you do it, Betty? How did you convince Mr. Mathai to settle down with you?”
The early days of her first marriage were not anything Beatrice was in a hurry to remember. Somehow in the chaos of unrequited love for another man and the blinding light of the sun, she’d not formally met her husband. That is to say, they were veritable strangers to each other.
Yet, to forget those early years would be to forget the love that surrounded her today. Perhaps, Beatrice reflected, it was just as well the memories would not let go of her.
CHAPTER THREE
Malaba Estate, January, 1991
New neighbours in Malaba Estate were treated like curios, their lives, prior to Malaba, a puzzle that the incumbent residents enjoyed assembling until it was as complete as possible. Seldom did a stranger move into the estate. Perhaps Mama Sally referred one of her friends, or maybe the referral came from the Shahs who’d already bought three houses next to each other, knocked down the walls in between the houses and built hallways connecting them.
A neighbour would hear that so-and-so’s friend had moved into house thirty-two and from this, one could reasonably deduce that if the new resident was so-and-so’s friend and it was clear so-and-so was of questionable character, then it only stood to reason that the new resident was also highly suspect. A judgment that held until such a time as such and such proved they were not.
There were allies and enemies and peace treaties over tea, intermarriages, deaths and divorces, playground fights, tribal wars, harambees, all-night prayer meetings, dowry celebrations. In short, Malaba was a city unto its own. A fine one at that. It was a clean little estate on twenty acres that housed fifty-seven, three-bedroom maisonettes.
To get there you’d take the number eleven matatu at the Gill House bus-stop in town. At the time, they were the loudest matatus. The graffiti on their bodies (political satire meets pop culture meets animated cartoon characters), the most elaborate, and their makangas, the politest on any route in Nairobi. Malaba Estate was within the South B area, a twenty shilling ride from Gill House.
Each of the Malaba houses sat in the middle of an eighth-of-an-acre plot with squat identical black gates. At the centre of the estate was a community centre cum shopping complex that never quite took off, and a large ovalish field with a balding brown spot in the middle where grass refused to grow.
At the shopping centre, there were at different times, a hair salon, a video store with a Sega and Nintendo you could rent for an hour at a time; a supermarket; a gym; a restaurant, and one or two other entrepreneurial ventures (most of which were owned, operated and bankrupted by Mrs. Mutiso). Within the estate walls it felt as if time moved irresponsibly slow until, of course, it sped up and moved recklessly fast.
~
The Mathais came by way of Annabel Oluoch. The beautiful Annie, the Annie who studied English Literature at University of Nairobi and later went on to Oxford for a masters in History of Art. In the second year of undergraduates, Beatrice and Annie lived across from each other in Hall Twelve. In their third, they were roommates.
‘When you know the history of the art then what?’ Beatrice had asked Annie when, in the space of the first few hours of their meeting each other, Annie had given her a thorough rundown of her past, present and future. The English degree sounded ridiculous in the first place. Beatrice couldn’t think of a career, other than teaching, for a person who studied English and teaching was a wholly underwhelming existence as far as she was concerned. She grew up the daughter of two teachers. Her friends’ parents had experienced upward mobility in a way her teacher-parents simply would never experience.
Her family went from being among the wealthiest in her neighborhood to being a lower-middle income home as inflation surged and teacher incomes stagnated. Even after her father was promoted to Headmaster of the high school he taught at, it made little difference to their financial situation. Beatrice grew up with the conviction that there must be more to life than the mediocrity of just making it, just meeting an income-class threshold, just about putting food on the table.
Annie studying English made no sense in Beatrice’s world because according to her, wealthy people (for Annie was the kind of wealthy you wrote home about), only applied themselves to activities that would increase their wealth. As far as she could see, there was nothing about English Literature that was wealth-creating and, certainly, the same could be said of History of Art.
‘You know most of our art is in foreign museums, and we just keep letting it go because we don’t understand its importance. Those works of art are our history and it just breaks my heart that we don’t care and worse still, we are forgetting.’
‘If it’s our history you want to learn, why do you need to go to Oxford to do that?’ Beatrice asked.
‘It’s the best department.’
‘For our history?’
‘No! No, to learn how to understand art in the context of history or the other way round as well, actually.’
‘So you need to go to a white man to learn how to interpret your ancestors’ art?’
‘No, it’s not like that. You don’t get it.’ Annie was irked by Beatrice’s disregard of a topic that was her life’s passion.
‘Me I think it doesn’t make sense but it’s your life,’ Beatrice capitulated after the taut exchange. It wasn’t the kind of conversation that one would imagine a friendship would sprout from, but as luck would have it, they got on with each other better than they did with the other girls on their floor and as it often the case is in youth, that was enough incentive for them to conduct a friendship.
~
Annie met her husband on the first day of her master’s program at Oxford. She was the kind of person who believed in the importance of serendipity. She had spent the last three years examining minute details in literature, say for example how a word, or a tone or even an eyebrow raised at the wrong time could change the course of a character’s life. Such a microscopic study of human nature, fate and language, rendered Annie unable to think rationally in the real world where she applied the same skills she used to analyse a text to analyse the events of her life. Where there was only a commonplace occurrence, she saw poetry, where a person mistakenly brushed her hand, she read intent in the way a writer can alliterate to draw an attentive reader’s attention to a particular idea.
They slammed into each other just outside her college gate. He was the first Kenyan she’d met since arriving at Oxford weeks earlier, he told her she was also the first Kenyan he’d met. She was lost, he showed her to her first lecture. A master’s degree and a child later, they were married. Lucas Oluoch was half Congolese, half Kenyan and fully godlike, except for the little matter that he was a degenerate and a womaniser, but he had high cheekbones and dark smooth skin you see, so it was inevitable that Annie fell for the spell wrought by that firm jaw which she had encountered so many times before in Jane Austen’s romance novels.
They separated three days before Christmas. By New Year’s Day, Lucas had officially moved out and Annie, whose house was a wedding present from her parents, found it difficult to live in it any longer.
~
The Mathais came to see Annie’s house together. Upon arrival, Mr. Mathai did not waste time in asking for a cup of tea. He kept Annie busy in the living room, regaling her with story after story, her cooperation in the conversation irrelevant in ensuring his enthusiasm. Beatrice
