The young man’s dream died before it was born. He had looked into the eyes of the most beautiful lady he ever saw, and professed his love. The lady stood up and walked away.
He had first noticed her in choir practice, in university. Only for her to disappear for some weeks. He finally tracked her down, through a combination of strategy and good fortune.
“Haven’t seen you in choir practice lately, “ Kaminho said as he perched himself precariously on the edge of a table. “You and your friend, what was her name again?”
“Adhis?” Debra enquired. As he nodded, Debra went on, “I think we have been a bit busy with classes. We’re course-mates, you know, and things have been a bit crazy, what with all the assignments, CAT’s and the impending exams. But we’ll come back when we’ve stabilized.”
“Really? I was almost thinking you had decided that singing was not for you.”
“Nope, we’re just taking a break. We’ll be back. You can be sure of that.”
“Okay. I’ll just continue with my hawking. Unless you want to take a copy of the magazine for your room-mate. Who is she, by the way?”
“Who is who? Oh, you mean my room-mate. My room-mate is Adhis. Yes, we are not only course-mates and choir-mates, but also room-mates as well. And I don’t know whether she wants a copy. You’ll have to ask her yourself, when she comes back.”
“And when does she come back?”
“Am not sure. Her routine is very unpredictable. Why don’t you check back on another day?”
“Okay, I will. See you around.”
And he continued with his salesmanship, but with a notable spring in his step and a light in his eyes. He now knew where Adhis roomed.
The floor where he had found Adhis’s room now became his favorite. He would do some sales on the ground floor, the third floor, and the fourth floor, but would find himself finishing up on her floor, and almost invariably knocking at their door. After some days of knocking without success, the door was opened again by Debra on a particular Friday.
“Oh, I think she is in the district association meeting,” Debra said chirpily, in response to his inquiry on Adhis’s whereabouts. “She also spends quite a lot of time in the library. You know how people are different. Me, I like reading from my room, right here. And that’s why you often find me here. But Adhis prefers to do her studying in the library.”
“Did you say she attends district association meetings? Which district is she from?” he asked.
Debra told him. He was shocked. Adhis was from his home district. While he had spurned these meetings because he was more nationally inclined, he would never have guessed that she was from his county. It was the sort of news that is usually taken better seated down.
He took refuge in a nearby seat, as Debra launched into an incomprehensible monologue about something or the other. He was not sure how long he had been sitting when the door opened, and Adhis swept in.
After a long time of not seeing her, here she was in the flesh. Right in front of him. The lady with the special eyes. The girlie with the impeccable articulation, albeit with a momentary stutter, which had happened as he looked at her.
This was the chick who had bumped into him outside the university bookshop. The beauty whom he had just discovered was from his home district. He was barely able to hide his pleasure.
“There she is, the lady of the moment. The lady who is very hard to find. Adhis, welcome to your room!” He was smiling as he said this, and was glad to see that it had elicited a smile in return, on the face of this undeniably beautiful woman.
She demurred something in return. Debra had seen all his attention shift to Adhis when she came in, and with the tactfulness that most women are universally renowned for, she excused herself and was gone in seconds. He was left all alone with this inscrutable mystery, this veritable enigma of a woman.
“Adhis, why have you never mentioned that you were from my home county? I mean, I have attended our district association meeting once, but if I knew you also attended the same, I would certainly have come more often.”
His ill-concealed attention seemed to be making her shy, and she had retreated to the window. She was half looking out of the second-floor window, half looking at him. But with an unmistakable half-smile on her lips. He decided to forge on.
“Come on, tell me about our district association meetings,” he said as he stood and moved a bit closer to her. “I am told that you attended. When is the next meeting?”
“Okay, I don’t know what Debra told you. What was your name again?” He got a glimpse of brilliant-white teeth as she flashed a smile at him, before swiftly turning her face back to the window.
“My name is Eduardo. I am Edu to my friends. You can call me Edu.”
“Right.” She turned to face him, leaning against the window, her face in perfect silhouette against the night darkness. “I was saying, I don’t often attend the district associations, because of the tribal inclinations that are to be found there. I prefer going to meetings with a more national outlook. That was just a once-in-a-blue-moon thing.”
This was said in perfect elocution. He was impressed, and said so.
“I don’t say this very often. In fact, I’ve never said this to anyone else on campus. But I like the way you speak English. Where did you learn to do that?”
She smiled her brilliant smile again, as she turned again halfway towards the window. He saw that she thought he was bluffing, or possibly engaging in flattery.
“No, seriously,” he said. “I really like your English. Which high school did you go to?”
She told him. As he nodded in comprehension — the school she mentioned had been one of their bitter competitors in the national exams — she asked him where he had attended his high school. They talked for a while about high school life, until the point where he felt a natural lull in the conversation.
“I think I should be going now. Can I pass by tomorrow? Same time?”
Adhis agreed, after an appropriate pause.
Next day, he knocked on her door at about the same time. It was well and truly locked. There was nobody around. And he had not even had the presence of mind to take her phone number.
But what will be will be, and he got her on another day, the following week. They talked a bit more. About their common love for singing. About why she wore her hair the way she did. Their family had recently relocated to Bahati in Nairobi, but she had a grandmother in Chavakali that she visited often.
“If you don’t get me in Bahati, then you will know that I’m in Chavakali, with my grandmother,” she said.
They talked about her career aspirations. The course she was taking, computer science, could see her work almost anywhere, in the IT department.
