Saturday night. I am in the kitchen. I have chapatis, freshly made by someone you don’t need to know. They [the someone, not the chapatis] left in the morning.
I am making mbuzi wet fry; grandmother’s recipe. I am having a good time. I serve myself a glass of mango juice. I decide, maybe I should take a shower as the condiments infuse in the sufuria.
I don’t stay in Langata/Roysambu/South C so water is not a problem. God has been good. I am even singing I am happy today so happy. I come out [of the bathroom]. The kitchen is silent. I get there. Ah. Someone switched off my gas.
I open the cylinder rack, and, I know I have been working out so the gas cylinder this time round is lighter because I am stronger. Right? Right. Ha! Kumbe gas imeisha .
At this moment I wish I was a woman. I would just “I need a favour” myself out of 10 men. 2K each. I am a bad bit*h so perhaps 4K each. And just like that nimetengeneza pesa ya gas, mbuzi mzima na sadaka .
But as a rule, I don’t ask women for money because women never have money [to give]. Just kidding. I am a shameless man. And I don’t pay back. Kwani utado?
I have one girl friend [notice the space between girl and friend] that I can ask for money. I call her, she is mteja . I understand. It is Saturday night.
And she lives in Ruaka where you have three roommates and cereal for dinner, a DJ boyfriend in a dying nightclub, a new thigh tattoo and an STD for every six months you lived there. She is unemployed, excuse me, she is a “freelancer” and “consultant”.
But she’s never behind on rent even though she has no clients. Wait, maybe she does. Hii ni town. I get it. The city is desire and the demons beneath, a metropolis where virtue is transactional and shifting façades, a city where the governor is more concerned about his hairline and dimples than the craters in the road. Si lazima a-work.
Where was I? Oh. Yes, marriage experts would tell me that all money belongs to the family but I am suspicious of their message. Everyone knows when you loan from a woman Sh3,000 and maybe your things go right and give her, say, Sh15,000, you still owe your woman Sh3,000.
There is a dearth of marriageable partners out here. I have been in the dating market for a considerable time now, and I dare say, soko ni chafu. But my word. Mali ni safi. Only problem is you can’t take them home. They know their rights. They are strong, and independent. They don’t need no man.
They can even change the lightbulbs. I know this because my neighbour no longer calls me—wearing nothing but a towel—to change her lightbulbs. Meanwhile, mother says you are not getting any younger. The clock only ticks when you listen, and tonight, it is deafening.
Mother says she wants to coddle her grandchildren, your children. Get a woman, your woman, any woman. Find a good church girl and settle down. Ask her if she can cook if she can sweep if she can iron. Not these ones with long nails and sharp tongues who speak as if a mosquito is lodged inside their nostrils and drink like their fathers and curse like their uncles.
I want to tell her it’s not for the lack of trying. Take, for instance, G—, an extinguished flame who was like ordering the sky from the florist. Light skinned she could make the darkest nights bright. With a callipygian booty and self-esteem issues over that one pimple on her face, I had hit the jackpot. She was from a rich family too, and that meant I was marrying well. These are things no one will teach you about life. To be born into a poor family is not your fault. To marry into a poor family, well that’s on you. Sadly, G— had that rich man disease: “commitment issues.”
She didn’t want to settle down too early and “miss out on life”—whatever that means. She also wondered why I was in a rush. You have the best years ahead of you, Eddie. Be out there. Jibambe! Somehow we just stopped replying to each other’s texts, I ghosted her, she ghosted me back, and now I live in the graveyard of her WhatsApp statuses.
P— on the other hand was what the Bible says “Enjoy the wife of your youth”. Enjoy I did. She is the reason poets still fantasise about the stars. Calling her ass okay was like calling the moon a nice rock.
If this was a different kind of column, I’d tell you about how she scratched the scales off my eyes. How we never did anything when not high. I’d tell you about the drugs she introduced me to: cigarettes. Molly. LSD.
She made me understand that if you talk to the right person, and ask the right questions, you can find anything in this country. And I’d tell you about her big dreams: how she wants to move to São Paulo and become a model or a singer and how she hasn’t decided between the two and how she’s been in this state of indecision for years.
P—, like her drugs, put the fun in dysfunctional. Single-parent home. Absent (shocker!) Dad. Cuckoo mom. That means I played father figure, lover, and big bro. Talk about role-playing. In the end, though it was too draining, I was constantly worn out with the sadness, emptying myself to fill her up, in all senses of the word. She was mali safi but I swore never to buy from that section of the market again.
There was T— too, who was always online, because she was in a nervous breakdown, or a time of transition, or whatever you wanted to call it. She would lie in bed, open TikTok, and say things like, “Eat me.”
And what about J—? J— told me she liked men. And women. She was bisexual. She was also taking mood stabilisers, because she was bipolar. I outdid myself with that one—most women are either bisexual or bipolar—she was both.
As you can see, I am jaundiced by the market. I don’t know how married-but-single-kiasi men do this, but this dating thing is hard. Men, it kills me to admit it but it’s true. If you are in a relationship right now, kaa tu ndani . Huku nje, there’s nothing good.
And I’m not just saying that so I could have all of them. What’s that famous saying? No matter how tall your grandfather was, you must do your own growing. Hear word abi. I have done my growing, and it’s time I leave you with a Buddhist koan: Which is harder: the president telling the truth or you finding a good girl?
