairobian girl.
They are both drinking, changing from dancehall to reggae to Bongo, and this musical calypso is irritating. They’d make a terrible DJ—MC combo. Then he takes his lady’s phone and starts shouting, throwing his hands up and down. His anger is picking speed, and from where I was, it seemed as ferocious as a comet, hurtling towards her to do some new damage.
I pinned my ears to the window and listened to everything they said, why not, it is a free country; but all the time I was trying to be a little careful about it too—subtle, I mean—because you never know what’s going to set them off. I want to tell you they ended up fighting, smashing the windscreen into smithereens, maybe even rolling the car onto Southern Bypass, but I was raised Catholic. Guilt is my second nature. What happened is they started kissing, and I recall clicking so loudly I must have broken some world record or something.
You can tell who a man is by how he drives.
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I remember I once had a thing with a girl who would not sleep until every door of every cabinet was closed. No joke. Well, it did start as a joke between us, and I’d sometimes leave open cabinet doors just to get to her, and it did. You can’t help who you fall in love with, and sometimes who you love can break your heart.
The relationship petered out very quickly. Of course, there are other reasons why it did so, but the open cabinet doors became a symbol of everything that was wrong. What’s love got to do with it? No. The better question is: what’s cabinet doors got to do with love? You know the worst part about this? Now I can’t sleep with cabinet doors open. Sandra, if you are reading this, I hope your new man has bad breath.
“It’s funny,” E— says, “How we are on this side because we have cars, and there are guys on that side, because they do not.”
He tells me a story of how he had gone to KU, yes, that KU, to support a friend of his who was staging a musical. “KU has musicals?” was the question I wanted to ask, but the man is a talker. He droned on and on, and I wanted to tell him to cut to the chase, but this generation believes in talk therapy. Ati men don’t speak up? They should meet E—.
Anyway, he says that when the musical was over, he approached some sirens, and just as he was ushering them over to his table, they asked: “Do you guys have a car?” E—, who had been there with two of his friends and had come to KU through an Uber baridi, felt something very tall collapse slowly inside him. “No, but…”
“Sorry,” the babes said, “We have other plans.”
My next thought was that maybe they had high heels. And you know how hard it is to walk in high heels. Maybe they were afraid of getting robbed, you know how it is in KU, or picking up bedbugs from those TukTuks at the hostels, so this was actually a gesture of pure altruism, a way of reducing the spread of bedbugs in Nairobi. Yeah, right, I told myself, the words hii ni town making a quick tour of my brain as I pictured the girls laughing in their Group chat later that night at the expense of E— and his TukTuk. Oh, to be a man.
I guess it’s just human nature to want to compare yourself to the next man. Stick it up to the little guy. Down on the Southern Bypass, cars blitz by, some doing 50 on a 110 km/h lane. I think of the theory H—, a colleague, says about the men in her life: you can tell who a man is just by how they drive. An overly cautious driver is overly cautious in their life decisions, always waiting for the path of least resistance.
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Would rather get towed than skip a red light; afraid of living, even more afraid of dying. A heavy foot, aggressive road-rager, never playing it safe with life? Well, don’t expect them to understand what the word “wait” means.
Me? I said, “I’m definitely not the one in a Toyota.”