But she had a secret aspiration to be a TV presenter. He nodded in acknowledgment. With her looks, personal grooming and perfect elocution, she would be right at home in front of a video camera.
“Adhis, I hope am not jumping the gun here, but I want to say something.”
“What?”
“I, umm, I really like you a lot...”
“Yes. So?”
“Uh, I’d like to get to know you better. That is if you don’t mind.”
“Really?” She raised her peaked eyebrows.
“Yes, really. So, can we hang?”
“Yes, you can go hang yourself, if that’s what you want.”
“No, I mean, like, can we be friends…you and me?”
“I didn’t know that we were enemies.”
“We are not. But I want you to be different from my other friends who happen to be girls.”
“How different?”
“As different as the sun is from the moon.”
And now, it had been three years of alternately pursuing each other, with him doing most of the pursuing. Her pursuit, in retrospect, seemed like baiting. In those three years, Adhis had accepted and rebuffed him in turn.
She had praised and scolded, inspired and upbraided him, only to reject him. Adhis had raised his hopes up to a breathless peak, and then dashed them to a thousand smithereens, without so much as a how-do-you-do.
“I want somebody who is more responsible, and who can keep his word,” she said in her sweet voice, her deep, brown, soulful eyes seeming to bore into him. “I’m sorry, Edu.”
And then she was gone.
*****
When Eduardo Kaminho was born, nothing about him indicated anything special. He was born in Kenya, the world-renown land of marathon runners, at the end of the 20th century. In the faraway land of the stars and the stripes, a young man with a Kenyan father, who would later go on to become the most powerful man in the world, had just won an elective post in the Illinois senate.
Eight thousand miles away, the only remarkable thing about this other mixed-race birth was how plump and well fed the bouncing baby boy was, as a new-born. The union between a Kenyan father and a German mother had produced a perfectly brown Kenyanese with no visible Caucasian features, although he was decidedly much lighter than his coffee-colored father.
The young boy, separated from his mother almost at birth, was by that eventuality deprived of the chance to relate with his blood sister. Or any other sister, for that matter. His Kenyan step-mother would struggle to have children, belatedly bringing forth two boys in her late thirties.
As a result, in much of his earlier years, he was like a cat on hot bricks when relating with the fairer sex. Nothing was so foreign, so alien, so flustering, as these emotion-filled, giggly, sometimes shrill and absurdly coquettish specimens of life.
And yet nothing could be more mysteriously alluring, so full of promise, so untouchably exotic. The fact that he had inherited his mother’s aristocratic face, and her perpetually surprised eyes and eyebrows, and was therefore unspeakably handsome to most girls his age, only made things more difficult for him. It made most girls secretly fascinated by him, but outwardly determined not to be just another easy catch.
His father, Edinho, had met his mother by chance at the coast, where he usually delivered charcoal from up-country. He had been contracted by a number of large hotels to provide them with the ‘black gold’, as it was known to the Coasterians.
He did this on his motorcycle, at times carrying up to ten full sacks of charcoal in a single trip. So he hunched forward in his seat, almost spilling over the front of the bike because of the sacks pressed against his back. But he was spurred on by the knowledge that he would receive a tidy sum for each sack.
In between his trips back and forth from his village and Malindi, he would take time to rest his worn back by exploring the meandering streets of the coastal town, which was unerringly mobbed by German and Italian tourists the year round. Elsa was a German girl shopping for curios and mementos in the sprawling backstreets of Malindi. She was fascinated by this knowledgeable young man, who seemed to appear by magic at her side.
Ten hours later, at around 7:30 p.m., the two had already taken their fill of exploring, and had also taken lunch together. Hence, they found themselves alone in the room where she had roughed it with her father for the last two nights.
Her father usually checked in at around midnight, with his latest ‘Amina’ or ‘Fatuma’ draped around his waist. He would be around for just long enough to make sure she was still alive and breathing, before disappearing again until midday of the next day. Therefore, the two young lovers had enough time to passionately consummate their newfound love, before the heavy footsteps at the front door forced Elsa to usher Edinho outside the back door.
Early the next day, Edinho had to travel back to ready his next order. By the time he returned to Malindi, six weeks later, the flighty Elsa and her father were gone. After an appropriate period of grieving, he returned to his normal routine.
But try as he may, he could not forget Elsa. All other women seemed to pale into insignificance, compared with the exotic beauty who still lived large in his heart, and whose grey-green eyes he could recall to memory at a moment’s notice.
However, the inexorable passage of time, and the decidedly harsh demands of life, eventually forced him to set aside, if not forget, his moment in the sun. Thus, one-and-a-half years later, with the savings from his lucrative charcoal trade, he bought a farm close to his ancestral village and settled down with Wambona. She was the shy daughter of the Mama Mboga at whose ‘kibanda’
business stall
he often had his supper.
And all seemed to be going well for the two, now living as husband and wife, almost two years to the day since he had first set eyes on Elsa. All until the fateful day, when in the late afternoon hours, there was a knock on the front door of their rough wooden cabin.
“Yes?” Edinho raised his eyes as a visibly agitated Wambona stood over him. He was seated on the back porch, fashioning a new handle for his axe. The old handle had outlived its usefulness that morning, with a crack and a snap.
“There is a lady at the door asking for you.” Something in her manner made him look at her again, as she stood, arms crossed, in front of him. “From her dressing and her Swahili, it seems as if she is from the coast.”
“What lady from the coast?”
