Calisto the chef offers mulberry crêpes.
“No,” says Ajany.
“English breakfast?” His hands clasped partly in prayer.
“No,” she stutters. “Just tea.”
His jaw sags. “Is my food bad?”
Ajany murmurs, “Crêpes.”
Calisto grins.
Other people’s English breakfast. Bacon. The meat smell evokes the morgue. Ajany gets up, grabs the orange juice, and heads for the garden. A cold morning, but she can eat her crêpes there.
She calls up yesterday’s taxi driver. His name is Peter. He communes with God. He says he has to. “Not all passengers are good.”
She can understand.
He asks, “You’re from where, madam?”
“Here.”
“Where?”
“N-north.”
“Where?”
“Kalacha …”
“Where?”
“Northern Kenya.”
“Ngai! That’s far.… You don’t look like you’re from those sides.”
She turns.
“What do they look like?”
Peter frowns.
They stop in front of a sweating policeman who is choreographing the traffic flow and creating a logjam.
“Business in Nairobi?”
“Yes,” she sighs, staring out of the window.
The policeman points, and they crawl into their lane on the roundabout. Destination, the University of Nairobi, Department of Civil Engineering and Material Sciences, near the street where Ajany last smelled Odidi’s student-budget cologne.
16
ENGINEER OPIRR IS A BAG-EYED MAN WITH A BIG OVAL FACE ON which a verdant sprouting of white-streaked hairs flourish on an elongated jaw. His crimson suspenders lift dark-blue trousers above his stomach. A large oval ring set with turquoise and coral bulges from his third left-hand finger. Odidi’s former tutor. He ushers Ajany into his book-choked, paper-filled office.
“Odidi’s little sister! Aha-ha, indeed, indeed!” A flourish. “What can I do for her?”
“I’m … uh … looking for Odidi.”
They sit down. Between them a perfect round dark-brown table weighed down with books about bridges, notepads, written papers, five rectangular containers stuffed with cards, and an incongruous delicate pink-blue flowered china cup, with its saucer and a thin, etched silver spoon.
“I graduated the boy, you know.” Odidi as a theme gave him warm feelings. A most excellent student.
Ajany waits.
“In this age of technology, would’ve thought …?”
“Lost contact.”
Opirr plucks at his face, eyes missing little. “Mhh.”
“Just came home,” she elaborates, “Looking for him.”
She believed it.
Engineer Opirr observes the structural dysfunction in the otherwise well-put-together frame of the female in front of him. Leaking from her eyes. “Tea? Hard times for our blessed nation, what? Must have faith. Our young are still unsullied, eh?” Opirr pours out liquid into another floral cup. “Oolong tea,” Opirr confides. “Mix leaves with crushed dek, food for the heart. Sandwich?”
“No, thank you,” Ajany replies.
Engineer Opirr plunks himself down on a ratty couch. “Lost touch myself.”
Silence.
A white wall lined up with framed certificates of overachievement. Pictures of Opirr in assorted robes carrying scrolls and other artifacts of accolade. Seven pictures of Opirr with a plump, happy giantess, presumably his wife, and their nine children lined up for a photographer, adorned in different-colored academic gowns.
But it is a silver-edged, elegantly inscribed framed text, beneath which a small square of the Kenya flag is glued, on which Ajany focuses. She reads:
“I heard my country calling, away across the sea,
Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me …
I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.”
Opirr follows her gaze. “A reminder, for when I forget.” He says.
“Sir?” Ajany asks.
“Why I’m here. Y’know, was in the first of the Mboya-Kennedy airlifts. Excelled, of course. The Americans had never met anyone like me. Top of my school, of course. Much courted. Abandoned the banquet of Western tables to come home. Yes. Y’know the anthem from which I borrow these lines? Cherished by our English friends?” He begins to croak, “I vow to thee my country, all earthly things above.…” He stops and clears his throat with a trumpeting sound. “Ah! Odidi.” He frowns.
Opirr and Ajany sip tea. Opirr booms, “Musali!”
Odidi’s competitor turned friend.
Ajany remembers the nervy, loud youth whose jumpy presence discomfited her. Musali had been the heckling cheer-song conductor to Odidi’s rugby turnout.
Odidi had once told her about his rivalry with Musali. Musali had mocked Odidi’s private-school accent. Odidi had let him get away with it for a week. “Then I sorted him out,” Odidi boasted.
Opirr recounts the tale.
“The very next week, Odidi became Musali. Dress, accent, and walk. Uproar in class and campus.” He chuckles. “After three days, the two young men called a truce. Learned to share projects, plans. Yes. Mad about water, both of them, what?” Opirr pauses. “First-class honors. In the top ten best marks in the university’s history.” A broad smile. “Two of the best. Both in my class.”
Opirr fishes out details from a tattered fat black pocket planner. “Moses Odidi. Infatuated with the geometry of life. Loved beautiful things. An aesthete — do you love beautiful things? Do you know the boy redesigned a ditch carrying effluent into the Nairobi River so that it generated potable water? Very grateful slum people.” A hand gesture, light on the turquoise ring. “They renamed the ditch for him, what? K’Ebewesit in Korogocho or one of those other ridiculous Nairobi ‘K’ settlements — Korogocho or Katina — no, Kawangware. KKK … Kibera? That ditch rebuilt under the nose of a city councillor who vowed to behead him. Who are these sociopaths? Such calicoes. Behead? What ugliness.” Pursed lips. “M’fraid when they killed Tom we lost all sense of our … elegance. Whatever given in exchange for his soul — poor man — opened gates for a viscid, stygian presence to roam our land unfettered, trading in baubles, lies, and blood for lives.” He frowns. “Do you understand?” He drifts, muttering an incoherent phrase before stirring himself alert.
Heart jolt inside Ajany.
“Anyway. Heard our Odidi went off with Musali and some members of his rugby team to confront that terribly foolish man. Called him out, gave him a sharpened panga, told him to try.” Opirr chortles. “Another truce called. Odidi. A character.”
“Musali and Odidi. Good team. Final-year project became Tich Lich Engineers, a company.” A frown. Opirr’s jowls collapse in a downward movement, eyes whiten with subtle unhappiness. “Oh, what do you do when you are made to wade through political sludge? Terrifyingly ugly, Odidi’s little sister. Soul-corroding.” He looks into his book, then turns to search through one of the containers on the table overflowing with business cards. “No moral gumption among men today, m’afraid, few noble testicles around — forgive the crudity — we’re spawning tawdry thieves, hitmen, and gigolos who love nothing!” Opirr wheezes, plucks out a card, and hands it over to Ajany. “Little sister, when you find Moses, tell him his old teacher would be so pleased to meet him, what?”
Ajany studies the black card, the white text that reads, “Tich Lich Engineers. Bespoke Engineering Consultants.” No names, just an address. She slips it into her handbag.